Political Tension in North America Builds Before the World Cup

On the first Tuesday in November, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda to Indian parents, scored a decisive victory in New York City’s mayoral election. In sports terms, it was a blowout; for soccer fans, Mamdani’s win is a gift.

Tickets for the FIFA World Cup 2026, which is set to kick off in mid-June across 16 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, are already shaping up as the most expensive in the tournament’s history. In September, Mamdani launched the “Game over Greed” campaign, which urged World Cup organizers to set aside 15 per cent of ticket inventory to sell to local residents at discounted prices and urged caps on resale prices in the secondary market. Eight matches, including the final, are scheduled for MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Mamdani’s election win sets up a fascinating push-pull, with the mayor and working-class soccer fans on one side, and World Cup organizer FIFA, with its close ties to U.S. President Donald Trump, on the other.

And a big-city mayor wading into World Cup ticket pricing points to a broader dynamic that has been developing since the United States, Canada and Mexico’s trinational World Cup bid was approved in 2018. Technically, the world’s biggest sports tournament is an apolitical event, but its ties to power run deep.

The three-way World Cup bid was accepted by FIFA just five months before the same three countries finalized the USMCA trade agreement. The tournament’s subtitle, “Unity,” reflected a renewed sense of trilateral co-operation.

Nearly eight years and several trade disputes later, that spirit has faded. Trump has deployed federal troops to U.S. cities under questionable pretenses, while the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively okayed racial profiling as a tool for federal law enforcement agents in search of illegal immigrants. What was conceived as a celebration of three-way allyship is now unfolding against a backdrop of political, social and economic turmoil that threatens to cast a shadow over the beautiful game.

Whether the public’s focus stays on the field might depend heavily on Trump, and whether he chooses to politicize the world’s largest sports event.

“This is someone who understands the power of sports, and he’s not going to squander the opportunity to use it to his political advantage,” says Jules Boykoff, a professor of government and politics at Pacific University in Portland, Ore., an expert on the politics of sport and a former pro soccer player. “It gives him one more lever to grab on to.”

Sports fans with an eye for social issues might already be aware of the spectre of “sportswashing”–wherein countries with questionable human rights records use major sports events to polish their public image–looming over World Cup 2026.

In October of this year, Saudi Arabia qualified for World Cup 2026, but almost a year before that, the country scored an invite to the CONCACAF Gold Cup, a regional event for countries from North America and the Caribbean, after the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) lavished the tournament with sponsorship dollars. That event joined a PIF portfolio that includes full ownership of Newcastle United of the English Premier League and the LIV Golf tour and complements the Saudi government’s deepening influence in high-level boxing.

But there’s a critical difference between traditional sports-washing and Trump’s pre-tournament power plays: the Saudi government spends big on sports to foster goodwill among the general public, while Trump threatens to torpedo FIFA’s tournament with costly last-minute venue changes.

“They’re under the umbrella of sportswashing, but they’re different types,” Boykoff says. “Most people who host events are on their best behaviour in the run-up to them.”

For World Cup followers, off-the-field drama is a normal part of the pre-tournament process. The 2010 edition in South Africa and 2014 tournament in Brazil both wrestled with questions about venue readiness. In Qatar in 2022, there were concerns over stadium uncertainty, the host nation’s human rights record and a head-on collision with climate change. To avoid that country’s stifling July heat, the start date was moved from early summer to late November, with the final taking place just a week before Christmas.

The difference this time? In the past, heads of state have welcomed the World Cup, despite the controversies percolating around it. This time, the U.S. president is a source of pre-tournament turbulence with his threats to move matches from cities he considers to be unsafe.

“Once the [2022] tournament started, all the focus was on the games, and I can see the same thing happening here,” said Vijay Setlur, a sports marketing instructor at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. “Unless Trump decides to say, ‘I’m not getting enough attention. Maybe I should do something.’ The royal family in Qatar weren’t trying to create headlines.”

Politics aside, World Cup 2026 could produce some clear winners, including the business of pro soccer in North America. In 1994, the World Cup came to the United States for the first time, and that event spawned Major League Soccer (MLS), which has since grown to 30 teams, including franchises in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Business professor Norm O’Reilly points out that MLS franchise values have skyrocketed in recent years. In 2006, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment paid US $10 million for the right to operate Toronto FC–a team now valued at US $725 million, according to Forbes. O’Reilly says the World Cup’s expansion to 48 teams from 32, plus its high-profile midsummer presence in the biggest sports markets on the continent, should juice MLS’s popularity even further.

“Even with the political bumps, it’s going to be off the charts,” says O’Reilly, dean of the College of Business at the University of New England and the author of seven books on the sports industry. “Half the world is going to watch this thing. People who don’t even like soccer are going to put on a jersey. It’s a train that’s headed in the right direction.”

If political turmoil is worrying soccer fans, it hasn’t affected ticket sales. Eight months before the tournament opener, business at the online ticket booth is almost inexplicably brisk.

By September, more than 4.5 million people had entered a draw for the opportunity to buy tickets when the purchase window opened in October. By the time that period closed, roughly one million tickets had been sold–mostly to buyers from the United States, Canada and Mexico–at prices ranging from US $60 to US $6,700. Yet by the second day of sales, customers were already reporting price hikes, thanks to FIFA’s “variable pricing” model. And by late October, secondary-market sellers had already listed tickets for the June 12 match involving Team USA for as much as US $60,000.

Those prices shouldn’t be surprising, says O’Reilly. “It’s the No. 1 sport, the No. 1 platform, with the most popular athletes in the world,” he says. “Everyone’s complaining about the prices, but I can tell you: if the demand is high, you raise the price.”

