Sportswashed: FIFA’s long love affair with authoritarians

The last major tournament staged by FIFA, the body behind the World Cup, was last summer’s Club World Cup—an international tournament where Donald Trump crashed the trophy presentation at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, joining the winning team’s celebrations as they lifted the prize. 

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote at the time, autocracies have long used international sports events as a platform to whitewash abuses of power. Aptly, human rights advocates coined the term “sportswashing” to describe it. During the Club World Cup, ICE continued to raid and occupy Los Angeles, Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the US military struck three nuclear facilities in Iran shortly after Israel launched strikes of its own in the middle of negotiations.

For the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which starts Thursday, the situation may be even worse.

“If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from,” Jules Boykoff, a professor of politics at Pacific University in Oregon and former professional soccer player who represented the United States’ under-23 team, told me last month. “We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals.”

Boykoff has written extensively about the intersection of politics and international sports, including the Olympics—the 2028 Games in Los Angeles will provide Trump ample further opportunities for sportswashing—as well as activism against systems of power behind the massive developments that come with events like the World Cup or the Olympics, and how they intersect with politics beyond sporting events.

Boykoff’s latest book, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, was released June 9. I spoke to him about the upcoming games, the sportswashing phenomenon, and the wider politics of international sporting events.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve seen the term “sportswashing” enter mainstream coverage, but it’s often used to characterize autocratic figures and states in the Global South. How do you think it applies to this upcoming World Cup?

Sportswashing is when political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage, while deflecting attention from chronic social problems, from human rights woes at home, and also while teeing up opportunities for political and economic advancement.

And yes, the term has been used in the past, I’ll be honest, in a somewhat xenophobic, ethnocentric fashion. It’s waggling a finger at those other countries that do it. Now, they do it: Russia in the 2018 Men’s World Cup definitely was a sportswashing endeavor; Qatar in 2022 was definitely a sportswashing endeavor. 

But it can also happen in places that are putative democracies. I know it’s a discussion now as to whether the United States is even a fully-fledged democracy anymore. Some of my political science brethren are calling it the new “competitive authoritarianism,” not unlike what we saw under [former Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán in Hungary. The point is, it can happen in places like the United States. 

Second, when we ask ourselves whether sportswashing works or not, a lot of times it’s implicit that it’s talking about a global audience. And that’s true. You could look at the Qatar World Cup of 2022 and, after the World Cup, their tourism numbers went up and they became even more of an important mediator in the region. But you should also look at domestic audiences.

Right after the Sochi, Russia, Winter Olympics of 2014, President [Vladimir] Putin’s ratings were higher than ever. He was standing on the stage looking legitimate as a world leader. What did he do with that? He invaded Crimea between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Domestic audiences can be really important here as well. Putin used those two events to basically get the oligarchs in line and on sides for him.

So that takes us to 2026, and while the [term] sportswashing hasn’t often been applied to the United States, I think it very much should, if we accept the definition that I gave before.

If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from. We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals. There’s the lingering Epstein files, in which he’s named thousands of times. The list goes on and on. He needs to use this opportunity to look important on the world stage, especially for a domestic audience ahead of these midterm elections. And let’s be real, President Donald Trump has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in the recent history of the country. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s going to talk about the importance of this World Cup to his presidency. He’s going to talk about that UFC event happening three days into the World Cup on the White House lawn. And he’s going to talk after that about the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

The book looks back at FIFA’s history, and accusations of sportswashing, corruption, or just excessive commercialization even before this World Cup. I was specifically interested in an inflection point around the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Can you expand on that history and how that foundation was really established?

To understand the history of the World Cup in regards to sportswashing, you have to go back to 1934, the second World Cup ever, in Italy under Benito Mussolini—where he used that soccer team as this sort of embodiment of machismo, the embodiment of the fascist new man. Mussolini would actually ride around on a horse without a shirt a long time before Putin ever did. 

