Five months out from the World Cup the politics are impossible to avoid. There are concerns relating to one of the host countries, the US, with armed immigration officials roaming through its cities and visa restrictions stepped up against foreign visitors. One qualifying nation, Iran, is experiencing a public uprising against its leadership, with the regime attacking its citizens in response. Among other qualifiers there are concerns over democratic backsliding in Tunisia, ecological crimes in Ecuador and , in the future host country Saudi Arabia. And that’s just for starters.
It sometimes feels as if this summer’s tournament, the one Gianni Infantino recently described as “the greatest show ever on planet Earth”, will serve as an inescapable reminder of the depressing state of the world in 2026. It could yet be an event that goes down in infamy. But it is hardly the only tournament to have prompted ethical concerns and serves as a reminder that the issue of how global sport should engage with such issues has remained largely unresolved.
In 1978, the World Cup was held in Argentina, which two years earlier had been taken over by a military dictatorship. It prompted a response from Amnesty International, which ran what is understood to be the organisation’s first campaign focused on a major sporting event. Under a slogan devised by its West German branch, Amnesty made an appeal for “Fussball ja – Folter nein” or “Football yes – torture no”. The campaign played a part in generating a debate over the ethics of participation in the tournament and West Germany’s Paul Breitner refused to play. The final ended with the dictator, Jorge Videla, handing the World Cup trophy to Argentina’s captain Daniel Passarella.
“It wasn’t a push to boycott the World Cup,” says Steve Cockburn, Amnesty’s head of sports and human rights, of the Argentina campaign. “It was a push to raise the issues with some very specific demands.” These demands related to gaining access to prisons and transparency about those who had been arrested or disappeared, but Amnesty also made demands of other countries to place greater diplomatic pressure on Argentina. “It would have been opportunistic in the sense of trying to generate attention and make change on issues in Argentina, using the World Cup as a hook,” Cockburn says. “My guess is that this was also coinciding with a time when the World Cup was reaching more and more people via television.”
What it didn’t do was make demands of Fifa. “We didn’t necessarily frame this as arguing that a sports body like Fifa has a particular human rights responsibility legally in the way that we do now,” Cockburn says. That changed much later, after the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the events of 2010, when Fifa awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar amid accusations of corruption and human rights neglect. This period, says Cockburn, coincided “with a broader movement in the human rights sector which was about trying to define the responsibilities of organisations. You had the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, which Fifa adopted [in 2016]. That led to an acceptance within sports bodies that they have human rights responsibilities, I think partly as a result of pressure, but also out of a desire to protect their autonomy and avoid regulation.”
In the years since, Fifa has protected its autonomy, grown its influence and found itself increasingly the focus for criticism over human rights. Campaigns to influence Fifa’s behaviour in Qatar, or to prevent it handing the World Cup to Saudi Arabia, or for it to suspend Israel from its competitions have not been successful. Fifa is accused of neglecting its direct responsibilities but also of failing to stand up for values that many believe should be intrinsic to the sport. Fifa’s statutes, however, remain clear: “Fifa remains neutral in matters of politics and religion.”
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 FairSquare, which works to achieve “systemic change” in the relation between sport and human rights. “So rather than repeating the nonsense about keeping sport and politics separate we need to recognise its power and look to use that power appropriately and effectively,” he says. “A big problem that we have is that neither Fifa nor the IOC [International Olympic Committee] – to take the two biggest and most influential organisations – have any rules on how to deal with serious geopolitical developments.”
The biggest political intervention by sporting bodies in recent years highlights this point. A decision to ban Russia from international football was made jointly by Fifa and Uefa after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It came about after political pressure, including from the UK government, but Fifa justified the ban on sporting grounds. It claimed that the threat of boycott by European teams scheduled to play Russia had endangered Fifa’s obligation to “guarantee the smooth running of its flagship competition”. It was, Fifa said, “imperative that this calendar is not disrupted” and so action had to be taken.
Dr Antoine Duval is a researcher at the Asser International Sports Law Centre in the Netherlands. He is scathing of the past 15 years of avowed commitment to human rights. “I would say this entire sequence has been rather a lesson in pessimism,” he says. “China didn’t become more democratic after the Olympics, it became more autocratic. Russia became even more aggressive as a state after the two mega sporting events [the World Cup and Winter Olympics in Sochi]. Qatar didn’t really reform kafala, didn’t really improve the life of migrant workers, didn’t really became a democracy because of the 2022 World Cup.”
He is also, however, understanding of the approach by Fifa and the IOC to ensure any decisions are grounded in their rulebooks. It may be possible, Duval says, to create a system whereby Fifa or the IOC would act as an “arbiter of compliance” for international law, expected to take action against countries that are the subject of adverse rulings by the International Court of Justice or resolutions by the UN General Assembly, for example. But it would come with real risks. “Proper, in-depth reform is difficult to trigger,” he says. “You need to have proper rules in place to determine which country is to be excluded and which is not. If not, you risk ending up having, in practice, double standards.”
Duval says a more useful focus could be on ensuring governing bodies enforce the rules they have. “My own impression is that we should not overplay the capacity of Fifa or the international Olympic movement to actually achieve democratisation or spread human rights,” he says. “We should be prudent in what we hope to achieve.” Instead Duval believes the best thing to be hoped is that the Olympics and World Cup fulfil the expectation billions of people around the world place on them: namely that they showcase the best in human endeavour. And that this should extend to the conditions in which the tournament is played out.
“You can see the World Cup or Olympics as a circus that comes to a country every four years,” Duval says. “My suggestion would be to consider it not only a circus that is about the commercial interest 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 the rights of people exceed those within the host country, where we ensure free expression and that the fundamental rights of those that participate are fully protected in that particular space.”
Duval admits that the power of a World Cup such as the one described above would be largely symbolic, but it would at least be a symbol that inspires hope. Until then many football fans, some perhaps still pondering whether to travel to the World Cup this summer, or whether they will be allowed in, will still be experiencing something of a disconnect. “It feels like people want sport to be this beautiful escape from everything else but it’s just as affected by power struggles and human failings as any other industry,” Cockburn says. “There’s a mismatch between what you’re seeing and what’s happening around it in terms of power, politics, business, abuse. There’s probably a better word for it, but to me it’s jarring.”
