The start of the run-up to a World Cup is traditionally an upbeat affair. New stadium launches, inclusion-friendly marketing and merch campaigns, the unveiling of a tournament song or quirky mascot: these are the traditional signals by which host nations announce that the big show is approaching. This time, pre-tournament preparations are taking shape a little differently. Thanks to Donald Trump and his determination to pursue economic armageddon against the US’s co-hosts, Canada and Mexico, the tone for the 2026 World Cup is being set not by Shakira or an anthropomorphic keffiyeh but by reciprocal tariffs, a flurry of cross-border insults, and crumbling diplomatic relations between the host nations. On Tuesday, Trump confirmed that the US will begin imposing levies on most imports from Canada and Mexico; Canada immediately retaliated, and Mexico looks set to follow. Welcome to the Trade War World Cup; please tip your host 25% of the entrance fee on your way in. If things continue on their current course, the 2026 tournament will be the first installment of the World Cup to be co-hosted by the antagonists of an active international economic conflict.
Whether things do in fact continue as they are is, of course, difficult to predict: Trump’s approach to policy is famously erratic, and the protectionism that marked his first administration was leavened by various exemptions and carve-outs to the tariffs imposed on trading partners, a cycle of aggression and moderation that could be repeated this time round. With the first match still 15 months away, there’s plenty of time for the deterioration in diplomatic relations between the co-hosts to give way to reconciliation. But as things stand today, with Trump and his cabinet lackeys apparently hellbent on trashing the global economy and humiliating traditional allies, that hope seems pretty remote. The US – which is due to host 75% of the matches during the 2026 tournament, and every fixture from the quarter-finals onwards – looks set to steam into the approaching World Cup with a spirit of hospitality roughly equivalent to Roy Keane sizing up Alf-Inge Haaland’s knee.
Trump’s mercantile war on America’s co-hosts sends the World Cup into uncharted waters, compounding many of the existing imponderables about next year’s tournament. Tariffs on their own won’t directly affect the staging; the schedule has already been decided, so the World Cup could go ahead even if the host nations are at economic loggerheads, with each country taking care of its part of the tournament in a spirit of steadfast mutual ignorance. But an ongoing trade war would naturally make everything far more awkward. Trump wrote to Fifa during his first term, while the bids for 2026 were under assessment, to reassure officials that there would no travel bans or other restrictions in place during the tournament, and that “all eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination.” That pledge is already at risk thanks to Elon Musk’s incineration of the federal government, which has led to massive blowouts in visa processing times and could leave many fans unable to enter the US.
Add that uncertainty to the diplomatic and economic offensive that Trump has now unleashed on the US’s neighbors, and things could quickly deteriorate. Travel for fans between the host nations seems the part of the tournament most likely to end up being affected, and there’s a very real question of how far the contagion from deteriorating diplomatic relations will spread: a breakdown in cooperation at the highest levels of government between the hosts could seriously affect logistical and security coordination, the information sharing that makes big events like the World Cup run smoothly. The tournament, barring a security calamity, could probably still forge ahead in the face of such difficulties. But given the cruelty and volatility of the current US administration – plus its power to compel obsequious submission from even the leaders of the world’s most advanced economies – there’s every reason to assume the worst.
Will Trump insist that Canada and Mexico somehow compensate the US for the costs of staging the tournament? Will he cook up a plan with home broadcaster Fox to refer to the US’s northern neighbor as “the state of Canada”? Could the US impose a World Cup entry tax on visitors, or force them to pay into the US’s new strategic crypto reserve? Will every foreign team competing on US soil be made to join in a special rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner? Will visiting stars have to offer up praise for the US leader during a televised World Cup struggle session in the West Wing (“Stand up, Kylian”), the way Trump’s cabinet members often have to? Could we see the Jules Rimet Trophy renamed the Roy Cohn Cup?
So exceptional is the pettiness of America’s leaders that none of these scenarios seems even remotely implausible; and Trump, who in 2018 threatened nations considering voting against the US’s World Cup bid with retribution, has form in this area. A tournament that should be the catalyst for soccer’s next big push into the world’s heftiest media market – and a platform for the expression of an eternal bond between the three leading nations of North America – now risks turning into a month-long dummy spit from the most childish president in US history.
