Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter expressed support Monday for the notion of a fan boycott of this year's World Cup matches in the US because of the policies of President Trump and his administration at home and abroad. Blatter was the latest international soccer figure to call into question the suitability of the US as a host country, the AP reports. He called for the boycott in a post on X that supported comments made in an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Der Bund by Mark Pieth, an anti-corruption expert who chaired the Independent Governance Committee's oversight of FIFA reform a decade ago.
"If we consider everything we've discussed, there's only one piece of advice for fans: Stay away from the USA!" Pieth said in the interview. "You'll see it better on TV anyway." Blatter, who was president of the world's governing body for soccer from 1998 to 2015 before resigning during a corruption investigation, posted that Pieth was right to question "this World Cup." The international soccer community's concerns stem from Trump's expansionist posture on Greenland, travel bans, and aggressive tactics in dealing with migrants and immigration enforcement protesters in the US. There's been talk in Europe about a boycott, per Deutsche Welle.
Oke Göttlich, one of the vice presidents of the German soccer federation, told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper in an interview on Friday that the time had come to seriously consider boycotting, per the AP. A Danish official said it could come to that if Trump's designs on Greenland resulted in conflict. Two weeks ago, travel plans for fans from two of the top soccer countries in Africa were thrown into disarray when the Trump administration announced a ban that would effectively bar people from Senegal and 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. FIFA President Gianni Infantino's alignment with Trump and presentation of an inaugural honor to Trump worries some in politics and soccer that the tournament could be used in propaganda, per DW. "I don't know on what grounds FIFA suddenly needs to award a peace prize, but it could be a warning of what could await us when the tournament happens in the US," said Mogens Jensen of the Danish Social Democrats. The US is co-hosting the event with Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19.
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