Should the United States men’s national soccer team be banned from this summer’s World Cup soccer tournament due to this country’s military operations against Venezuela and Iran?
The 2026 World Cup, featuring teams representing 48 countries, begins on June 11 with the United States, Canada, and Mexico as the host nations. The finals will take place on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just 10 miles from downtown Manhattan.
FIFA holds the sole authority to exclude countries from participating in its sanctioned events. The FIFA Statutes is composed of 80 articles. The organization, based in Zurich, Switzerland, and officially yet nominally registered as a non-profit, generates billions of dollars in revenue year-over-year and is in theory apolitical. Yet, over many decades, they have proven highly influenced by global political climates and embroiled in massive corruption scandals.
While their statutes do not specifically reference that countries could be barred for egregious political activities, there is a deep precedent for FIFA proscribing nations inarguably engaged in such undertakings. Germany and Japan were precluded from the 1950 World Cup following World War II. South Africa was banned from 1961 to 1992 as a result of its oppressive apartheid system. Yugoslavia in 1994 due to the Balkan Wars. Russia received an indefinite suspension in 2022 for invading Ukraine. Pakistan was suspended by FIFA in 2025 and barred from this year’s World Cup for failing to adopt a constitution ensuring fair, democratic elections.
In the FIFA Legal Handbook, in the section “FIFA Statutes,” under “1. General provisions, 3. Human Rights,” it reads: “FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights.” Words can be parsed and nuanced. But fundamentally, FIFA applies the aforementioned statute to ban countries for reasons associated with political practices.
President Donald Trump has long desired to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his sycophantic supporters have maintained he is as deserving of the honor as any United States president since its inception in 1901. Only four U.S. presidents have been bestowed the award: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.
To curry favor with Trump and feed his narcissism, the International Association Football Federation, commonly known as FIFA, created the FIFA Peace Prize last year and presented it to Trump on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., prior to the soccer World Cup draw.
A little under a month later, on Jan. 3, Trump unilaterally launched a military operation in Caracas, Venezuela, a sovereign South American country, and detained its now former president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now being held at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. This past weekend, Trump authorized an attack on Iran without congressional approval. He is now a wartime president, who has attacked two countries over virtually a two-month span without provocation.
Given FIFA’s past and recent history of suspending countries for carrying out military actions against another sovereign country, Trump has put the United States in a position to be justifiably shut out of competing. At this point, it would be a logistical catastrophe to do so. But categorically deserved.
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