Blatter urges FIFA World Cup boycott over Trump administration policies
Ex-FIFA boss Sepp Blatter joins politicians, football experts calling on fans not to travel to US for 2026 World Cup.
Former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter has backed a proposed fan boycott of World Cup 2026 matches in the United States because of the conduct of President Donald Trump and his administration at home and abroad.
Blatter is the latest international football figure to call into question the suitability of the US as a host country, calling for a boycott in a post on X on Monday.
The US is cohosting the World Cup with Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19.
Blatter supported the comments of Mark Pieth, a Swiss lawyer specialising in white-collar crime and anticorruption expert, who called on football fans to stay away from the US.
“If we consider everything we’ve discussed, there’s only one piece of advice for fans: Stay away from the USA!” Pieth, who also chaired the Independent Governance Committee’s oversight of FIFA reform a decade ago, said in an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Der Bund.
“You’ll see it better on TV anyway,” Pieth said, adding, “And upon arrival, fans should expect that if they don’t please the officials, they’ll be put straight on the next flight home. If they’re lucky.”
In his X post, Blatter, quoting Pieth, added, “I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup.”
The 89-year-old was president of the football governing body from 1998 to 2015, when he resigned following a corruption investigation.
The international football community’s concerns about the US stem from Trump’s expansionist posture on Greenland, travel bans and aggressive tactics in dealing with migrants and immigration enforcement protesters in US cities, particularly Minneapolis.
Two weeks ago, travel plans for fans from two of the top football countries in Africa were thrown into disarray when the Trump administration announced a ban that would effectively bar people from Senegal and the Ivory Coast from following their teams unless they already have visas. Trump cited “screening and vetting deficiencies” as the main reason for the suspensions.
Fans from Iran and Haiti, two other countries that have qualified for the World Cup, will be barred from entering the US as well; they were included in the first iteration of the travel ban announced by the Trump administration.
‘Qatar was too political, and now we’re apolitical?’
Before Blatter’s comments, football officials and political leaders from across the world had expressed similar sentiments about the US as the World Cup cohost.
Oke Gottlich, one of the vice presidents of the German football federation, told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper in an interview on Friday that the time had come to “seriously consider” boycotting the World Cup.
“What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic Games in the 1980s?” Gottlich said. “By my reckoning, the potential threat is greater now than it was then. We need to have this discussion.”
Gottlich, who has called for the defence of values, is likely to meet resistance to calls for a boycott from German federation chief Bernd Neuendorf and FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
“Qatar was too political for everyone, and now we’re completely apolitical? That’s something that really, really, really bothers me,” Gottlich said of the German federation’s opposition to the 2022 World Cup host.
Germany flopped at that tournament, and the coach who took over afterwards said he wanted no more political distractions.
“As organisations and society, we’re forgetting how to set taboos and boundaries, and how to defend values,” Gottlich said. “Taboos are an essential part of our stance. Is a taboo crossed when someone threatens? Is a taboo crossed when someone attacks, when people die? I would like to know from Donald Trump when he has reached his taboo, and I would like to know from Bernd Neuendorf and Gianni Infantino.”
Hamburg-based football club St Pauli is near the city’s red-light district and known for mixing sport with politics, particularly its left-wing stance. The club’s famous pirate skull-and-crossbones symbol was first carried by squatters who lived nearby and later popularised by fans who identified as punks.
Gottlich dismissed the suggestion that a boycott would hurt St Pauli’s national team players, Australia’s Jackson Irvine and Connor Metcalfe, and Japan’s Joel Chima Fujita.
“The life of a professional player is not worth more than the lives of countless people in various regions who are being directly or indirectly attacked or threatened by the World Cup host,” he said.
The FIFA board suspended then President Sep Blatter in 2015, and subsequently barred him from any further official interaction with the FIFA Board - under pressure from US authorities who indicted Sep Blatter for serious corrupt practices, and threatened FIFA access to the global banking network.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Blatter is burning to find a way to punish the Yankees for his downfall.