When President Trump dropped by Madison Square Garden earlier this week to watch his hometown Knicks play in their biggest game in a generation, he was greeted with lusty boos from the crowd. (In typical Trump fashion, he denied he was even jeered at all.) And a lot of Knicks fans felt like he jinxed them; the team hadn’t lost a game in nearly two months before Trump showed up to watch the proceedings from the box seats.
Now the historically unpopular President’s shadow is being cast on an even larger, more consequential sporting event: the World Cup. The quadrennial futbol tournament puts up viewership numbers that dwarf the Super Bowl, and this year has more countries participating than ever. And friends, it’s already a whole mess. Even leaving aside the oppressive heat and the eye-watering ticket cost to attend. The stands are likely to be less lively and less crowded as overseas fans run up against the brick wall of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.
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Haiti qualified for the World Cup for the first time in more than 50 years. It’s also one of more than three dozen countries on the Trump administration’s travel ban list, so its fans cannot come to the U.S. to watch their team play. Last week, a member of the Iraqi national team was detained for seven hours of questioning when he arrived in the U.S. A highly regarded Somali referee who was slated to be the first person from his country to ever officiate a World Cup match had his visa revoked after the White House said he had “terror ties.” Countless fans are finding their U.S. visas revoked at the last minute with little explanation, while journalists covering the tournament from some countries haven’t been cleared to attend.
You would think that FIFA, the body that governs international soccer, would be a little concerned about ticket-buying fans being locked out of its signature event. But FIFA’s going to be fine. They’ve already said that this World Cup will be the most lucrative in its history, raking in $13 billion for FIFA, which is ostensibly a nonprofit. Among us futbol fans, FIFA has a reputation as a cartoonishly shady, borderline criminal organization. When FIFA was criticized for awarding the last World Cup to Qatar — a literal slaveocracy attempting to sportswash its image that may have bribed FIFA in the process — the organization’s European president responded with a bizarre, much-memed speech about how he felt like he, too, was African and disabled and gay. (Bro, what?) After the president complained he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, that same FIFA president showily bestowed upon Trump a goofy award it made up called the FIFA Peace Price.
FIFA, for its part, knows that the U.S. is one of the few countries powerful enough to prosecute its officials for wrongdoing, and it’s also desperate to increase soccer’s profile in the U.S., where it has enormous revenue potential but a still-undersized cultural footprint. So if FIFA needs to look the other way while the U.S. government detains and humiliates and inconveniences soccer fans from other countries, well – sorry to those fans.
And unless the White House somehow softens its hostile posture toward immigration and travel to the U.S., we’re likely to run back a very similar scenario for sports fans real soon. Just a little over two summers from now in the waning months of the Trump administration, the Summer Olympics are set to kick off in Los Angeles.
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ON THE POD
The DOJ created a $1.776 billion fund to compensate January 6 defendants. The fund may not survive, but the federal redress system it was reaching into — built by Native nations over generations — is still intact. So who counts as having been harmed by the state?
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