“Don’t Let The Ball Roll!”: FIFA and the World Cup

The International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) presents itself as a neutral governing body for international competitive soccer. In practice, it operates as a global cartel that organizes one of the most profitable cultural events in the world, which imperialism and the monopoly capitalist class play a central role in directing.

Imperialism and FIFA

Founded in Paris in 1904, FIFA initially served as a coordinating body for European soccer associations. With the establishment of the World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, soccer was transformed into a global commercial enterprise, creating new opportunities for investment, tourism, and international broadcasting. In 1954, FIFA relocated its headquarters to Zurich, joining other major sports federations in taking advantage of Swiss legal protections that allowed these organizations to maintain non-profit status while generating billions of dollars of profit through sponsorship agreements and broadcasting rights.

The modern FIFA system rests on monopoly domination. Multinational corporations such as Adidas, Visa, Coca-Cola, and numerous other firms do more than sponsor the tournament for advertising purposes; critics have argued that corporate influence has been intertwined with patronage networks, bribery scandals, and vote-buying among the ruling classes of different nations. Governments that secure hosting rights frequently grant FIFA extensive tax exemptions, public subsidies, and legal privileges, transferring enormous public resources toward the organization and the infrastructure required for the tournament.

Across several countries, hosting the FIFA World Cup has repeatedly been associated with police repression, intensified militarization, displacement of working-class communities, expansion of the sex trade, and reductions in public spending on services such as healthcare and education to finance tournament infrastructure.

While the profits generated by the World Cup are privately captured by FIFA’s corporate sponsors, the costs of hosting the tournament are socialized. Tax revenue from the working class finances massive sporting events, public budgets are cut to cover construction costs, neighborhoods are “redeveloped” through the eviction of entire communities to make way for stadiums, and heavily armed police secure surrounding areas to ensure that the uninterrupted cycle of profit-making proceeds under the banner of entertainment.

These outcomes are not coincidental. They are embedded in the requirements imposed on host countries and are readily embraced by the comprador bourgeoisie, who facilitate the expansion of imperialist capital investments and the reaping of superprofits by finance capital in the Third World.

FIFA in the Third World

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa illustrates these dynamics. Stadium construction was accompanied by strikes among construction workers and the displacement of poor working-class communities to housing developments away from the urban centers. Although the tournament was promoted as a project of “national development,” many workers instead experienced wage pressure, forced relocation, and intensified security measures around stadium sites.

The widespread and combative protests surrounding the 2014 World Cup in Brazil brought FIFA under unprecedented public scrutiny. Beginning in 2013, Brazil experienced one of its largest waves of mass demonstrations, directed against the fake “socialist” government of Dilma Rousseff, which oversaw transit fare hikes, massive cuts to education, and several publicized cases of corruption involving her government showing favor to FIFA over the poor peasants in the countryside and the impoverished workers living in the favelas.

Millions of workers, students, and urban poor took to the streets and violently confronted the police as Rousseff, on behalf of imperialist monopolies and real estate interests, sought to push through stadium projects through low-wage labor and dangerous conditions and cleared entire favelas through “urban mobility” plans. The Brazilian old-State responded to the rebellions with “World Cup laws” that restricted street vendors, outlawed protests, and created special legal regimes for FIFA spaces, which the Brazilian police and military were deployed to enforce.

An Al Jazeera investigation cites an estimated 250,000 people were displaced in Brazil during preparations for the 2014 World Cup, primarily among the country’s poorest residents in host cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre.

FIFA World Cup 2026

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In Mexico, the process of hosting the World Cup has largely followed the same patterns as the aforementioned Third World countries. In the US and Canada, on the other hand, the tournament is taking place under very different political and economic conditions than those of South Africa or Brazil. Nevertheless, the underlying pattern remains the same: public resources are diverted to subsidize projects that ultimately benefit FIFA and its monopoly capitalist partners.

Mexico

In Mexico, the revolutionary organization Front of the People – Red Sun, under the slogan “Do Not Let the Ball Roll!”, has mobilized in a coalition with other organizations to demand a boycott of the World Cup, as part of a national strike.

The national strike was driven largely by the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE). For 20 days in June, nearly 90,000 teachers mobilized in combative sit-ins and demonstrations against the privatization of teachers’ state pension system and reactionary educational reforms, and demanding a salary increase and justice for the families of those who have been disappeared by the Mexican government.

The Mexican government allocated 2 billion pesos to FIFA-related expenditures, fueling anger among teachers and their supporters who argued that the state claimed it could not afford retirement benefits despite financing the tournament.

Sheinbaum has also pushed several massive projects around the World Cup at the expense of workers and peasants. On the opening day of the Cup, combative demonstrations occurred outside of Azteca Stadium as part of the national strike.

United States

Even in the United States, the 2026 World Cup has exposed many of the same contradictions that accompanied previous tournaments. Host cities have faced mounting pressure from short-term rental expansion, rising housing costs, and public expenditures directed toward projects intended to serve FIFA and international tourism. In Seattle, approximately $32 million was committed to “beautification” projects, prompting criticism from housing activists who questioned why public amenities appeared to become available for FIFA visitors while remaining neglected for local residents.

“Something that all of Seattle is feeling is that any of these improvements—like bathrooms, water fountains, trash, free transit—are magically available for FIFA passholders,” an anti-displacement activist told CALÓ News. “What about the rest of us for the rest of the year?”

Preparations for the tournament have also intensified labor struggles in the hospitality, food service, construction, and security industries. In Los Angeles, UNITE HERE Local 11 reached an agreement with SoFi Stadium and Legends Hospitality while preserving workers’ ability to walk off the job if management violated the agreement or if immigration enforcement threatened workers during World Cup events. In New York City, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council’s ratification of an eight-year contract prevented workers from using the tournament as leverage for improved wages and working conditions. Hotel workers in Seattle and Philadelphia have authorized or threatened strikes during the tournament.

US imperialism is also using its position as one of the host countries to promote jingoism and anti-immigrant chauvinism, target the teams of countries the US is at war with, and expand its mass-deportation plan domestically.

In the context of the US imperialist war of aggression against Iran, the Iranian national soccer team was denied visas to stay in the US and forced to house in Tijuana, Mexico, spending countless hours traveling before and after each match to stadiums in Los Angeles and Seattle. During each of Iran’s three games, winning goals were overturned by FIFA’s Video Assistant Referee (VAR) in highly contentious calls.

Omar Abdulkadir Artan, a Somali referee who earned the title of Africa’s best male soccer referee last year, was denied entry into the United States after an 11-hour interrogation by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which cited unspecified “vetting concerns” and ties to terrorist groups as justification for denying Artan’s entry.

The US government has also been ramping up deportations, detaining over 10,000 people in the last five days of June. A coalition of non-profit and community organizations in host cities has launched “No ICE In the Cup” to provide legal support to immigrants and support rapid response teams.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino rewarded arch-reactionary President Trump with a “FIFA Peace Prize” in December 2025—the first of its kind—and is prepared to allow Trump to hand the FIFA World Cup trophy to the winning captain of the 2026 Final. The increasing politicization of FIFA and its open collusion with US imperialism, the most barbaric and degenerate ruling class in the world, indicates the state of the general imperialist crisis, that it must use every means and every avenue possible to shore up its decaying mass as the people mobilize militantly against its crimes.

Image: Workers rally behind the banner “Boycott the 2026 FIFA World Cup!” in Mexico City. Credit: Red Sun Mexico.

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