sportswashing at – As the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup kicks off Thursday, human rights advocates and a politics professor argue the spectacle could be used to distract from domestic and foreign-policy turmoil—stretching a long pattern they say runs from dictatorships to democracie
When the next World Cup begins Thursday, the pitch won’t just be about goals and glory. It will also be about timing—about what political leaders might try to hide while stadium lights are brightest.
Jules Boykoff. a professor of politics at Pacific University in Oregon and a former professional soccer player who represented the United States’ under-23 team. says the concept of “sportswashing” isn’t limited to authoritarian states. It’s a strategy, he argues, that can show up wherever leaders believe big international events can manufacture legitimacy.
Sportswashing. human rights advocates coined the term to describe. is when political figures use international mega-events to look important on the world stage while diverting attention from chronic abuses—at home and abroad. Boykoff acknowledges that in mainstream talk. the label has often been aimed at the Global South. but he says it should be applied more broadly. He points to the 2018 Men’s World Cup in Russia as sportswashing and says the 2022 tournament in Qatar also fit the definition.
The difference, in Boykoff’s view, is that the U.S. conversation has lagged behind. He ties the issue to a wider political debate about whether the United States still counts as a fully-fledged democracy. with some political scientists describing what they see as “competitive authoritarianism. ” a framework compared to what happened under former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
“If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash,” Boykoff told MISRYOUM last month, “we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from.”
He points to what he calls “terrible approval ratings” right now and to what he describes as an Iran war President Donald Trump is “carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals.” He also cites what he calls the “lingering Epstein files. ” in which Trump is named thousands of times.
For Boykoff, those pressures create the motive: the World Cup becomes an opportunity to project stature for both global audiences and a domestic one—especially with midterm elections in view.
He also expects Trump to weave the tournament into his political brand almost immediately. Boykoff says Trump will talk about the importance of the World Cup to his presidency and that he plans to reference a UFC event happening three days into the World Cup on the White House lawn. Boykoff also expects Trump to turn the conversation toward the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
That emphasis on spectacle isn’t new, Boykoff argues. He says Trump has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in recent history.
The stakes, in this telling, are sharpened by what Boykoff calls the United States’ recent “mega-event” rhythm. The last major tournament FIFA staged before this—last summer’s Club World Cup—was the same event where Donald Trump crashed the trophy presentation at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. joining the winning team’s celebrations as they lifted the prize.
Boykoff places that image alongside a checklist of other events he says were unfolding at the same time: ICE continuing to raid and occupy Los Angeles; Trump passing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”; and the U.S. military striking three nuclear facilities in Iran shortly after Israel launched strikes of its own in the middle of negotiations.
The throughline, according to Boykoff, is the promise of distraction—whether the tool is a tournament trophy or a stage-managed ceremony that projects power while other power is being exercised.
To explain how deep that pattern runs. Boykoff traces FIFA’s history and says one inflection point comes in 1978 in Argentina. He argues that the World Cup’s relationship with authoritarian politics didn’t begin with modern autocrats—it goes back at least to 1934. the second World Cup ever. held in Italy under Benito Mussolini.
Boykoff describes Mussolini as using soccer’s machinery to embody what he calls fascist machismo and “the fascist new man.” He says Mussolini rode around on a horse without a shirt long before Vladimir Putin ever did. and that he treated the Italian national team as “soldiers of sport.” When Italy won. Boykoff says Mussolini maximized the propaganda value.
Jump to 1978, and Boykoff says the tournament unfolded under an Argentine military junta. He places it in the geography of repression: only 700 meters from where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final. 3-1. he says leftists were imprisoned. tortured. and sometimes killed. He also says the junta received what he calls “a massive sportswash assist” from Henry Kissinger. describing him as showing up and “palling around” with General Jorge Rafael Videla. the figure Boykoff says was running the junta and maximizing its leverage over the World Cup.
Before journalists from around the world descended. Boykoff says the junta “dialed back its direct repression” to give the event room to breathe. He says they ramped repression back up after the global media left. while noting that the window created space for Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo—“mothers fighting against Argentina’s military dictatorship”—to operate more freely with the world’s eyes on them.
Boykoff then asks whether a similar opening will appear again under Trump.
He points to Russia’s 2018 World Cup as a warning sign, saying Putin passed a law making it illegal to protest in host cities and surrounding regions while allowing protests elsewhere. Under that logic, Boykoff says he will be watching for whether there will be space for dissent in 2026.
If activism does find openings, Boykoff says it can piggyback on the same global attention that governments seek to harness. He ties that to his own lived experience of mega-events in the streets—starting with Rio de Janeiro in the lead-up to and during the Olympics. which he says he observed “out in the streets” with his own eyes.
He recalls similar momentum in Tokyo until it was scuppered by Covid. and he points to Los Angeles where activists have been active since 2017. He says activists chant “the whole world is watching” with the World Cup and Olympics. treating that mass attention as leverage for political messages beyond the field.
Boykoff says he learned to pursue that broader reach the hard way. Before he wrote about the politics of sports. he says he wrote about suppression of political dissent and struggled to spark conversations with people who didn’t share his political beliefs. Using sport, he argues, is one way to open those conversations.
