The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup across the United States, Canada and Mexico has delivered the spectacle global football audiences expect: packed stadiums, pulsating atmospheres, and a month‑long carnival of goals and storylines. Yet beneath the joy and celebration that dominate broadcast images lies a growing unease about what is happening away from the spotlight. Critics warn that the tournament has become a stage not only for sporting excellence, but also for unprecedented levels of abuse, discrimination and political interference that expose deep structural problems in the governance of football and the protection of those who play it.
The central charge is stark. As one rights‑focused observer put it,
“The joy and celebration on display at the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup should not distract from the unprecedented exclusion, discrimination and misuse of power the U.S. government is conducting away from the spotlight. It’s time for FIFA to finally take the widespread problem of abuse in sport seriously”
– a framing that captures both the scale of the alleged harm and the perceived failure of football’s global authorities to respond with the seriousness the moment demands.
U.S. political power and the integrity of disciplinary decisions
The Balogun case as a test of independence
The most controversial issue currently under discussion concerns the inappropriate use of influence by the U.S. government on decisions made in the course of the competition. One of the most illustrative examples includes a red card that was shown to American international forward Folarin Balogun in the course of the game against Bosnia in California. As the sending off led to the automatic one-match suspension, it belongs entirely to the jurisdiction of referees and FIFA. However, in this situation, something unusual happened.
The senior representatives of the U.S. government, including political officials and people working for the administration, reacted very fast. What is even more surprising, this case did not stay at the level of sport. Indeed, there were reports according to which the U.S. president Donald Trump contacted Gianni Infantino, the FIFA President, regarding Balogun’s suspension, and the White House reported that it had taken steps with regard to the unfair decision made.
FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee ultimately chose to suspend Balogun’s one‑match ban for a year, a procedural twist that in practical terms cleared the player to participate in the United States’ next fixture. For critics, the optics were unmistakable: a high‑profile player from the host nation received an exceptional outcome shortly after direct political lobbying, while FIFA insisted that its processes remained independent. The underlying question is not whether Balogun deserved clemency, but whether that clemency was granted in a manner consistent with equal treatment and due process.
Soft power and long‑term leverage over football
However, the Balogun case needs to be placed within the larger context of U.S.-FIFA relationships. As a reaction to prior scandals of corruption, the Department of Justice of the United States launched a legal campaign against high FIFA officials, leading to the transformation of FIFA’s leadership structure and image. Eventually, North America won the rights to organize the 2026 World Cup. Such a development was termed as the use of American soft power in the realm of global soccer, involving a combination of legal action, business leverage, and diplomacy. Within such a context, the vision of the U.S. president negotiating the specifics of penalties with the head of FIFA takes on much broader implications than one particular game.
It gives rise to a concern that the powers of politics are gradually penetrating those spheres where they ought not to do so. For the players and the fans in other countries, this story becomes another example that proves that sometimes, under certain circumstances, it is possible to bend the rules. From the perspective of abuse in sport, it is not harassment and discrimination but rather the governance environment which might privilege one party over another.
Unprecedented abuse in sport: the data from FIFA’s own systems
A surge in online hostility
If the Balogun episode exemplifies concerns over misuse of power, the numbers emerging from FIFA’s own monitoring services show how abuse in sport is manifesting in more direct ways against players and officials. The Social Media Protection Service (SMPS), deployed to monitor and mitigate hostile content across major platforms, has produced data that many describe as alarming.
For the World Cup group stage, SMPS had analyzed more than six million posts and comments directed at players, teams, and match officials. From all the noise generated through those posts and comments, 225,000 posts were selected for human review, out of which 89,000 posts had been found to be hostile in nature. This figure is 13 times higher than the around 6,700 posts flagged as abusive at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. It appears that the rise in the figure cannot be explained by any kind of increased social media usage, thus reflecting a more hostile environment created through social media.
The most disturbing part is the reason behind the hostile posts. As much as 11 percent of the hostile posts were found to be racially motivated, and it is certainly a rise compared to the previous World Cup when it comes to the percentage of such posts. This simply means that there were thousands of racial posts against players because of their skin color, ethnicity, or nationalities. In the course of the tournament, SMPS was able to detect over seven million potentially abusive or harmful posts.
