Fifa

FIFA looks set to face its first major scandal of the 2026 World Cup – if you don’t count the exorbitant cost of the tickets, that is. The Egyptian FA has made a formal request for the cancellation of an LGBTQ+ celebration planned to take place at their Group G game against Iran on June 26 in Seattle. The game roughly coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The Seattle Pride match committee are planning to combine celebrations of the anniversary with the game.  A Pride match or Pride night is a tradition in American sports going back to around the year 2000 and is now embraced by most professional leagues. These events usually involve a particular game being dedicated to certain communities.

It is ten years since Sepp Blatter finally lost control of football’s world governing body, Fifa. But despite his retirement and advanced years – he has just celebrated his 89th birthday – Blatter has not been able to bow out quietly. In a few days, on Tuesday, Blatter will be in court, in Basel, in his native Switzerland, to hear verdicts on allegations of fraud. Last month, Blatter spoke to protest his innocence in this case: ‘When you talk about falsehoods, lies and deception, that’s not me… That didn’t exist in my whole life.’ However, this picture of purity is one few football fans would recognise. Because Blatter is a villain of the old school, an inveterate chancer, an oleaginous schemer, a proper wrong ’un.

“It is often said that history will judge us not only for what we said and did in times of strife, but also for our silence.” So wrote Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism dean Charles Whitaker in 2018. The statement was released following a heated exchange between former president Donald Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta, which resulted in the White House revoking Acosta’s press pass. Whitaker believed it was important for an “institution as prominent as Medill” to defend the journalism profession against such an “attack.” Four years later, Northwestern has failed to practice what it preaches: it fell silent when Qatari security officials threatened to smash a Danish journalist’s camera during a live TV report on the FIFA World Cup.

The World Cup has just begun and it’s already shaping up to be the wokest iteration of the world’s grandest sporting event in history. Twelve years ago, corrupt FIFA officials awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a Gulf state of less than three million people and about the size of Connecticut. In the intervening years, most of the criticism of this decision focused on the bribery scandal that engulfed FIFA and claims from human rights groups that some 6,000 migrant laborers died on the job during the frenzied construction of eight stadiums and other buildings for the tournament. Attacks on the host country have broadened in recent days, focusing predominantly on Qatar’s laws criminalizing homosexuality.

Winter is just around the corner — and you know what that means: the Soccer World Cup? Yes, as sleigh bells ring and children listen, a motley crew of twenty- and thirtysomething millionaires will be kicking balls around in hastily constructed stadiums in the desert. The tournament is in Qatar for the first time — not known as a great footballing nation (their men’s team has never qualified on merit), but the head of their FA was deputy head of FIFA during Sepp Blatter’s appallingly corrupt tenure, so that’s got to be a good enough reason to host it there. In the middle of the regular season. In new arenas that thousands of migrant workers died building.