'U.S. Against The World: Four Years With The Men's National Soccer Team' Park Stories/Lukas Korver/HBO At this year’s World Cup, the rest of the globe will not be rooting for Team USA.
This has nothing to do with the players. As seen in the excellent HBO documentary series U.S. Against the World: Four Years With the U.S. Men’s National Team, the USMNT is a likable squad made up of young and talented, ambitious but humble players who, at another tournament in another year, would be everyone’s favorite second team.
But this is not another tournament in another year. The 2026 FIFA World Cup may officially be a three-way party co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, but thanks to President Trump, the planet’s most beloved sporting celebration has been turned into a referendum on American power, American paranoia, and a particular Trump-era brand of kleptocratic nationalism. Going into the tournament, the U.S., usually viewed as the plucky underdogs in global soccer, finds itself cast in an unfamiliar role: as tournament villain.
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Both within and outside the United States, politics has invaded World Cup coverage, crowding traditional sports reporting off the pitch. A May 28 article in the Columbia Journalism Review noted how publications like The Guardian and The Athletic are devoting resources to the politics and business stories surrounding the tournament — reporting on border controls, ICE crackdowns and the dynamic ticket pricing that will make this World Cup the most expensive ever for fans.
For many newsrooms, from Berlin to São Paulo, the question is not who will lift the trophy on July 19 at MetLife Stadium. It is: will fans make it through the door?
The answer, for some, is definitively no.
Fans from Iran and Haiti remain barred from entering the United States entirely. Supporters from Ivory Coast and Senegal — the latter a genuine African contender — face partial restrictions under the Trump administration’s expanded travel ban. Five World Cup-qualifying nations — Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Tunisia — were subjected to a $15,000 visa bond requirement that critics immediately labeled economic exclusion dressed up as national security. The administration has since partially walked back the policy, waiving the bond for fans who hold valid match tickets — but it is unclear whether fans who purchased tickets after the cutoff date will still be on the hook for the bond.
Sports writer Zito Madu, responding on social media to the bond policy when it was first reported, called the tournament “a World Cup that’s hostile to the world.” He was not being hyperbolic.
Then there is the Iran situation. This is the first time in World Cup history that a host nation is at war with a participating team. The United States and Israel have spent recent months bombing Iran, and yet Iran’s national football team has qualified for and is participating in the tournament. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly insinuated the Iranian squad could serve as cover for military operatives, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and warning that “they can’t bring a bunch of IRGC terrorists into our country and pretend that they are journalists and athletic trainers.” In December, the Iranian delegation nearly boycotted the World Cup draw in Washington after the federation was granted only four of the nine visas it applied for; federation president Mehdi Taj was denied a travel permit entirely. Iran’s team has been forced to establish its training base in Tijuana, Mexico, commuting across the border for matches. In the context of international sport, this is unprecedented.
The political awkwardness does not stop at the U.S. border. The three co-hosts — the United States, Canada and Mexico — stood together for the World Cup draw at Washington’s Kennedy Center last December in a display of trinational unity so strained it bordered on satire. Trump has mused publicly about making Canada the 51st state and discussed sending U.S. soldiers into Mexico to attack drug cartels. The look on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s faces at that Kennedy Center ceremony told a story that no press release could adequately obscure. Overseeing all of this, with the special authority vested in him by the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup, is Andrew Giuliani — yes, Rudy’s son — who, at 40 years old, finds himself as the nation’s steward for what he has accurately, if grandiosely, described as “the largest sporting event in the history of the world.”
The man who created the conditions for that particular appointment is, of course, Donald Trump himself — and his relationship with FIFA president Gianni Infantino has become the tournament’s most uncomfortable subplot. Infantino, who has cultivated close ties with an impressive roster of illiberal world leaders since his election in 2016 — receiving Vladimir Putin’s Order of Friendship after calling the Russia 2018 tournament “the best World Cup ever,” and spending extended time in Qatar in the lead-up to that nation’s 2022 edition — has found in Trump a kindred spirit. He has attended Trump’s inauguration, appeared multiple times at Mar-a-Lago and in the Oval Office, and accompanied the president to the “Summit for Peace” in Egypt. FIFA’s own code of ethics requires the organization to remain politically neutral. Infantino, photographed at Trump’s “Board of Peace” meeting wearing a red MAGA-style hat bearing the numbers 45 and 47, appears unconcerned by that particular clause.
Most strikingly, in December, Infantino presented Trump with a newly invented “FIFA Peace Prize” — a prize with no prior history of existence — after the president was passed over for a Nobel. This was not a subtle gesture. Months later, U.S. forces began bombing Iran, a FIFA World Cup participant. The peace prize has not been revisited.
Meanwhile, FIFA’s conduct around the tournament itself has made it deeply unpopular in ways that have nothing to do with geopolitics. Under the dynamic pricing system FIFA has implemented — U.S.-style surge pricing applied to the planet’s most watched sporting event — a single ticket to the World Cup final can cost nearly $11,000, compared to $1,600 for an equivalent seat at the Qatar 2022 final. FIFA also benefits from the resale market, extracting a 15 percent commission from both buyer and seller on secondary transactions.
Fans will be gouged at every stage. Parking at U.S. stadiums averages $175 per car, with spots at Los Angeles games now listed at $300. New Jersey Transit has raised its round-trip fare from New York’s Penn Station to MetLife Stadium from $12.90 to $150 on match days. The original United 2026 bid promised fans “complimentary public transportation to and from the stadiums on match days.” That promise, like a few others, has not survived contact with reality.
The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have now subpoenaed FIFA as part of an investigation into its ticketing practices. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani secured a symbolic concession — 1,000 tickets at $50 each, distributed by ballot exclusively to city residents — which amounts to roughly 1.6 percent of MetLife Stadium’s sellable capacity. It is the only citywide access program of its kind announced for the entire tournament.
In the meantime, immigrant rights advocates in all 11 U.S. host cities are mobilizing not to welcome fans — but to protect them. Rapid response networks of immigration attorneys have been established. The “No ICE in the Cup” campaign is organizing ICE-free watch parties. UNITE HERE Local 11, the union representing 2,000 workers at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, has lodged a formal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over FIFA’s sharing of workers’ biometric data with ICE, and is threatening to strike. More than 120 civil society groups — including the ACLU — have issued international travel warnings about “serious rights violations” in the current political climate, including “arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has compiled a legal-support hotline specifically for reporters covering the tournament. Trump administration officials have declined to rule out ICE arrests near stadiums, despite assurances from Rubio that agents will not operate inside venues.
At least 19 people have died in ICE custody in the United States so far this year. This is the backdrop against which the best players in the world will take the field.
And yet — and this is what makes the moment genuinely painful for anyone who has watched the HBO documentary — the United States team itself is a different story entirely.
U.S. Against the World offers a portrait of a USMNT squad that is, in many ways, the antithesis of the political environment in which it now competes. The players are young and multicultural, ethnically diverse, several born outside the country or in the United States to immigrant parents. They are the physical embodiment of the country’s immigrant story — the very story that the administration running the tournament has spent years working to foreclose. They are humble and hungry, aware of their underdog status in the global game, eager to prove themselves on the biggest stage. Under different circumstances, in a different political moment, they would be the team the world wanted to see succeed: scrappy American kids taking on the old football superpowers of Europe and South America.
It is the particular cruelty of this World Cup that the squad itself — those kids, that documentary, those stories — represents exactly the America the world would love to embrace. An America of open arms and mixed heritage, of ambition earned rather than inherited, of a country made stronger by the people who came to it from elsewhere. That America is on the pitch every time the USMNT plays. It is not, at the moment, running the tournament.
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