Fifa has given itself little authority to weigh in on the matter, given how central the US – the obvious senior partner in this coalition of hosting unequals – is to the staging of the tournament and how cravenly toadyish Gianni Infantino has been in his courting of Trump. The Fifa president, or “Johnny” as Trump calls him, has forged an alliance with his US counterpart that he defends as “absolutely crucial” to the success of the 2026 World Cup. But this is a strategy built on subordination and fealty, not a meeting of peers: from the day in 2018 that Infantino yucked it up for the cameras with Trump in the Oval Office, presenting the president with a special Trump 26 jersey (“You are part of the Fifa team,” he said) and a red card that then-president of the US Soccer Federation Carlos Cordeiro joked could be useful at “the next media session” (lol!), Fifa has effectively hitched its fortunes to Trump’s, making itself a tool of the Maga project.
This spineless display of loyalty is at odds with Fifa’s nominal political neutrality, but it won Infantino prime seats at this year’s Super Bowl and has turned him into a perpetual background presence in Trumpworld, where he can now be regularly found beaming vacantly off the president’s shoulder during various functions, a useful sporting idiot ready to defend the US leader to the hilt. Fifa did not exactly have much integrity to begin with, but the scale of its leader’s prostration is extraordinary. So completely has Infantino debased himself that after he witnessed Trump describe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” at a recent event in Miami, he immediately praised his American host for promoting a message of “peace and unity”. There is no way a man this deeply in thrall to Trump and his cognitive dissolution will have any power to mend relations between 2026’s host nations. For Infantino and Fifa, it’s Trump or bust.
With the global economy fracturing and the notion of American leadership of a “rules-based international order” in the trash, there’s a bigger question to confront: can football continue to be a globalizing force in a deglobalizing world? The guiding direction of the times is away from international cooperation and towards tariffs, export controls, the formation of trade blocs, and the carving out of great power spheres of interest. This retreat of nations and cultures behind protective walls is at odds with the World Cup’s abidingly sunny message of a common humanity and growing shared territory of footballing competition – not to mention the expansion of the tournament itself, which next year will swell to 48 teams.
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Historically, the co-hosting of major soccer tournaments has expressed either longstanding cross-border friendship or a desire for détente: on the previous occasion on which the World Cup took place in more than one country, in 2002, Japan and South Korea co-hosted the tournament in the face of a long history of mutual antagonism and the lingering bitterness caused by Japan’s wartime atrocities. Interestingly, given the current circumstances, the lead-up to that World Cup was not always smooth political sailing: most notably, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in 2001 fueled a diplomatic row that briefly threatened to derail the tournament. But cooler heads prevailed, tensions eased, and in retrospect cooperation between the two hosts – which included, in addition to all the regular logistical coordination, important legal breakthroughs such as the signature of a mutually binding extradition treaty – can be seen as a meaningful marker in the long road towards Japanese-Korean reconciliation. Two decades later, in the shadow of a resurgent China, détente is slowly giving way to rapprochement: cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo is deepening, cross-border trade is on the rise, and a majority of young South Koreans now have a favorable view of Japan.
Could the co-hosts of the approaching World Cup overcome today’s economic turmoil, peacefully unite in common purpose next year, and find a way to their own happy diplomatic ending? Under the Trump administration, it seems unlikely. The damage being done to what’s left of both the global order and Fifa’s credibility may be so severe that future World Cups will unfold amid a cold war-style atmosphere of mutual suspicion and sabotage. Certainly, there is nothing in the choice of Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 tournament to suggest the World Cup’s imminent liberation from the game of global power, which is becoming more nakedly nativist and zero-sum with each passing week. Infantino seems totally uninterested in playing the role of a neutral broker in this new universe. The World Cup, perhaps appropriately, is becoming a football for strong nations to kick and distort to their own quixotic ends. “When I heard World Cup, I wanted to do it,” Trump told Infantino during their 2018 love-in at the White House. Now we’re getting a greater sense for how Trump might want to do it, and there’s every chance the results won’t be pretty.
