On the morning of June 15, an airliner will leave Tijuana, Mexico, with Iran’s national men’s soccer team on board, fly 55 minutes north, and land at Los Angeles International Airport in California. The players will be driven to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where, that evening, they will play their opening World Cup match against New Zealand. After the final whistle, they will return to Tijuana, because that is where the United States government has agreed they may sleep. The same routine will be repeated six days later for the group game against Belgium and then again five days after that to play Egypt in Seattle.
The geography of Iran’s tournament—three matches in the United States, every night spent in Mexico—was decided in late May during a series of phone calls between FIFA, Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. This was all because U.S. President Donald Trump made the unprecedented decision to ban the Iranian team from spending the night on U.S. territory.
On the morning of June 15, an airliner will leave Tijuana, Mexico, with Iran’s national men’s soccer team on board, fly 55 minutes north, and land at Los Angeles International Airport in California. The players will be driven to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where, that evening, they will play their opening World Cup match against New Zealand. After the final whistle, they will return to Tijuana, because that is where the United States government has agreed they may sleep. The same routine will be repeated six days later for the group game against Belgium and then again five days after that to play Egypt in Seattle.
The geography of Iran’s tournament—three matches in the United States, every night spent in Mexico—was decided in late May during a series of phone calls between FIFA, Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. This was all because U.S. President Donald Trump made the unprecedented decision to ban the Iranian team from spending the night on U.S. territory.
Politics have shaped the geography of the World Cup before, but never quite like this. On occasion, visiting teams have refused to play in a host’s territory. The Soviet Union famously did so in November 1973, when the second leg of a World Cup qualifying playoff was scheduled at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, shortly after Augusto Pinochet had finished using it as a torture site. FIFA has banned countries from participating altogether: Yugoslavia was kept out of the 1994 World Cup due to United Nations sanctions, and apartheid-era South Africa was suspended for a quarter of a century. Individual host cities have, on occasion, declined base-camp requests; two Brazilian cities turned away the U.S. team in 2014. But no host nation has ever refused to allow a qualified participating team to be based on its soil while still requiring it to play its matches there.
At the time of writing, with negotiations between the United States and Iran yet to produce a peace deal that would end the current war, there exists at least a chance that a frustrated Trump will bar the Iranian team from playing in the United States entirely. FIFA President Gianni Infantino will be tightly crossing his fingers that his special friendship with Trump—to whom he bestowed a “peace prize”—will forestall that possibility.
As it is, the Trump administration’s refusal to let the Iranians spend a night on U.S. soil represents a difficult challenge for FIFA and sets a dangerous precedent for politicizing the global sport. To understand why, it helps to compare the organization of international soccer to the Olympics.
It’s tempting to look at the long and fraught history of the Olympics and conclude that, when it comes to politics in international sports, the question of where Iran’s World Cup squad sleeps is nothing. The 1936 Berlin Olympics went ahead under Adolf Hitler. The 1972 Munich Games went ahead after 11 members of the Israeli delegation were murdered in the host’s territory; International Olympic Committee (IOC) chairman Avery Brundage’s infamous quote, “The Games must go on,” became the operating doctrine. The 1980 Moscow Games were boycotted by the the United States, and the 1984 U.S. Games by the Soviet Union. Apartheid South Africa missed seven Summer Olympics. Russia has competed at four Games under neutral designations since its doping suspension.
Through all this, the IOC managed to keep its product intact and its sponsorships compounding. If the Olympic machinery can absorb that much, then why should FIFA worry about housing one team across an international border?
Because the Olympics and the World Cup, despite their family resemblance, are not the same kind of institution. They are wired differently, and they metabolize geopolitics in opposite ways. The Iran base-camp affair is the first time that the difference has been laid out in plain view.
