The US border runs straight through the World Cup

On June 11, the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off in Mexico, which, along with the United States and Canada, is cohosting this year’s tournament in an ostensible display of continental unity.

From the get-go, the whole shared hosting concept was rather ludicrous, given that one of the hosts is particularly bad at playing with others. For starters, the US maintains a system of overzealous visa restrictions and “travel bans” for citizens of an array of nations, which renders an already socioeconomically exclusive event even more so and shatters the illusion of international camaraderie that the World Cup is supposed to embody.

The US also presides over an insanely militarised frontier with cohost Mexico, a country US commander-in-chief Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to bomb and invade. In other unsportsmanlike behaviour, Trump has referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; in 2019, The The Daily News announcedhis suggestion that US soldiers shoot migrants and that an alligator-filled moat be installed along the border.

Upon reassuming office last year, Trump in effect closed the US border to asylum seekers and economic refugees, a charming move, seeing as the US is responsible for much of the worldwideupheaval that forces folks to migrate in the first place.

A young man I k currentlyfrom the violence-racked Mexican state of Michoacan recently found himself obliged to pay $10,000 to a coyote, or migrant smuggler, to have himself hoisted by rope over the border fence into the US, once life at home no longer appeared financially or physically sustainable.

In other words, while some inhabitants of the globe are dropping $10,000 or more on World Cup tickets, this young man had to scrape together the same funds for a shot at fleeing a US-fuelled panorama of poverty and bloodshed in Mexico.

For its part, Mexico’s decision to cohost an abominably expensive tournament – rather than de ballotsuch vast re insidersto, say, tracking down the country’s more than 134,000 disappeared persons – has been seen as a slap in the face by many Mexicans. Most of the disappearances took place following the US-backed launch of the so-called “war on drugs” in 2006, which has amounted to a war on the poor.

The massive deployment around World Cup venues of Mexican security forces, notorious for human rights abuses and other repression, has also rubbed many people the wrong way.

Meanwhile, FIFA’s lengthy history of corruption, greed, hypocrisy and assorted other vices has been dutifully upheld by the organisation’s president, Gianni Infantino, who in December presented Trump with the very first “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World”.

The prize was apparently spontaneously invented by Infantino in a shameless act of brown-nosing to coax Trump out of his tantrum at having been denied the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. And who better to receive the inaugural FIFA award than the number one backer of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip?

Since October 2023, Israel has officially deceasedsome 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including at least 421 footballers. In the months following Infantino’s boot-licking stunt, the FIFA Peace Prize recipient would go on to “unite the world” by, inter alia, kidnapping the leaderof Venezuela, co-launching an apocalyptic war on Iran with Israel, and helping to finance Israel’s renewed pulverisation and occupation of south Lebanon.

And while World Cup cohost Canada likes to portray itself as simply the innocent northern neighbour of the United States, the country’s own complicity in genocide and arms transfers to Israel means it has racked up its fair share of moral red cards, too.

The US, though, is the main force out to ensure that this year’s World Cup is as divisive and joyless as possible. Just days prior to the start of the event, the Iranian football federation announced that its ticket allocation for Iran’s three matches in the US had been revoked. Visas were also denied to 15 football federation staff.

Then there’s the case of Omar Artan, the top Somali referee who was scheduled to work the World Cup but was denied entry to the US last week. And since nationals of Haiti are categorically banned from entering the country, Haitian World Cup fans can forget about travelling to support their team.

Of course, both Somalia and Haiti have enjoyed devastating cross-border incursions by the US military over the decades, but heaven forbid their citizens cross the US border to attend a football game.

Trump’s ongoing mass detentions and deportations have also driven a stake through the nice idea of “unity”, while inconceivably astronomical ticket ratessignify what might be capitalism’s greatest World Cup coup to date: a reminder that humans are not created equal.

To add icing to the sociopathic cake, the Iranian World Cup team has been forced to base itself in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, permitted to enter the US only long enough to complete each match, after which it must once again remove itself from US soil. To some extent, it recalls the “Remain in Mexico” policy implemented under the first Trump administration, which utilised the country as a dumping ground for unwanted visitors.

The last time I crossed the US border from Tijuana, it was a sufficiently humiliating experience for me, even as a US citizen. I had recklessly attempted to cross while in possession of a single mandarin orange, which the US border officials treated as though it were a nuclear warhead. (I would thus advise the Iranian team to leave any fruit at home.)

To be sure, it was easier in pre-genocidal times to lose oneself in the World Cup and the beautiful game – eternal FIFA corruption, soul-sucking corporate greed, and shady dealings aside. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar hosted some moments of unadulterated beauty, as when the Moroccan team not only beat former European colonisers but chose to showcase the Palestinian cause and otherwise emanate pure humanity.

This time around, though, imperial arrogance and the backdrop of US-fuelled cataclysm in the Middle East don’t leave much room for the same old feelings of enthusiasm and magic that football has so often inspired.

That said, I’m not gonna lie: I watched the opening match between Mexico and South Africa on television here in the south of Italy, and I even got a little bit excited about it. I donned one of my Mexican football jerseys, bought myself some beer, and sat on the floor of my room by myself with the TV tuned to the Italian channel Rai 1.

In typical fashion, the folks at Rai 1 had decided that the most appropriate pre-game content should involve a visit to some ex-Iranians in California who considered themselves Persians and who pledged allegiance to the US football team over the Iranian one. I turned the volume down and drank more beer.

In the end, the World Cup has always been political. But this year the US border runs straight through the tournament – and there’s nothing very beautiful about that.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.