Even before the first kickoff today, the FIFA World Cup — hosted jointly by the United States, Canada, and Mexico — was off to a bit of a rocky start. Sports fans have not historically loved referees, but the global soccer community was united in outrage after the award-winning Somali referee Omar Artan, who’d have made history as the first Somali ref in the quadrennial tournament, was denied entry to the country after an 11-hour interrogation upon landing in Miami.
The government did not explain why Artan, who had been granted a visa for this purpose, was turned away, though White House World Cup Task Force head Andrew Giuliani — yes, the same Rudy Giuliani offspring who got crushed in the 2022 GOP New York gubernatorial primary — insinuated without any evidence that Artan had some kind of terrorist ties. It’s a somewhat predictable opening black eye for a tournament that many people expect will turn out to be one more humiliation for a United States that has already so debased itself on the world stage.
While interest in soccer has been on a steady climb in the United States from what I would say was relative irrelevance some 25 years ago, I don’t think that most people here really realize how huge a deal the World Cup is globally, rivaling the Olympics. It is also never particularly devoid of controversy.
The 2022 Qatar World Cup, the most recent, has a Wikipedia page just for its controversies, one that’s longer than most Wikipedia articles that I’ve seen. It encompasses subjects ranging from corruption in Qatar’s selection as host country to the use of slave labor in building stadiums and Qatar’s criminalization of LGBT identity. This came on the heels of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which began four years after its invasion of Crimea. Just this year, the Justice Department under President Donald Trump moved to drop decade-old corruption charges involving FIFA officials that U.S. officials announced in a splashy news conference that shook global soccer.
All this is to say, the World Cup is used to being the subject of polemics – none of which have ever fully dissuaded fans from participating or being excited for the tournament. Yet the mood this time around seems rather subdued, and the conversations so far have focused on the political backdrop, perhaps more so than on the teams and the tournament itself. Perhaps part of that sense comes from my being in the belly of the beast, but there are some data points to back it up. Hotels around the U.S. are reporting lower-than-anticipated bookings and high cancellations, driven by a variety of factors including FIFA’s own block-booking and then canceling of rooms. Ticket prices are also dropping in advance of the matches, though from ridiculous if not extortionate heights.
It’s funny to think that the initial bid was put in as a show of North American unity and strength, with the U.S., Canada and Mexico standing arm-in-arm as happy siblings before the world. The latter two, of course, kind of hate us now, and for completely understandable reasons. The U.S. started an unprovoked war against one of the tournament’s participating nations, Iran, whose team had to scrap plans to stay in Tucson and is instead staying across the border in Tijuana.
Artan has not been the only person affiliated with FIFA or its teams to face scrutiny at a port of entry; the Iraq delegation’s official photographer was turned away and one of its players detained before ultimately allowed entry. Fans and journalists, too, have been denied visas or turned away, a predictable outcome despite FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s assurances that the process would be smooth for everyone. And this is all prior to the games actually getting underway; once they do, there are concerns that Tom Homan’s threatened mass deployment of federal agents in New York City, for example, could disrupt fans and matches.
I was thinking about all of this on Monday, in the run-up to and during game 3 of the NBA finals, between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. I am going to be honest, I don’t really watch basketball in general and was only dimly aware of the Knicks’ ascendance in the playoffs until they made it to the finals. Yet basketball has done what sports at their best are supposed to do: shape a local culture by bringing people together. Suddenly, I, like practically everyone else in this city, care about the Knicks, with enough emotional buy-in to be upset like pretty much everyone else in Madison Square Garden and elsewhere over Trump’s decision to partially hijack the first home game just so he could appear on the Jumbotron for a few seconds and get roundly booed (during the national anthem, no less).
It was not just that he came, but that his coming prompted the NYPD and Secret Service to cordon off a 10-block security zone around MSG that shafted local businesses that would have otherwise expected heavy foot traffic, not to mention partially shutting down the busiest transit hub in the Western hemisphere. The sight of Jared Kushner — a patron saint of failing upward — receiving a police escort into the arena as fans lined up hours before tip-off to get in – as even star players got wanded down by security – really left a bad taste in my mouth.
I think what all this cumulatively brings to the fore is that sports are becoming ever more of a reminder that nothing escapes the gravitational pull of our postmodernist society; every result and stat is now itself a commodity in the betting markets that have swallowed athletics, to the point that people watch sports in the way that traders might watch Bloomberg terminals, completely divorced from the actual play on the field. Even youth sports are now a vehicle for rich people to scam their kids into college or private equity to construct lucrative portfolios.
Average resale prices for Games 3 and 4 at the Garden were over $8,000; two courtside seats sold for $1 million at auction, though most courtside seats seem to just be doled out to favored celebrities. And, of course, one guy — who has through some bewildering array of dark forces managed to stay atop the American cultural and political landscape for a decade-plus — can both ruin an experience of sports-driven unity in NYC and tank excitement for a unifying global tournament. Ticket prices have climbed steeply over the years, making matches more of a status symbol than something regular people can enjoy in person.
There’s a scene in the now-classic journalism film Spotlight in which the reporter Mike Rezendes, played by Mark Ruffalo, tells a colleague that as a lapsed Catholic he had taken comfort in the idea that, though he wasn’t practicing, one day he could return to the church – a dream that was dashed by the reporters’ findings about the cover-upof child sexual abuse by clergy. I feel like that sometimes about sports fandom, that it’s something I have never really participated in but could keep in my back pocket for a rainy day. That has felt like it’s slipping away. But, of course, after we all watched the Knicks’ historic comeback to reverse a 29-point deficit and win by one point in the last two seconds, some of those sour feelings are gone again.
