Calls for a European-led World Cup boycott have grown louder and louder in recent weeks. Yet the possibility one could happen is "slim to none," said Alan Rothenberg, a man who knows a little bit about both World Cups and boycotts.
Rothenberg organized the soccer tournament at the 1984 L.A. Games, which was boycotted by 19 countries. Ten years later, he led the organization that put on the 1994 World Cup, the first held in the U.S. and still the best-attended in history.
So while politicians and soccer officials in several key European countries — Germany, France, Denmark and the United Kingdom, among others — haveraised the idea of skipping this summer's World Cup, largely in response to President Trump's demands that Denmark hand over Greenland, Rothenberg knows that talk is all bluster.
A boycott is not likely to happen for a number of reasons.
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For starters the World Cup is run by the same organization, FIFA, which sanctions virtually every level of soccer globally, from the men's and women's World Cups, to confederation competitions including the UEFA Championships and the Copa América, to most major age-group tournaments. And since it both writes and enforces its own laws, it can ban a federation — and, by extension, its national teams — from any and all competitions.
So imagine the price a single country, say Spain, would pay for refusing to play World Cup games in the U.S. FIFA could ban its national team from the Euros and its women's team from next summer's World Cup, costing the federation millions of dollars in revenue. It could also prohibit Spanish youth teams from participating in age-group competitions and cut Spain off from any FIFA funding.
Consider the case of Russia. After that country invaded neighboring Ukraine in the winter of 2022, FIFA — under enormous international pressure — banned Russia from international soccer completely, barring it from competing in qualifying for the 2022 and 2026 World Cups and keeping it out of the 2024 Euros.
As a result, Russia has not played in a competitive match since November 2021.
(FIFA's penalties can be arbitrary and maddeningly inconsistent, however. In 2014, four days after the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, annexing Crimea. Yet less than four months later Russia played in the World Cup and four years later it hosted the tournament, with FIFA president Gianni Infantino sitting beside Vladimir Putin, who ordered both the 2014 and 2022 invasions. Now Infantino is pushing to lift the sanctions on Russia completely despite the fact Putin has stepped up the war, bombing civilians and resisting calls for peace.)
No country has boycotted a World Cup since World War II, though Olympic boycotts have been more frequent with coalitions of as many as five dozen countries refusing to take part in the Summer Games four times between 1956 and 1984.
Those protests were largely coordinated by politicians, not athletes or their federations. President Carter led the largest boycott, rallying more than 60 nations to skip the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, a group of mostly Soviet Bloc countries stayed home from the L.A. Olympics in response.
No World Cup boycott could hope to succeed without a similar coalition and that's unlikely to happen. But that hasn't stopped people from talking about one just the same.
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In Germany, Oke Gottlich, one of the German soccer federation's 11 vice presidents, said last month that it's time to "seriously consider a boycott." Bernd Neuendorf, the federation president, said the idea was not "a major debate at all," calling it "completely misguided."
Last Saturday, Germany officially ruled out a boycott.
In France, where politicians have discussed a boycott, sports minister Marina Ferrari and Philippe Diallo, president of the country's soccer federation, both dismissed such talk out of hand.
Still, the idea isn't completely dead. Mogens Jensen, who serves in the Danish parliament, said a World Cup boycott was "one of the last tools in the toolbox" and said if the U.S. were to instigate a real conflict, then a "boycott discussion in very, very relevant."
Still, as improbable as a boycott may be, keeping alive the possibility may be just as effective as actually following through with it. Talk of some sort of World Cup protest, for example, may have played a part in Trump's decision to back off his threats of invading Greenland, the issue that has most angered Europeans.
But that's not the only issue. Coverage of immigration raids in Minnesota and threats by Trump — the host of the U.S. portion of the World Cup — to bomb Iran (a World Cup qualifier) after using the military to extract the president of Venezuela have created a vision of violence and chaos in the U.S. that has frightened and appalled many in Europe.
"I don't know what things are going to look like in June," said Andrew Bertoli, an assistant professor at IE University in Segovia, Spain, and an expert on the social and political effects of sports. "But the perceptions right now are the United States is in a very volatile political situation and it's very unusual."
If national soccer federations feel trapped between a rock and the World Cup, however, there's nothing to keep fans from voting with their wallets and electing to stay home.
Others have opted to attend matches only in Mexico or Canada, which are sharing hosting duties with the U.S., while some have changed their mind about coming to the tournament at all and have reportedly begun reselling their tickets. FIFA will benefit from the change in plans, gaining a 15% fee from the seller and a 15% fee from the buyer of resold tickets.
"I absolutely think that could prevent tourists from going to the United States," said Bertoli, the Segovia professor.
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This story originally appeared inLos Angeles Times.