He talked about how the players on the Italian national team were what he called “soldiers of sport” and as the new fascist man who was bigger than just what was happening on the field. When they won that World Cup, he maximized his propaganda value. 

If you shimmy forward to the event you were talking about in 1978, this was the World Cup for Argentina carried out by a military junta. Only 700 meters from where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, 3-1, was a place where leftists were imprisoned, tortured, and even in some cases killed. They got a massive sportswash assist from Henry Kissinger, the human rights ogre of yore who showed up there and palled around with General [Jorge Rafael] Videla, the guy who was really running the junta at that time, who was maximizing his leverage over the World Cup. 

Before the World Cup started and journalists from around the world descended on Argentina, the junta dialed back its direct repression—took a little bit of a break, if you will. They ramped it back up after the global media left, but it did provide an opportunity for groups like Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo—[mothers fighting against Argentina’s military dictatorship]—to have a bit more space, and the global media were there to cover it. I’m interested to see whether that happens [again].

Let’s be real, though: [for] the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Putin actually passed a law that said it was illegal to protest in the host cities [and surrounding regions], but you could protest elsewhere. I’ll be interested to see whether, under Trump, there is space for dissent.

You just mentioned soccer fans being a part of organizing. Where do you see space to expand that coalition?

These events are so huge, and they’re so enormously popular that they provide activists with an opportunity to piggyback. For the Olympics, I’ve seen this over and over again. 

I lived in Rio de Janeiro in the lead-up to and during those Olympics, and I saw it out in the streets with my own two eyes. We saw it in Tokyo in the lead-in until it got scuppered by Covid. And we’re seeing it in Los Angeles where activists have been active since 2017.

It’s really true when activists chant “the whole world is watching” with the World Cup and Olympics. So it’s an incredible opportunity to speak to a wider audience. 

Before I started writing about the politics of sports, I wrote about the suppression of political dissent. It was hard to jumpstart conversations with people about that topic, especially with people who didn’t necessarily hold my [political] beliefs.

I’ve had a lot more success using sport to open the political door to have discussions with people who I might not agree with on a lot of things, but they can agree with me [that the way] we use public money should be more savvy, instead of just handing it over to the barons of sport.

And that can be a real entry point for having conversations about other things like policing around these sports mega-events, or how locals are kind of left out in the cold. I think that’s the logic behind a lot of the activism we will be seeing at the World Cup. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out.

I am also interested in your experience in professional soccer and with the US men’s under-23 team, as players’ unions have criticized player schedules. It’s almost the end of the season and I’m already seeing players getting injured and tired. Do you relate your experiences while playing to your thought process now [about] how these mega-tournaments function?

When I was running up and down the field for the US under-23 men’s national soccer team, I was 19 years old. That’s when I played my first international match against Brazil. I was quite clueless about a lot of the things that we were talking about today. 

When I arrived at the first match, I expected people to cheer vociferously. I’d been weaned on a steady diet of pro-US propaganda. And that just wasn’t the case all around France. This was a tournament in France where we played Brazil, and then what was Yugoslavia, what was Czechoslovakia, and what was the Soviet Union. It really got me thinking. 

We did not have a union back then, and when I was playing professional soccer, that was actually a real problem. We got paid okay, but we could have gotten paid so much more. More importantly, we had no protection. So if we got hurt, I mean, I could just like lose my contract the next day if I got seriously hurt. 

So I’m really happy to see these unions popping up both in Major League Soccer in the United States—it’s only getting stronger—[and] at the international level, there’s FIFPro, who has been raising a lot of important questions about athlete health and safety at this World Cup.

There’s the number of matches that players have played. You can chalk up quite a lot of this to the FIFA greed machine. They’re cranking out tournament after tournament—they trial ballooned the idea of having a FIFA Men’s World Cup every two years. 

FIFPro [has also] been smart and outspoken on the issues around climate change and its attendant heat issues. There are a few indoor stadiums that are air conditioned, but places like Miami are absolutely not. 

