A man fills water jugs from a tanker truck amid a U.S. blockade that has dealt a major blow to the island's already ailing energy infrastructure. in Havana, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
FIFA uses the World Cup to present the United States as a legitimate nation, but the U.S. is a rogue state committing crimes against humanity. The call for a boycott is a call to decolonize football and reject FIFA's role as a broker of legitimacy for empire.
The world watched in horror. Day after day, people ,around the world were bombarded with images of a level of brutality rarely witnessed in real time: human beings burned alive; families desperately digging through mountains of rubble in search of loved ones trapped beneath what had once been their homes; apocalyptic scenes of hundreds of starving Palestinians herded into fenced enclosures like cattle, waiting at what were cynically called "feeding stations" operated by shadowy organizations funded by the United States.
Then came the scenes of people running for their lives as those same feeding stations became death traps, with armed men firing indiscriminately into crowds of Palestinians whose only crime was the desire to live freely on their land, free from colonial domination.
Yet these are precisely the images that the organizer of the World Cup, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the United States, and the collaborationist forces of the so-called Collective West insist that we forget.
Why?
Because acknowledging those realities would force the public to confront an uncomfortable truth. It would require recognizing that the decision to allow the World Cup to be hosted in the United States, while it facilitates and supports such violence, sends a clear message about whose lives are valued and whose lives are not. It would require acknowledging that, for the white West, non-European life has very little value.
It would also require confronting the historical reality that FIFA is not a politically neutral institution. Born within and shaped by the structures of European colonial power, FIFA developed as an instrument of Western cultural dominance, extending control over the world's most popular sport while presenting that control as universal and apolitical. In that sense, football itself was colonized, governed through institutions designed to reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies of global power.
And we are certainly not supposed to examine—or even discuss— the symbiotic relationship between FIFA, the U.S. and Zionist power that have helped shield Israel and the U.S. from international accountability.
The ritualistic slaughter of Palestinians, seventy percent of those murdered were women and children, is not a factor that should have been considered as the blood flowed and the world came closer to the dates of the games. Because as Jerry Steinfeld, the famous Zionist comedian said a few days ago, Palestine, and by extension Palestinians don’t exist. An attitude and position apparently shared by FIFA, the international media, significant parts of the international public and most progressive and left elements not only in the U.S. but around the world. Enjoy the games, don’t prick the consciousness of the fans, have a good time and pretend that not opposing the games in the U.S. is not a collaboration with evil.
What makes hosting the Games in the U.S. So Different?
The United States is not simply another host nation. It is the principal military power and leader of the white West that is implicated in crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and a war of aggression against Iran. Domestically expanded surveillance, militarized policing, immigrant detention, and political repression characterizes a consolidating fascism led by the U.S. domestically and abroad.
Yet FIFA chose to place the world's premier sporting event at the center of this reality. In doing so, FIFA once again performed the role it has historically played: transforming Western colonial power into legitimacy and converting political violence into sporting spectacle.
The spectacle is commodified and sold to advertisers and broadcasters and in the case of the World Cup, plays a further depoliticizing role transforming politics into entertainment and obscuring deep social and national contradictions with a false and temporary social unity. “Don’t worry be happy,” “we are the world,” scroll past the images of murder and imposed mayhem to see what your favorite player is saying about the games in the U.S.
But that is precisely what the World Cup and FIFA are tasked to do. Therefore, we should have not been surprised that FIFA would present a “peace prize” to the head of the most corrupt, violent, terroristic state on the planet. The World Cup facilitates consent and legitimation. It functions ideologically by presenting the host state as legitimate and civilized regardless of its actual uncivilized conduct.
FIFA presents itself as a diverse and global organization committed to inclusion, equality, and human rights. Its role and actual conduct reveal FIFA as an institution deeply integrated into structures of Western colonial/capitalist power. Mega-sporting events such as the World Cup generate immense profits for multinational corporations, media conglomerates, financial institutions, and political elites. The 2026 World Cup illustrates this contradiction with particular clarity.
