Video from Ian Wright’s Instagram, orginally published here.
By Claudia Sanchez
Two days before the 2026 World Cup begins, Ian Wright recorded a video for his two million Instagram followers. The former England and Arsenal striker had just read that Omar Artan, the Somali referee selected to officiate at the tournament, had been turned away at the United States border. “Every few hours it’s another story,” Wright said, “another story about fans denied, players denied, officials denied, journalists denied, now refs.” He called it a “World Cup of chaos” and asked whether this was how a host should behave for the biggest tournament in the world.
Wright’s list is the right one, though chaos might not be the best word for it. Each denial traces back to a single policy. The US operates a racially stratified immigration system whose institutional roots run deep, and whose current administration has pushed to its most explicit expression yet. Fans, players, officials, and journalists have been blocked, searched, restricted, and turned back, and they come overwhelmingly from Africa and West Asia.
That system is the thread running through every incident below, and its shape is worth stating at the outset. A travel ban framework, expanded through 2025 and 2026, bars or restricts entry from countries that are predominantly African, Muslim-majority, or designated adversaries of US foreign policy. A parallel Visa Bond Programme requires visitors from 50 named countries, concentrated in Africa, West Asia, Latin America, and parts of Asia, to pay a refundable deposit of up to $15,000 simply to enter. A separate visa pause list subjects citizens of further countries to heightened scrutiny. The World Cup suspended none of this.
The clearest case is the one that prompted Ian Wright. Referees at a World Cup are not local appointments; they are an elite group selected and vetted centrally by FIFA, football’s global governing body, from across the world. Omar Abdulkadir Artan was one of them. He had been named the best male referee of 2025 by the Confederation of African Football, the continent’s governing body, and would have been the first Somali ever to officiate at a men’s World Cup. He arrived at Miami International Airport from Istanbul on 6 June, five days before kickoff. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained him, cited unspecified “vetting concerns,” and refused him entry. He has returned to Istanbul. He will not officiate at the World Cup.
FIFA confirmed the decision was final. CBP stated that admissibility is determined “on a case-by-case basis using law enforcement, national security, and immigration information.” Somalia sits on the US travel ban list. Artan had received what an anonymous FIFA representative described the previous week as full visa clearance, and it was overridden at the border. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, stated that
“Somali visitors go through the same vetting process that other visitors go through, and once someone has gone through that thorough vetting process, there is no reason to ban them from our country simply because of their nationality. Doing so is an affront to our values and the law.”
The same system reached the players. When Senegal’s national team arrived in San Antonio for pre-tournament preparations, US border officials searched the squad and delegation on the airport tarmac. Players were required to remove their shoes. Bags were emptied and inspected. The footage circulated widely on social media; one aviation industry worker with 15 years’ experience said they had never seen passengers on a private charter flight subjected to that procedure. US authorities justified the search by citing fears about the spread of Ebola.
Senegal has no active Ebola outbreak. Applying an Ebola justification to a Senegalese football squad arriving for a World Cup deploys a colonial-era disease-as-threat framing against an African team, the same framing long used to pathologise African populations and restrict their movement. It produced images of professional athletes in their national kit having their bags turned out on a runway. No comparable footage has emerged of any European squad.
The system reached the fans through the Visa Bond Programme. Five of the countries on its list of 50 have qualified for the World Cup, and all five are African: Algeria, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Tunisia. Average annual income across them is around $5,000 or less, so the deposit alone puts attendance out of reach for most supporters. Of the 38 countries currently required to post these bonds, 24 are in Africa, and a further 12 African countries face outright travel bans. The bond was partially waived for fans who had bought tickets by mid-April, a concession that assumes supporters on incomes under $5,000 had already purchased international football tickets months in advance. African fan bases have been priced out of attending matches on US soil.
Iran qualified for the tournament legitimately, as it has for each of the last four. Players from banned countries are meant to be protected by a special exemption that lets athletes, coaches, and their immediate family enter despite the travel ban; in Iran’s case it was applied so narrowly as to be hollow. The US denied visas to 15 of its officials and staff, restricted the national team to entering the country on match days only and leaving the same day, and withdrew the block of tickets FIFA guarantees each competing nation to sell to its own supporters, leaving the Iranian federation unable to supply its fans with a single ticket. The federation’s president, Mehdi Taj, one of the most senior officials in Asian football, was himself refused entry. The federation called it “political interference in sport in its worst form.”
The International Sports Press Association wrote formally to FIFA on 5 June. Its president, Gianni Merlo, described the situation facing African and Iranian journalists as “a long-standing and unacceptable problem”: reporters holding official FIFA accreditation had been denied US visas, or issued single-entry visas that bar them from returning to the US if they follow their team to matches in Canada or Mexico. Many had already lost money on pre-booked flights. The association urged FIFA to intervene. FIFA said immigration is a matter for the host government.
Read together rather than separately, these incidents describe a single hierarchy. The referee, the players searched on the tarmac, the fans priced out, the team admitted only on match days, the journalists turned back at the visa stage, all fall on the same side of a line that runs along racial alignment, consistent with the broader structure of US power. The dominant coverage has treated each episode as regrettable administrative friction, or as geopolitical tension spilling into sport, and in reporting only the fragments it has missed the pattern. Ian Wright, reacting in real time and naming every category in one breath, came closer to it than most of the press has.
FIFA has not stood outside that pattern. It awarded hosting rights to the United States, Canada, and Mexico in June 2018, and carries its own long record of corruption proceedings. Its standing defence, that immigration is a matter for the host government, is one it applies selectively. In 2023 it stripped Indonesia of the right to host the Under-20 World Cup two months before that tournament was due to start, after a regional governor there refused to host Israel’s youth team. Where exclusion serves one set of interests FIFA intervenes; where it serves another it defers to the host. The same selectivity runs through the present case. The State Department has confirmed it will work to fully stop any effort to ban Israel from the tournament, despite Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the proceedings against it at the International Court of Justice. Israel plays freely. The referee from Somalia cannot enter the country.
The World Cup has become an instrument of the same foreign policy that produced the exclusions. The State Department’s own Sports Diplomacy Playbook sets out how Washington intends to leverage the tournament to advance foreign investment and diplomatic aims, and the administration that detained Africa’s referee of the year at its border arranged for President Trump to be handed a newly created “FIFA Peace Prize” in December, at the televised ceremony where the tournament’s groups were decided. What surrounds the 2026 World Cup is a concentrated form of how the United States conducts itself more broadly. A state that stratifies entry to its territory by race and by geopolitical alignment has staged the world’s most international event, and has carried that stratification intact into the stadium. The football will proceed. The terms on which the world has been admitted to watch it are the more lasting record of what kind of host the United States has chosen to be.
The above article was originally published here on the For Liberation, Against Racism blog.