FIFA has repeated, for a decade now, the same promise before every World Cup. This time it would be the most inclusive tournament in history, with more national teams than ever and a message of unity repeated at every press conference given by Gianni Infantino. The reality that took hold in the opening weeks of the 2026 World Cup was different. Referees detained at the border, players interrogated for hours, supporters who had saved for years for a trip ultimately denied at a consular counter. Behind the celebration declared inclusive, the tournament organised between the United States, Mexico and Canada displays a mechanism older than professional football itself, in which the costs are spread towards the south and the benefits concentrate at the top. Nobody at FIFA will put it in those words. Nobody needs to.
The business nobody audits
The World Cup has never been merely a sporting tournament. It is, above all, a business whose balance sheet rarely appears in the headlines celebrating the goals. FIFA projects substantial revenue from television rights, sponsorships and ticket sales, while host countries bear the cost of stadiums, security, transport and the urban infrastructure the tournament demands. Mexico offers the clearest example of this unequal distribution. In 2017, the government of Enrique Peña Nieto committed to exempting FIFA and every actor involved in organising the tournament from taxes, a condition required to keep the hosting rights. Nearly a decade later, that promise still stands. Whoever organises the party does not pay the bill.
According to Mexican civil organisations, including the Instituto de Estudios sobre Desigualdad, FIFA projects revenue of 8.911 billion dollars from the 2026 World Cup and will pay no taxes in Mexico because of the fiscal exemptions granted to secure the hosting rights.
The Estadio Azteca, venue of the opening ceremony, illustrates the same principle on a smaller but equally telling scale. FIFA requires every host stadium to provide what it calls a clean venue, meaning total control over the space during the tournament, with no outside advertising or external concessions. That condition clashed with rights acquired sixty years ago by the owners of the Azteca’s boxes, who since the stadium was built have held guaranteed access, food, drink and parking for any event held there for ninety nine years. The dispute ended with a payment of 62.4 million dollars to the group owning the boxes to secure their access, while FIFA succeeded in imposing a ban on bringing in outside food, drink or vehicles. A minor dispute set against the tournament’s overall budget. But revealing of how the organisation operates at every scale, imposing conditions rather than negotiating them.
Ticket prices confirm the same logic from the public’s side. The final of this World Cup reached a price of more than a million dollars on FIFA’s official resale platform, a figure that turns access to the stadium into a class privilege rather than a popular experience. Prosecutors in the states of New York and New Jersey opened an investigation into the dynamic pricing system the organisation applied, a mechanism that adjusts ticket prices to real-time demand much the way an airline sets its fares. In Mexico, rents on housing and commercial premises near the stadiums rose by up to 40 per cent within a few months, a phenomenon urban planners call touristification, the displacement of a neighbourhood’s original residents to make room for short-term tourist rental. Nobody factored that cost into the tournament’s official budget.
A few days before the opening match, Gianni Infantino presented Donald Trump with what FIFA called a peace prize. The gesture had no direct connection to football, but it fitted precisely into the logic of the business. An institution that depends on the migratory and political cooperation of the host country quickly learns to pay in symbolic gestures what it cannot pay in financial transparency.
FIFA’s own operating budget for this World Cup stands at around 3.8 billion dollars, of which 1.8 billion corresponds to operational costs at the venues and nearly a billion to capital investment. The gap between that spending and the 8.911 billion in projected revenue explains, better than any institutional speech, why the organisation defends every tax exemption negotiated with host governments so fiercely. Climate change adds another layer of costs that likewise enters no official balance sheet. Several matches were played under temperatures exceeding the levels FIFA’s own medical protocols consider safe, and public transport access to several American stadiums proved so limited that a large share of attendees ended up relying on private transfer services, another expense the organisation never included in its mobility budget.
The border as a second stadium
The other half of the mechanism plays out off the pitch. In January 2026, the United States State Department suspended visa processing for citizens of 75 countries, several of them already qualified for the World Cup. Months earlier, President Donald Trump had signed an executive order banning entry to the United States outright for citizens of twelve nations, including Iran and Haiti, both of which had qualified for the tournament. FIFA negotiated a partial exception with the US government, the so called FIFA Pass, a registration system allowing supporters who had already bought tickets to access faster consular interviews and avoid the security deposit, known as a bond, that some countries had to pay to process a visa application. The exception did not lift the underlying ban. It merely made it look less brutal.