And what does FIFA do? They decided to institute water breaks partway through each half, regardless of weather at the World Cup. On one hand, great, the FIFPro union got a concession for worker safety. On the other hand, they’re using it as an opportunity to make even more money. I mean, they’re allowing commercials during those water breaks. Leave it to FIFA to figure out a way to monetize climate change to their advantage.

I think that things have changed a lot, and for the better, since I was playing [pro] soccer in the 1990s, and I hope things continue to get better. I’m concerned that groups like UEFA, the European body for soccer, and FIFA are just going to continue to milk these players for all the money they can squeeze out of them. But the World Cup is a good chance to raise awareness about this, especially both in the lead-in to the tournament, where players are coming down with injuries, who’ve played thousands of minutes over the last few months, but also during the tournament in the early stages, when some big names, unfortunately, might just get hurt.

Saudi Arabia has the 2034 World Cup and other sports investments—like their own soccer league with players like Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as golf and e-sports. Where do you see Saudi Arabia within this framework and their relationships with FIFA and the US?

Saudi Arabia has been active in sportswashing for a long time. They’re also spending quite a bit of money on sort of what we might call macho sports—boxing and UFC, and so on. That fits pretty nicely with the history you and I were talking about before, with authoritarians affiliating themselves with these macho fighters. Trump does it, of course, all the time.

One episode in the book that is extremely instructive is how two sportswashers, President Trump and [Saudi crown prince] Mohammed bin Salman, came together for a state dinner and extended visit in Washington, DC. These folks internationally are often working together and supporting each other’s sportswashes. It [also] reminds us that sportswashing isn’t just [events]—it’s about cutting deals and advancing yourself politically and economically. And that’s all that that state dinner was about.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who you just referenced, was there. He [hadn’t] come to the US since 2014 because of the credible rape allegations against him, [but] he knew Trump would not let anything happen to him. 

Another key ligature to all this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino. He was buddies with Putin back in 2018 for that World Cup, played football in the Kremlin with Putin in the lead-up to that tournament, and received a special friendship order from Putin afterwards. He lifted his residence, moved to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, and ran interference for the emirs there around all the issues with human rights and [migrant] workers. And now he moved to the United States. He and Trump are extraordinarily friendly. They both have a penchant for political spectacle. They both like being around wealth and affluence and they both like being in the spotlight.

Infantino handed the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, there was no real serious bid process around that. There’s so much to say about that, but I would argue Infantino has a crucial role in all this.

I’m curious about a lot of people who are justly criticizing and boycotting the World Cup—what they enjoy about soccer and what it could be. Do you have any thoughts on that, and how we could get to the ideal where soccer is legitimately for everyone who has some form of the sport that they love?

I have had the privilege of soccer enriching my life from the time I was a four-year-old kid.

I understand the effective power of sport and how it can be channeled for good. In my memoir, Kicking, there’s a lot of stories about how soccer activists in Portland fought back against the power brokers of soccer in Portland. They got the [Portland Thorns’] general manager [fired after supporting a coach alleged to have abused players]. They got the owner of the Thorns to sell the team. Those are huge victories that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the bonds that soccer created being used then to pivot into political action. 

With all the money swirling through the highest levels of echelons of sport, I’m concerned that maybe the game has become so heavily commercialized that it’s losing a lot of the luster of community-building. But, you know, there are leagues around the country and around the world that aren’t necessarily at that highest level that we watch on TV every Saturday and Sunday, but where you can engage in a much more community-oriented way.

In Portland, Oregon, we’ve got a professional [lower league] team called Portland Bangers FC. And it’s super fun. The mascot is like a seven-foot-tall sausage, and it’s totally goofy. The soccer is fine, but it’s really about community, and tickets are very affordable. Now we have a team called the Cherry Bombs in Portland where the sponsor is Planned Parenthood. 

I think [community-building through soccer] is too important to give up on, and I’m going to keep fighting alongside others for improvements for worker-athletes on the field and for conditions for fans and others off the field.