The Empty Seats

From the shooting of Renee Nicole Good to the "weaponization" of DHS, the 2026 World Cup is turning into a global masterclass in how to ruin a festival of unity.

WASHINGTON — Mohamad Safa bought his tickets to the FIFA World Cup the way a million other people did, which is to say he went online and paid too much money and figured he’d worry about the hotel later. He’s a diplomat from Lebanon, works with the United Nations on economic development, the kind of guy who spends his life in conference rooms trying to make things better. Soccer’s his thing. Always has been.

Then on January 7th, an ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good three times during a traffic stop in Minneapolis. She was 37, American citizen, mother of three, wrote poetry. Her car moved forward—witnesses say barely—and the agent fired. Homeland Security called it a “weaponized vehicle.” The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, said get the fuck out of our city.

Safa watched the video. Then he cancelled his tickets.

“The ICE may decide that I am a gang member,” he wrote, “and I’ll be locked in prison for a year with no charges, no hearing, no trial, no right to consult a lawyer, no phone call. The US is not safe to visit.”

He was the first. Within a week, 16,800 people followed. Maybe 25,000 if you count the hotels. The hashtag #BoycottWorldCup started trending like a disease spreads—person to person, fear to fear.

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Here’s what the Trump administration did: They banned fans from four countries that qualified for the World Cup. Iran, Haiti, Senegal, Ivory Coast. Not the players—the players can come. Not the coaches or the officials. Just the fans. The people who’d sit in the stands and wave their flags and sing their songs.

Djibril Gueye is from Senegal. His team qualified. He can’t go watch them play. “I can’t understand why the American president would want to exclude teams from certain nations,” he told the Associated Press. You can hear the hurt in it, the confusion. His country earned the right to be there. He earned nothing but a travel ban.

During last summer’s Club World Cup in Southern California, ICE agents tried to get into Dodger Stadium’s parking lot. The stadium said no. Telemundo threw a countdown party on a boat in Miami with FIFA executives present. Department of Homeland Security agents shut it down. Thousands of federal agents patrolled the streets near the venues. Immigrant communities—the people who work the concessions, clean the stadiums, drive the cabs, cook in the restaurants—they stayed home. Stayed hidden. Entire neighborhoods went quiet.

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FIFA says millions of people are still coming. Gianni Infantino, the president, keeps saying it. They had an emergency meeting about the cancellations. They created something called a “FIFA PASS” to speed up visas. They hired 400 additional consular officers. They spent $50 million on advertising.

But the math doesn’t work the way it used to. The Club World Cup already proved that. You can’t tell people the country is safe when mothers are getting shot at traffic stops. You can’t promise a festival of nations when you’ve banned four of the nations. You can’t say come celebrate with us when ICE is in the parking lot.

Ninety human rights organizations wrote to FIFA last July. The NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the AFL-CIO. They said the tournament risked being “weaponized for authoritarian aims.” They weren’t being dramatic. They were reading the newspaper.

Twenty-three British MPs called for the United States to be expelled from hosting. A Change.org petition wants both the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics moved out of the country. The petition’s got enough signatures that somebody at FIFA had to read it.

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The World Cup starts June 11th. Five months from now. The stadiums will open and the teams will play and somewhere, in some luxury box, Infantino will smile for the cameras and talk about unity and the beautiful game bringing the world together.

But Mohamad Safa won’t be there. Djibril Gueye won’t be there. Renee Good’s children won’t see their mother again. And thousands of people who bought tickets thinking they’d take their kids to see something special, something bigger than borders and politics—they’ll stay home too.

You can’t build a festival on fear. You can’t host the world when the world knows you shoot people at traffic stops and lock others in detention without lawyers. You can’t sell the dream of soccer when the reality is ICE agents in the parking lot.

FIFA keeps saying everything’s fine. The Trump administration keeps issuing executive orders. And the tickets keep getting cancelled, one by one, each cancellation its own small prayer that somebody, somewhere, will notice that this isn’t how you’re supposed to do things.

The World Cup was supposed to be about soccer. Turns out it’s about everything but.