FFive months before the World Cup, it is impossible to avoid politics. There are concerns for one of the host countries, the United States, with armed immigration officials roaming through its cities and tightening visa restrictions against foreign visitors. One eligible country, Iran, is experiencing a general uprising against its leadership, with the regime attacking its citizens in response. Among other factors, there are concerns about democratic backsliding in Tunisia, environmental crimes in Ecuador, and in future host country Saudi Arabia. And that’s just for starters.
It sometimes feels as if this summer’s tournament, which Gianni Infantino recently described as “the greatest show ever put on planet Earth”, will serve as an inescapable reminder of the depressing state the world is in in 2026. However, it could still be an infamous event. But it is not the only tournament to raise ethical concerns, and it serves as a reminder that the question of how global sport deals with such issues has remained largely unresolved.
In 1978, the World Cup was held in Argentina, which had taken power two years earlier by a military dictatorship. This prompted a response from Amnesty International, which ran what is understood to be the organisation’s first campaign to focus on a major sporting event. Under a slogan created by its branch in West Germany, Amnesty International issued a call to “Fussball ja – Folter nein” or “Football yes – torture no.” The campaign played a role in sparking controversy over the ethics of participating in the tournament and West German player Paul Breitner’s refusal to play. The final match ended with dictator Jorge Videla handing the World Cup to Argentina captain Daniel Passarella.
“This was not a campaign to boycott the World Cup,” says Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of sport and human rights, on the Argentina campaign. “It was a push to raise issues with some very specific demands.” These demands relate to access to prisons and transparency about those who have been arrested or disappeared, but Amnesty International has also called on other countries to put greater diplomatic pressure on Argentina. “It could have been opportunistic in the sense of trying to attract attention and make a difference to the issues in Argentina, using the World Cup as a hook,” says Cockburn. “I think this was also coinciding with the time when the World Cup was reaching more and more people through television.”
What it did not do was submit demands to FIFA. “We didn’t necessarily frame this as claiming that a sporting body like FIFA had a certain legal human rights responsibility in the way we do now,” Cockburn says. That changed much later, after the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the events of 2010, when FIFA awarded the right to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar amid accusations of corruption and neglect of human rights. This period coincided, Cockburn says, “with a broader movement in the human rights sector that was around trying to define the responsibilities of organizations. We had the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which FIFA adopted.” [in 2016]. This has led to an acceptance within sporting bodies that they have human rights responsibilities, and I think this is partly due to pressure, but also due to a desire to protect their independence and avoid regulation.
In the years since, FIFA has protected its independence, increased its influence, and increasingly found itself the target of criticism over human rights. The campaigns aimed at influencing FIFA’s behavior in Qatar, preventing it from handing over the World Cup to Saudi Arabia, or suspending Israel’s participation in its competitions did not succeed. FIFA is accused of neglecting its direct responsibilities, but it also fails to stand up for the values that many believe should be core to the sport. However, the FIFA Statutes remain clear: “FIFA remains neutral in matters relating to political and religious matters.”
As the world’s most popular sport, “football will always have very significant social, cultural, political and economic significance,” says Nick McGeehan, co-director of VerSquareWhich works to achieve “systematic change” in the relationship between sport and human rights. “So, instead of repeating this nonsense about separating sport and politics, we need to acknowledge its power and aspire to use that power appropriately and effectively,” he says. “The big problem we face is that neither FIFA nor the International Olympic Committee [International Olympic Committee] – Let’s take the two largest and most influential organizations – they have any rules on how to deal with dangerous geopolitical developments.
The largest political intervention by sporting bodies in recent years highlights this point. The decision to ban Russia from international football was taken jointly by FIFA and UEFA following the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This came after political pressure, including from the UK government, but FIFA justified the ban on sporting grounds. It claimed that the threat to boycott European teams scheduled to play against Russia could jeopardize FIFA’s obligation “to ensure the smooth running of its flagship competition”. FIFA said that “it is necessary not to disrupt this calendar” and therefore the necessary measures had to be taken.
Dr. Antoine Duval is a researcher at the ASER International Center for Sports Law in the Netherlands. He is highly critical of the declared commitment to human rights over the past fifteen years. “I would say that this whole sequence was a lesson in pessimism,” he says. “China did not become more democratic after the Olympics, it became more authoritarian. Russia became more aggressive as a country after the two major sporting events. [the World Cup and Winter Olympics in Sochi]. Qatar hasn’t really reformed the kafala system, hasn’t really improved the lives of migrant workers, and hasn’t really become a democracy because of the 2022 World Cup.
However, he also understands the approach taken by FIFA and the IOC to ensure any decisions are based on their rules. Duval says it might be possible to create a system whereby FIFA or the IOC would act as an “arbiter of compliance” with international law, and would be expected to take action against countries subject to adverse rulings from the International Court of Justice or resolutions from the UN General Assembly, for example. But that would come with real risks. “It is difficult to launch sound and in-depth reform,” he says. “You have to have appropriate rules to determine which countries should be excluded and which ones will not. If not, you risk ending up, in practice, with double standards.”
Duvall says a more useful focus could be on ensuring that governing bodies enforce the rules they have. He says: “My personal impression is that we should not overestimate the ability of FIFA or the International Olympic Movement to achieve democracy or spread human rights.” “We have to be careful about what we hope to achieve.” Instead, Duvall believes, the best we can hope for is for the Olympics and World Cup to fulfill the expectations that billions of people around the world place on them: that they demonstrate the best of human endeavour. This should extend to the circumstances in which the tournament is held.
“You can see the World Cup or the Olympics as a circus that comes to a country every four years,” says Duvall. “My suggestion is to consider it not just as a circus around the commercial interests of FIFA and the IOC and the security of those events, but also that those events are moments where we ensure radical non-discrimination. Where people’s rights go beyond those within the host country, where we guarantee freedom of expression and that the fundamental rights of those who participate are fully protected in that particular space.”
Duval admits that a powerful World Cup such as the one described above will be largely symbolic, but it will at least be a symbol of hope. Until then, many football fans, some of whom may still be contemplating whether they will travel to this summer’s World Cup finals, or whether they will be allowed in, will still experience some sort of disconnect. “It’s as if people want sports to be a nice escape from everything else, but it’s as affected by power struggles and human failings as any other industry,” Cockburn says. “There’s a mismatch between what she sees and what’s happening around her in terms of power, politics, business, and abuse. Maybe there’s a better word to describe it, but to me it’s paradoxical.”