He also ties sportswashing to money—especially FIFA’s ability to commercialize concessions that are framed as safety improvements. He points to FIFA’s ad-laden “water breaks partway through each half, regardless of weather,” saying FIFA built a way to monetize climate change.
In Boykoff’s account, there’s a dual reality: player unions are pushing for protection, and FIFA is offering changes like water breaks that he credits as concessions, while also creating new opportunities for advertising revenue.
That tension threads through Boykoff’s remarks about player health. He says that when he played for the U.S. under-23 men, he was 19 during his first international match against Brazil. He says he expected people to cheer vociferously, imagining a pro-U.S. atmosphere cultivated by what he calls “pro-US propaganda. ” but that in France—where the team played Brazil. then Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia. and the Soviet Union—the experience forced him to think differently.
He also connects the athlete experience to labor protections. saying that when he played professional soccer he said there was no union. and that this was a real problem. He says players got paid okay but could have been paid more. and more importantly he says they had no protection if they got hurt—so if a player was seriously injured. he says the contract could be lost the next day.
Boykoff says he’s happy to see unions growing stronger in Major League Soccer in the United States and at the international level through FIFPro. He says FIFPro has been raising questions about athlete health and safety at the World Cup.
He also points directly to FIFA’s “greed machine,” saying FIFA is running tournament after tournament and even “trial ballooned the idea of having a FIFA Men’s World Cup every two years.”
He adds that FIFPro has been outspoken on climate change and the heat risks that come with it. He notes that while some indoor stadiums are air conditioned—he singles out Miami as a place that is not—heat is a factor that cannot be treated like an afterthought.
He then returns to FIFA’s choice to institute water breaks “regardless of weather at the World Cup.” He calls it both an advance for safety and a revenue opportunity because commercials are allowed during those water breaks. “Leave it to FIFA to figure out a way to monetize climate change to their advantage,” he said.
Even with that critique. Boykoff argues the World Cup is still a chance to press the conversation into the open—particularly as players come into the tournament injured or exhausted from playing thousands of minutes over the preceding months. and possibly during the tournament’s early stages when major names might be at risk of getting hurt.
The political stakes extend beyond the host country and the stadium, Boykoff says, because sports investments—especially the biggest ones—sit alongside state power and international deals. He points to Saudi Arabia and says the kingdom has engaged in sportswashing for a long time.
Boykoff also places Saudi sports investments in a bigger portfolio: he cites the kingdom’s 2034 World Cup and other sports spending. including its own soccer league with players like Cristiano Ronaldo. as well as golf and e-sports. He says that fits with a history of authoritarians affiliating themselves with “macho sports. ” including boxing and UFC—calling out Trump’s own pattern as comparable.
One episode he calls “extremely instructive” is a state dinner and extended visit in Washington. DC. when he says two sportswashers—President Trump and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman—came together. Boykoff says these leaders often work internationally and support each other’s sportswashing. He frames the state dinner as political and economic deal-making.
He adds another detail around Ronaldo: he says Ronaldo was there and had not come to the United States since 2014 because of credible rape allegations, but that Ronaldo “knew Trump would not let anything happen to him.”
For Boykoff, a key link in the web is FIFA President Gianni Infantino. He describes Infantino as having been friends with Putin in 2018 for that World Cup. saying Infantino played football in the Kremlin with Putin in the lead-up to the tournament and received a special friendship order from Putin afterward. Boykoff says Infantino later moved to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup after lifting his residence. and he says Infantino ran interference for Qatar’s emirs around human rights and migrant workers.
He adds that Infantino has since moved to the United States, and he says Infantino and Trump are extraordinarily friendly—sharing, in his description, a “penchant for political spectacle,” enjoying wealth and affluence and the spotlight.
Boykoff also argues Infantino has a crucial role in Saudi Arabia’s path to the 2034 World Cup, saying Saudi Arabia was handed the tournament “with no real serious bid process.”
Critics and boycotters are often dismissed as people who don’t understand what soccer can mean. Boykoff pushes back, saying he has had the privilege of soccer enriching his life since he was four years old.
He says he understands the effective power of sport and how it can be channeled for good. In his memoir, Kicking, he says he includes stories of soccer activists in Portland who fought back against power brokers. He describes victories: they got the general manager of the Portland Thorns fired after supporting a coach alleged to have abused players. and they got the owner of the Thorns to sell the team.
Boykoff calls those kinds of wins proof that community bonds built through soccer can pivot into political action.
Even so, he says he worries that money at the highest levels has made the game so commercialized that it has lost “a lot of the luster” of community-building.
To show that soccer can still be about connection. he points to lower-profile teams in Portland. Oregon—including a professional lower league team called Portland Bangers FC. with a mascot he describes as a seven-foot-tall sausage. “totally goofy. ” and with tickets he says are very affordable. He also cites a team called the Cherry Bombs in Portland, saying the sponsor is Planned Parenthood.
For Boykoff, the point is clear: community-building through soccer is “too important to give up on.” He says he will keep fighting alongside others for improvements for “worker-athletes” on the field and for conditions for fans and others off the field.
As the World Cup begins Thursday, the question for Americans won’t be whether millions will watch. It will be what leaders decide to do with that attention—and what activists, and players, can still force open once the world’s gaze is in the stands.
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