The last major tournament staged by FIFA, the body behind the World Cup, was last summer’s Club World Cup—an international tournament where Donald Trump crashed the trophy presentation at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, joining the winning team’s celebrations as they lifted the prize.

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote at the time, autocracies have long used international sports events as a platform to whitewash abuses of power. Aptly, human rights advocates coined the term “sportswashing” to describe it. During the Club World Cup, ICE continued to raid and occupy Los Angeles, Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the US military struck three nuclear facilities in Iran shortly after Israel launched strikes of its own in the middle of negotiations.

For the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which starts Thursday, the situation may be even worse.

“If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from,” Jules Boykoff, a professor of politics at Pacific University in Oregon and former professional soccer player who represented the United States’ under-23 team, told me last month. “We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals.”

“Trump has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in recent history.”

Boykoff has written extensively about the intersection of politics and international sports, including the Olympics—the 2028 Games in Los Angeles will provide Trump ample further opportunities for sportswashing—as well as activism against systems of power behind the massive developments that come with events like the World Cup or the Olympics, and how they intersect with politics beyond sporting events.

Boykoff’s latest book, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, was released June 9. I spoke to him about the upcoming games, the sportswashing phenomenon, and the wider politics of international sporting events.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve seen the term “sportswashing” enter mainstream coverage, but it’s often used to characterize autocratic figures and states in the Global South. How do you think it applies to this upcoming World Cup?

Sportswashing is when political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage, while deflecting attention from chronic social problems, from human rights woes at home, and also while teeing up opportunities for political and economic advancement.

And yes, the term has been used in the past, I’ll be honest, in a somewhat xenophobic, ethnocentric fashion. It’s waggling a finger at those other countries that do it. Now, they do it: Russia in the 2018 Men’s World Cup definitely was a sportswashing endeavor; Qatar in 2022 was definitely a sportswashing endeavor.

But it can also happen in places that are putative democracies. I know it’s a discussion now as to whether the United States is even a fully-fledged democracy anymore. Some of my political science brethren are calling it the new “competitive authoritarianism,” not unlike what we saw under [former Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán in Hungary. The point is, it can happen in places like the United States.

“After the Winter Olympics…Putin’s ratings were higher than ever. He was standing on the stage looking legitimate as a world leader. What did he do with that? He invaded Crimea.”

Second, when we ask ourselves whether sportswashing works or not, a lot of times it’s implicit that it’s talking about a global audience. And that’s true. You could look at the Qatar World Cup of 2022 and, after the World Cup, their tourism numbers went up and they became even more of an important mediator in the region. But you should also look at domestic audiences.

Right after the Sochi, Russia, Winter Olympics of 2014, President [Vladimir] Putin’s ratings were higher than ever. He was standing on the stage looking legitimate as a world leader. What did he do with that? He invaded Crimea between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Domestic audiences can be........

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