Consider what the IOC sells. Its product is the athlete, not the country. The Olympic Charter treats individual competitors as the subjects of the Games; national federations are administrative conveniences. When a country is absent or barred, the IOC produces another category. The Refugee Olympic Team has competed at every Games since the 2016 Rio Olympics. Russians without their flag, then under the neutral designation, made their way to Pyeongchang, Tokyo, Beijing, and Paris. The absence of the nation has rarely meant the absence of the athletes.
FIFA’s product is the opposite. The World Cup is a tournament of nations, full stop. There is no Refugee World Cup Team, no flagless Iranian XI assembled from expatriate Bundesliga professionals. An absent country is an absent country, and the schedule sees the gap immediately. As the Council on Foreign Relations noted, fewer than 10 countries have withdrawn from the finals after qualifying in the tournament’s history; each absence left a visible hole that the governing body had to scramble to fill.
Then there is the question of who decides who plays. The IOC has effective sovereignty over participation through the terms of the Olympic host contract, the binding agreement that every host city signs before a Games is awarded. Section 21.2 of the contract for the 2028 Los Angeles Games requires the host to ensure that all related personnel can obtain entry visas in an expedited and simplified manner, beginning a full year before the opening ceremony. Another section establishes that the Olympic identity and accreditation card—the laminated badge worn on a lanyard at every Games—serves as a temporary visa and work permit. Athletes from countries that have no diplomatic relations with the host can show up at the airport and walk through immigration on the strength of a card that the IOC has issued them.
Bans are IOC decisions; the neutral athlete category is an IOC innovation; South Africa’s apartheid-era suspension was an IOC determination. When political pressure builds on the Games, it builds on Switzerland, and Switzerland decides. The host has signed away the right to refuse.
FIFA is built differently. It can ban teams—Yugoslavia in 1994, Russia in 2022—and has done so. But it has no authority over whom the host country admits across its borders. That decision is the host’s sovereign right and FIFA’s structural weakness. Its government guarantee for 2026 merely requests that the host establish a visa-free environment or facilitate existing visa procedures. The verbs are softer, the obligations more porous, and there is no FIFA equivalent of the Olympic accreditation card that doubles as an entry visa.
The third difference is geographic. The Olympics consolidates competition in a host city, with the Olympic Village extraterritorialized by formal agreement between the host and the IOC. The World Cup is hosted by a nation and usually in multiple cities. This summer’s tournament will be played out in 16 cities across three countries, with 48 base camps. That means 48 delegations moving through commercial airports, hotels, training fields, and customs queues. The host country is not the scenery of the World Cup; it is its operating environment. When that environment is hostile to a participant, there is no World Cup village with a closed gate to retreat into. There is only the request for a room in Tucson, Arizona, and the answer from Washington.
What this meant in practice was that FIFA had to ask Mexico to play structural backstop for a problem that the World Cup framework has no formal tool to solve. The Iranian delegation could not be made notionally stateless; soccer has no such category. The Iranian fixtures could have been moved out of the United States—FIFA’s hosting agreement allows force-majeure relocations—but Infantino refused to entertain the idea on the grounds, he said, that bringing people together was his responsibility.
The visa question was different. When Iran applied for nine delegation visas to attend last December’s draw at the Kennedy Center, the U.S. State Department granted four and denied five, including Taj. The original base camp at the Kino Sports Complex in Tucson collapsed when Washington failed to issue visas to the Iranian delegation in time. When the squad departed for its pretournament training camp in Antalya on May 18, not a single player or coach had been granted entry to the United States. The Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the Americans of inventing pretexts; the State Department offered no public explanation.
What remained was the territorial workaround, and it required a willing neighbor. Mexico obliged.
The precedent that has now been established will not be forgotten by future hosts of less democratic temperament. Saudi Arabia’s disputes with Iran, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates may not be solved by the time it hosts the World Cup in 2034. Despite Trump’s latest promptings, Riyadh probably won’t have recognized Israel either. A World Cup in which one team has to cross national borders to play its games is silly enough—but make that two teams, or three, and you’ve got a theater of the absurd.
