Sorry performative politicians, a 2026 World Cup boycott just won’t work
Politicians calling for a boycott of the World Cup are only proving how out of touch and powerless they are, writes Ed Warner.
Every four years, politicians rediscover our football. And inevitably, they then threaten to take it away from us. Think Russia, then Qatar. This time, President Trump is the trigger. Quelle surprise!
The Donald’s latest outburst of international belligerence (pick your incident; there’s been no shortage) has caused predictable tremors across Europe. Tremors of outrage and condemnation accompanied by the dropping of the B-word: boycott.
Politicians from half a dozen countries have popped up on talk shows and social media demanding their teams pull out of this summer’s World Cup. If these have passed you by, no worry – they are formulaic.
Think angry viral clip and self-righteous thread, talking as if walking away from the global sporting event will somehow shift superpower politics. It may sound noble in theory. In practice, sporting boycotts almost never work.
“The USA should not be able to participate in the World Cup, let alone be part of hosting it, so yes I support those calling for a boycott.”
Labour MP Kate Osborne
“I really wonder when the time will be to think and talk about [a boycott] concretely. For me, that time has definitely come.”
Oke Gottlich, German FA vice president
If political outrage could end wars, the 1980 Moscow Olympics would have stopped the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in its tracks.
The US led a boycott of around 65 nations in protest (just 80 competed). Athletes trained for years only to be forced to stay at home. The invasion lasted another nine years, though. Four years later, the Soviet Union led a retaliatory boycott of 19 nations at the Los Angeles Games, proving only that sulking can be mutual.
The 1976 African boycott of the Montreal Olympics made the right moral point in protesting the New Zealand rugby team’s tour of South Africa – tacitly condoning apartheid was indefensible – but it didn’t move Pretoria.
It took decades of combined economic, cultural, and diplomatic isolation before South Africa cracked. Sporting isolation for South Africa played an integral part, but the African continent swerving the Olympics was but a small step on that long road.
The Montreal boycott led to the Commonwealth’s 1977 Gleneagles Agreement to isolate South African sport. The British government’s failure to uphold the Agreement prompted 32 nations to boycott the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1986.
Without such follow-through, though, a boycott is a symbolic gesture that mostly hurts athletes and fans, and dents a host city’s halo and its revenues.
Voters will defend right to watch World Cup
Fast-forward to 2026. The latest “boycott the World Cup” chatter feels more performative than principled. These politicians aren’t united around a great moral cause but seeking a pin with which to prick Trump’s o’er-weaning ambition and ginormous ego. That’s not so much a movement as a collective mood.
The reality is that no government in Europe is going to deprive its football-mad citizens of the year’s biggest jamboree in order to make a symbolic point about American foreign policy.
Picture Sir Keir Starmer (or Wes Streeting?), mere weeks before kick-off, stepping up to a podium outside No10 and explaining to millions of England fans that Harry Kane won’t be allowed to lace his boots because they are hoping to upset the White House. Nor Scottish fans be permitted to enjoy their team’s first World Cup in 30 years, or Welsh fans (play-offs pending) join the Tartan Army on flights across the Atlantic. Good luck surviving that presser in the face of tabloid fire.
Politicians, as a rule, are unpopular. Football is not. The idea that any leader would voluntarily pit themselves against the national game is laughable. Those same voters who roll their eyes at government scandals will defend their right to watch a World Cup game as if it’s a constitutional freedom.
This is the US’s first World Cup hosting since 1994. Back then, soccer (sic) was still the weird cousin of American sport, tolerated but not truly embraced.
Three decades later, it is becoming part of America’s sporting mainstream. Stadia are busy, ageing star players sprinkle stardust over home-grown talent, commercial partners are excited by the popularity of the women’s game and broadcasters are increasingly willing to pay meaningful sums to screen matches from Europe’s top leagues.
Hosting the World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico isn’t just a logistical exercise for the US. It is sport as diplomacy, a rare symbol of cooperation in a region better known these days for trade spats and border posturing.
For Trump, who loves a crowd as much as a headline, a successful tournament could be a political sugar rush, the Stars and Stripes fluttering above packed crowds, POTUS himself basking in sporting glory he had little to do with. Forget the sabre-rattling of recent weeks and months, this event is soft-power gold.
Trying to weaponise football unity will backfire
It is also huge for Fifa. America has long been the final frontier for men’s football – the one wealthy, sports-mad country the game hasn’t completely conquered.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar reached a global audience of almost 3bn. In the US? A respectable 20m tuned in for USA v England, the biggest ever audience for a football match in the States. Compare that to the Super Bowl, though, which still pulls north of 100m domestic viewers alone every single year.
This is the market that Fifa is drooling over. With games in American time zones and much local hype, peak viewership could double.
If 40m or 50m people, say, watch a match involving the USA this June, that might prove to be a cultural tipping point, the game finally going toe-to-toe with America’s native sports. For Fifa, this could be the holy grail: the United States locked into the football economy forever.
Of course, none of this means global sport exists in a political vacuum. Football is political, always has been. A stadium is a stage for national pride; shirts are surrogates for identity.
But that’s exactly why boycotts don’t stick. The game binds people in ways politics can’t break. For most fans, missing a World Cup would feel like being asked to sit out Christmas. For the sponsors, broadcasters and governing bodies, moreover, it would be a financial disaster.
The thing politicians forget when they flex about “sending a message” is that football is the message. It’s the world at play, the one moment where everyone – from Sao Paulo to Sunderland – agrees to watch the same thing. Trying to weaponise that unity merely ends up proving how little control politicians really have over it.
So yes, calls for a boycott make headlines. They let ministers posture, activists rally, columnists rage. But come June, when the anthems start and the first ball is kicked, those same critics will probably all be watching and boasting about it on social media in order to demonstrate their populist credentials.
Because football – ludicrous though this might seem to any alien visitor popping over to our planet on holiday – is simply too big to boycott.
That’s both the sport’s power and its problem. It is what gives us Fifa and Gianni Infantino. The world’s favourite game is now too vast, too profitable, too much a part of our shared identity to be abstained from – and what makes it an irresistible target for whoever wants to make a point.
Donald Trump may divide nations, but the World Cup will still unite them – for 90 or 120 minutes at a time, at least.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com