The campaign launched by the Black Alliance for Peace's North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights that called for an international boycott of the 2026 World Cup was not without precedent. It belongs to a long anti-colonial tradition that recognizes international sport as a site of political struggle rather than a neutral arena standing above history and power.
With the normalization of international gangsterism led by the U.S. and Zionist Israel that degrades, dehumanizes and extinguishes the lives of states and peoples around the world, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) recognized that principled opposition was absolutely necessary. FIFA asks the world to celebrate, BAP and the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition ask the world to act!
FIFA asks athletes, fans, journalists, and social movements to suspend political judgment and participate in a spectacle designed to present the United States as a legitimate and responsible member of the international community. BAP said we must defend human rights, the dignity of human beings being systematically oppressed and equal value of all humanity.
And while FIFA, its’ corporate sponsors and the U.S. government were not worried about accountability because the crimes it committed were not against people whose lives really matter, BAP in the Black human rights tradition of W.E.B Dubois, Claudia Jones, Ella Baker, and Malcolm X, declared that it would not be silent in this obvious attempt to sportswash U.S. criminality.
The people who are still being murdered, starved, and tortured in Gaza, plunged into darkness in Cuba, disappeared into ICE detention in the U.S., killed and displaced in Lebanon, occupy a lower rung on the hierarchy of humans who have value, who have rights that are recognized and respected by the white West.
To reinforce that ideology—even among the oppressed and dispossessed themselves—and to normalize the historic barbarism of colonial conquest, relegated to the footnotes of Western history, unspoken and unacknowledged along with its contemporary manifestations, FIFA presents the 2026 World Cup: an anesthetizing spectacle designed to help us forget, if only temporarily, the spiritually debilitating fear, anxiety, alienation, devaluation, and anger that define life under global capitalism.
The demand to decolonize football is therefore not symbolic. It is a challenge to the structures of power that continue to govern the sport. Decolonization means more than increasing representation within FIFA. It means transforming the political and economic foundations of the institution itself. It means rejecting the use of football as a tool for legitimizing imperialism, racial domination, and state violence. It means placing the interests of peoples’ above the interests of capitalist corporations, states, and a repacious bourgeois elite.
The struggle for a decolonized world has always included struggles over culture, ideas, and institutions. Football is no exception.
The modern World Cup has become a vehicle for sportswashing—the use of sport to manufacture legitimacy for states and corporations whose conduct would otherwise provoke international condemnation. Even more importantly, and this is where many on the left are deficient when it comes to understanding the deep complexities of ideological struggle - mega-events like the World Cup produce and reproduce the political, economic and ideological conditions that facilitate capital accumulation and the smooth functioning of the capitalist state.
Therefore, they cannot just be ignored, especially when on the global level they legitimize the contradictory relationships and functioning of the global accumulation process, state legitimacy, bourgeois ideology and global imperialist power.
The demand to boycott the 2026 World Cup was, therefore, not an attack on football. It was a defense of football. It was and is a demand that FIFA cease acting as a broker of legitimacy for Western imperialist governments engaged in international criminality and that the world's most beloved sport be liberated from its function as a vehicle for capitalist propaganda and corporate accumulation.
But we are not naïve. We recognize that as a colonial/capitalist structure FIFA would have to be captured and transformed by popular forces in order to alter the role it plays in the global structures of white Western imperialist power.
That is why unlike Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that document the internal conditions in the U.S. that represent a threat to human rights but have very little to say about the primary moral, political and legal contradiction that allowing the games to take place in the U.S., the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights (the Project) centers the issue of the U.S. operating as a rogue state with impunity that should have disqualified it from hosting the games.
For BAP’s North-South Project and the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition, it was recognized that decolonizing the beautiful game requires more than symbolic gestures and reforms. It requires confronting the political structures that continue to govern international sport. It requires recognizing that FIFA, like most global institutions, remains shaped by histories of white Western colonial domination and contemporary relations of imperial power. And most importantly, it requires an understanding that the games and the interests of the people will not be liberated from these forces without a revolutionary struggle of historic proportions.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
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