FIFA’s shield: necessary, but not sufficient
FIFA presents SMPS as a robust protective measure – a “digital shield” designed to hide abusive content from player feeds, reduce its visibility and generate reports to platforms and, where appropriate, law‑enforcement agencies. Early in the tournament, the system had already reviewed around 5.5 million comments and removed roughly 530,000 toxic messages, surpassing the total number removed across the entire 2022 World Cup. Around 186,000 messages flagged by algorithms were escalated to human analysts, with tens of thousands referred directly to platforms for enforcement action such as takedowns and account suspensions.
On paper, these figures demonstrate significant effort and improved technical capacity. But they also expose the magnitude of the problem. When half a million abusive posts are removed in a matter of days and hundreds of thousands more require human vetting, the story is not just of protection but of a sport under sustained bombardment. The fact that detection and removal rates are rising does not change the reality that players, particularly those in high‑pressure positions, are subject to a level of hostility that would be unthinkable in most workplace environments.
Players’ unions and real‑world impact: racism after the final whistle
A “growing pattern of abuse”
The global players’ union FIFPRO has responded to World Cup 2026 by sounding the alarm on what it terms a “growing pattern of abuse” that encompasses both online and offline behaviour. In its public statements, FIFPRO warns that footballers at the tournament are facing
“racist and discriminatory attacks, both online and in person, requiring urgent collective action by football authorities, governments and social media companies”,
a call that implicitly critiques the current patchwork of initiatives as insufficient.
One such incident, which made headlines, concerns three players from the Netherlands team – Justin Kluivert, Quinten Timber and Crysencio Summerville – who were involved in an unsuccessful shootout against Morocco in the knockout stage. As soon as it happened, their social media pages received a flood of abusive messages of a racist nature. The Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) denounced this attack as an act of hatred and discrimination, pointing out examples when criticism of the players’ playing skills turned into explicit racial insults. This case shows how rapidly the process of harassment in sports develops, especially following significant events in elite competition.
A penalty shootout is one of the most difficult formats in football and the pressure of the game on each of the shooters is immense. However, when defeat turns not only into disappointment in terms of sports results but also into an initiation of a campaign of racial hatred, the price paid by the athlete is simply incomparable.
Unequal protection and psychological toll
Although SMPS and national associations can remove thousands of hostile posts, the initial impact on players is often immediate. Abuse may be read before moderation systems take effect; screenshots and private messages circulate beyond the public domain. The cumulative psychological toll – anxiety, depression, fear of future mistakes – is difficult to quantify but evident in testimonies from players who witness their online spaces transform into hostile arenas overnight.
Furthermore, protection appears uneven. High‑profile stars and teams with strong federation support may benefit from rapid reporting and platform engagement, while players from smaller footballing nations and women’s teams often face abuse with fewer resources at their disposal. In that sense, abuse in sport intersects with existing inequities in funding, visibility and institutional backing, reproducing the very exclusions critics say the sport should be seeking to dismantle.
FIFA’s campaigns and the credibility gap
No Discrimination and the rhetoric of zero tolerance
FIFA has not ignored the issue. In the build‑up to 2026 and throughout the tournament, the organization has promoted its “No Discrimination” campaign, aligning its messaging with the International Day for Countering Hate Speech and similar initiatives. Official communications emphasize a commitment to “eradicating discriminatory abuse in all its forms” and portray the World Cup as a platform to champion inclusion and respect.
These statements matter symbolically. They set expectations for how fans, players and officials ought to behave, and they provide a normative framework for enforcement. However, the gap between rhetoric and lived experience is where credibility is won or lost. When abusive content persists at unprecedented levels, and when high‑profile cases of racism continue to surface despite campaign branding, slogans alone can feel like a thin shield.
Structural reform versus reactive firefighting
While these criticisms may seem unfounded, there is certainly room for improvement in the way FIFA deals with digital media problems. Moderation helps prevent abuse from occurring but does not do much about the underlying factors which encourage racism and discrimination. Similarly, the question of political influence in governance and discipline cannot be solved by the same means; in fact, such an approach would only fuel resentment. Thus, the problem is not so much in whether or not FIFA addresses digital abuse, as in how much it is willing to do to improve the situation.
There are several aspects which need more development – disciplinary procedures, independent oversight committees, consistent action towards punishing the member associations for failure to protect the players, as well as defining the line of political pressure that FIFA will not allow. Otherwise, such campaigns will remain mere public relations efforts.