That first batch of tickets represented roughly 15 per cent of the tournament’s total inventory, with another million seats going on sale to the winners of a second ticket lottery in mid-November. Between now and the tournament opener in June, two more lotteries are planned. The remaining tickets will go on sale to the general public closer to kickoff, at prices that are difficult to predict, even before they reach the resale markets.

Like soccer fans trying to rationalize the exorbitant cost of tickets, host cities are also grappling with the opportunity cost of participating in a once-in-a-generation global sports event.

Toronto, for example, is set to spend CDN $380 million to host six World Cup matches–a figure that works out to CDN $63.3 million per game. For perspective, for the cost of a single World Cup match, the city could have eliminated the local school board’s CDN $34.4-million, two-year budget deficit, with nearly CDN $29 million to spare. It’s an investment, but only if sponsors step up to offset the cost. As of mid-November, the city had secured just two commercial partnerships: Ontario Power Generation and Humber Polytechnic. FIFA guidelines allow cities up to 10 corporate sponsorships.

The city also plans to purchase ticket packages with a total retail value of CDN $10.7 million and resell them to corporate customers at a profit.

Even if Toronto’s ability to recoup its costs is in jeopardy, projected attendance at BMO Field–temporarily renamed Toronto Stadium for the World Cup–looks strong. The city spent CDN $123 million of its World Cup budget on stadium upgrades, expanding seating capacity to 45,000, thanks to 17,000 temporary seats. Other improvements, including improved locker rooms and new video screens at the city-owned stadium, are permanent.

“It’s one of the big legacy investments as part of the infrastructure project and obviously meeting FIFA requirements,” said Sharon Bollenbach, executive director of the FIFA World Cup 26 Toronto Secretariat, in a September interview with CBC. “(It’s) a huge upgrade and installation for fan experience going forward, post World Cup.”

For its part, Mexico guaranteed FIFA a tax exemption for the tournament. It’s the only one of the three host nations to make such a promise, reasoning that the tax breaks would make their portion of the bid more attractive to the governing body.

“The thing is, they [Canada and the United States] had other, more attractive offers than we did, such as infrastructure,” said congresswoman Claudia Anaya, in an interview with ESPN.

“Mexico is a traditional country and, historically, it’s more football-mad. So, yes, sometimes the one who has the least is the one who has to give the most to try to bring the package.”

Still, if consumer demand for World Cup games is a constant in this equation, the U.S. president’s behaviour is a volatile variable. Trump’s ongoing campaigns against American cities with Democratic mayors are a prime example.

For example, in October, he took aim at Boston, citing its mayor, Michelle Wu, and unspecified civil unrest as reasons he might move World Cup games out of Gillette Stadium in the city’s southern suburbs.

“We could take them away,” said Trump in October, referring to the Boston-area matches. “I love the people of Boston and I know the games are sold out, but your mayor is not good.” For an example of the spectre of social unrest upending a soccer fixture, look to Chicago, the site of a scheduled October exhibition match between Argentina and Puerto Rico. That game coincided with a surge of federal agents ordered into the city by Trump and was eventually rescheduled and relocated to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., amid concerns over potential protests.

That same month, federal agents raided an apartment building in a largely Black neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side, handcuffing citizens and immigrants alike, allegedly in an attempt to round up Venezuelan nationals living in the United States illegally. Meanwhile, social media posts from Chicago showed residents of Latin American descent being arrested, detained or roughed up by army fatigue–clad, mask-wearing federal agents.

It’s a chilling signal for foreign nationals planning to travel to the United States for the World Cup, and another impediment for a U.S. tourism sector that’s already struggling.

According to Tourism Economics, a Philadelphia-based consultancy, overseas arrivals to the United States from January through July declined 1.6 per cent, compared with the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, arrivals from Canada have cratered, down 25 per cent in the first half of the year.

“I don’t know how you could be a Brown (soccer) fan from Latin America and be excited to come to this country when you know ICE is marauding through the place,” Boykoff says. “They can snap you up, even if you’re here totally legally.”

(By early November, FIFA had not issued public statements on the prospect of federal agents detaining soccer fans.)

And yet, peaceful protests and sold-out sports events can coexist. Take Chicago–which has also had its share of the president’s attention–where an estimated tens of thousands of people showed up at the city’s Grant Park for an anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstration on October 18. The next day, the Chicago Bears hosted the New Orleans Saints at nearby Soldier Field before 58,102 spectators. Both events unfolded largely without incident.

FIFA, for its part, has maintained that it retains control over World Cup venues and scheduling, but will follow U.S. federal government guidance on whether cities are safe enough to host matches.

Whether teams and players can dodge Trump administration visa restrictions is, according to Boykoff, a separate, potentially explosive, question. Of the countries currently affected by U.S. travel bans, Iran has already qualified for World Cup 2026, while Haiti remains in the running for a tournament berth. Players and fans from either country might find their World Cup plans entangled in politics.

Or, because World Cup teams are arranged into 12 groups of four, determined by a lottery, luck might send Team Iran and Team Haiti to Canada or Mexico, allowing them to dodge visa complications in the tournament’s early stages.

“Best-case scenario, the World Cup does what it always does, which is to bring people together,” Boykoff says. “But there are too many erratic factors involved.”

While “Unity,” the 2026 tournament’s subtitle, reflected the hope that three nations would join together to celebrate an international game, that sense of co-operation remains under pressure as teams prepare for the opening kickoff.