How Trump overstepped his role as American leader to violate FIFA rules and principles

Between political interference, consular arbitration, and FIFA’s takeover, the World Cup revealed the face of unashamed American imperialism, even though it was supposed to celebrate the great festival of football. Washington now embodies the banality of football’s evil.

FIFA’s autonomy regulations explicitly prohibited any political interference. Trump trampled them from the very start of the preparations. African referees and players were denied visas under flimsy security pretexts, and delegations were targeted and humiliated: Washington transformed the right of entry into the country into a weapon of ideological coercion. The Iranian national team, subjected to abusive restrictions and constant administrative harassment, suffered the direct dictates of the White House.

As the media outlet TRT Afrika points out in its report on the impact of the travel ban on the continent’s national teams, “The joint organization has become a political dilemma where continental representation risks being purely symbolic in the face of the systematic exclusion of fans and families.” Along the same lines, columnists in the pan-African press denounce what they call “barely disguised sporting apartheid,” analyzing the consular system as an ethnic and social selection process “bearing the hallmarks of a particularly unwelcome........

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