The concrete cases arrived before the statistics did. Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, considered the best on his continent, was held for hours at Miami airport and ultimately turned back at the border, despite holding a diplomatic passport and an official FIFA accreditation. Officials at the Customs and Border Protection agency, known by the acronym CBP, cited doubts that arose during a background check they never explained publicly. Iraqi forward Aymen Hussein was questioned for nearly seven hours on arrival in the country, and Swiss player Breel Embolo had his own visa subjected to additional review that kept him from joining his squad for several days. In Morocco, forty out of forty two visa applications from supporters holding tickets and confirmed hotel bookings were rejected without explanation. South Africa’s team faced a comparable problem. Its federation had to postpone the entire delegation’s departure because several players and officials had not received their visas in time, and the squad ended up training in Johannesburg several extra days while waiting for a clearance that arrived only hours before the group’s first match.
Other cases circulated with weaker documentary support. Local media reported, without independent confirmation from an official source or an international agency, that members of the Senegalese delegation were subjected to searches they described as degrading, and that the Uzbek delegation faced inspections by dogs trained to detect explosives. AcidReport cannot certify either episode as verified fact, but records them because, if confirmed, they would fit seamlessly into the pattern already documented in the previous cases.
Not even formal diplomacy escaped the filter. Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestinian Football Federation, spent the days before the opening stranded in Mexico City, accredited by FIFA but without authorisation to enter the United States. The Palestinian national team had not even qualified for the tournament. Its president was nonetheless expecting a protocol invitation that Washington decided not to honour. Ten months before the opening, Infantino himself had promised that everyone would be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States, and that the visa process would run smoothly for any qualified team and its supporters. The promise did not survive the tournament’s first month.
According to Chequeado, of the 48 national teams qualified for the 2026 World Cup, two face total migratory restrictions towards the United States and two more face partial restrictions.
Iran, a geopolitical mirror
Iran’s case sums up the entire mechanism. The squad had chosen a sports complex in Tucson, Arizona, as its training base for the tournament. The war the United States and Israel waged against Iran, which ended in a preliminary peace agreement just days before the World Cup began, forced the team to move its base across the border, to a sports centre in Tijuana. The players were to cross into US territory only on match days, while fourteen members of the coaching staff remained without visas. The Department of Homeland Security, known by the acronym DHS, presented as a gesture of presidential generosity what under any other circumstance would simply have been called the minimal fulfilment of a sporting commitment signed years earlier with FIFA itself. The distance between Tucson and Tijuana is roughly one hundred kilometres, yet it might as well have been a different continent for a squad whose own federation could not guarantee it would be allowed back into the country it was meant to play in. Iran has 93 million inhabitants. Not one of them was able to enter as a supporter.
Mexico finds itself trapped at both ends of the mechanism. It finances the tournament’s infrastructure without collecting tax from those who benefit from it, while simultaneously serving as the waiting room for teams and supporters the United States decides not to let in. Tijuana became, without anyone having planned it that way, the changing room of a national team that geopolitics barred from using its own designated territory. No FIFA statement mentioned that function. There was no need to. Institutional silence is, in cases like this, the most efficient way of avoiding responsibility.
The price of the party
Qatar 2022 was marked by allegations over the working conditions of the migrant labourers who built its stadiums. Following the same underlying pattern, costs and bodies administered from above, the 2026 World Cup shifted the centre of controversy to the border itself. The continent changes, the state actor changes, but the underlying architecture remains intact.
Tijuana has known this role since long before the World Cup. The city built much of its modern economy on the maquiladora, the assembly plant that processes materials arriving from one side of the border to send the finished product back across the other, with the added value never staying on the Mexican side. The 2026 World Cup reproduces that same architecture, only with people instead of parts. Visas get processed, bodies get filtered, decisions get made about who crosses and who waits on the right side of the line, while the finished product, the spectacle, the audience, the television rights, always travels north.
The true winners of this World Cup will wear no shirt and set foot on no pitch. They are FIFA, the construction consortiums, the hotel chains and the property funds that have already pushed up the value of every square metre around the sixteen host stadiums. The supporters who paid, those who could not pay, and those who never even managed to cross the border share, without knowing it, the same place in this business. They are the cost that makes the final figure possible…
G.S.
Sources
- Mundial 2026: cómo las políticas migratorias de EE.UU. afectan a árbitros, jugadores e hinchas
- Visas negadas, veto de viajeros y protestas: los problemas extradeportivos que marcan el arranque del Mundial de Fútbol 2026
- Cómo las políticas migratorias de Estados Unidos afectaron a árbitros, jugadores y aficionados del Mundial 2026
- Copa Mundial 2026: ¿quiénes han tenido problemas para entrar a Estados Unidos?
- Controversias de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA 2026, Wikipedia
- FIFA se llevará millones por Mundial 2026 y México cubrirá los gastos, denuncian organizaciones
- La gran estafa de la Copa Mundial 2026: cómo la ambición de la FIFA transformará el futuro del fútbol
