The World Cup Nobody Can Get Into

Grant: We start today where this World Cup already wrote its most uncomfortable story. Omar Artan, Africa's twenty twenty-five referee of the year, the first Somali ever selected for a FIFA World Cup, turned away at Miami International—valid visa, diplomatic passport, eleven hours of interrogation. Miles: And he flew home to Mogadishu, where thousands packed a stadium to celebrate him—the World Cup crowd he actually got. Grant: That story opens a door we're walking through today because Artan isn't an isolated case; he's the clearest example of a pattern. Miles: The American Immigration Council laid out the full scope this week: Travel bans covering thirty-nine countries blocked ordinary fans from four World Cup nations outright. We'll get into who made the cut and who didn't. Grant: Iran had to move their training base from Tucson to Tijuana. Fourteen staff denied visas, players commuting by charter on match days. ESPN's been tracking every wrinkle of it. Miles: And the geopolitics there are strange: Iran filed a formal FIFA complaint, then showed up and played anyway. Grant: Meanwhile, inside the venues, nearly nineteen hundred SoFi Stadium workers voted ninety six percent to authorize a strike, wages and ICE deployment both on the table at once. Miles: They won a contract clause allowing mid-match walkouts if ICE threatens workers' safety. Unite Here Local Eleven called it So that unprecedented in modern American labor history, the math on that trade off is worth understanding. Grant: And underneath all of it is FIFA's silence and Infantino's relationship with Trump—that's the part that should make you uncomfortable. Miles: We'll get into whether FIFA ever had real leverage to enforce its own rules, or whether it simply chose not to try. Omar Artan's story is where we start. Grant: Thousands of people filled the stadium in Mogadishu last week. No match, no players, just one man being carried on shoulders wrapped in the Somali flag. Miles: Omar Artan, thirty four years old, Africa's referee of the year, the first Somali ever selected to officiate a FIFA World Cup. Grant: He flew from Istanbul to Miami on June sixth for a mandatory FIFA match official seminar. He had a valid three month U.S. visa. He had a diplomatic passport. Vic Passport: After an eleven hour interview at Miami International Airport, CBP put him on a return flight to Istanbul. Miles: CBP's official statement cited unspecified vetting concerns. An anonymous administration official told reporters Artan had associations with suspected terror organizations. No evidence, no specifics, just the door closed. Grant: The Washington Post covered this in detail. The White House World Cup Cup task force chief Andrew Giuliani defended the decision publicly, but the actual reasoning stayed buried behind anonymous sourcing. Miles: And Somalia's government made extensive diplomatic efforts before the tournament, engaged U.S. authorities directly. Nothing moved. Grant: Mm hmm. So Artan went home, and Mogadishu gave him a reception that a lot of World Cup winners don't get. Al Jazeera reported thousands at the stadium, government officials at the airport with flowers. crowds chanting his name. Miles: The absurdity that lands hardest for me, UEFA has since appointed him to referee the Champions League and Europa League winners in the Super Cup final in Salzburg this August, PSG against Aston Villa. Grant: Good enough to run the line in Austria, inadmissible in America; and FIFA confirmed he'll be paid in full for the World Cup matches he never got to call. Miles: Which tells you something about how FIFA read the situation. They know exactly what happened, they're just not the ones who can undo it. Grant: The American Immigration Council flagged this week that the U.S. promised the world, quote, everyone will be welcome. FIFA President Gianni Infantino said that in 2025. The Artan case is the most visible crack in that promise. Miles: But it's not an isolated crack. Artan's case drew attention because of his credentials. Strip those away, and you're looking at a structural reality. Somalia is one of nearly forty countries whose citizens face severe U.S. entry restrictions under the current administration. Grant: Somalia is one of nearly forty countries under travel restrictions. Artan's visa and diplomatic passport didn't change the underlying calculus. The math on that doesn't work for a tournament billing itself as the World's Party. You can't bar the world and host the world at the same time. Miles: So the question is, how many more Omar Artans were there? Players, fans, officials who never made headlines because they didn't have his record. What does that architecture actually look like? Grant: So the Artan case is one man. The policy behind it covers thirty nine countries, four of them World Cup participants. Miles: Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, Senegal. Ordinary fans from all four are locked out; players can enter under a sporting exemption, supporters cannot. Grant: And that carve out is worth examining. The Administration explicitly drew a line: you can compete here, your fans just can't watch you. Miles: The American Immigration Council framed it plainly: The ban prohibits new tourist visas for those thirty nine nations. No workaround, no appeals window. You're from Dakar, you don't get in. Speaker 3: Then layer on the Visa bond programme, five African World Cup nations-Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Tunisia-were told fifteen thousand dollars deposit just to apply for a visa. Miles: fifteen thousand dollars to apply, not to guarantee entry-to apply. Speaker 3: That got suspended in May under pressure, but only for fans who already bought tickets through FIFA's priority system. by April fifteenth. Miles: So the waiver only reached people who cleared a prior bureaucratic hurdle most fans didn't know existed. That's a pretty narrow relief valve. Speaker 3: The math doesn't work for most supporters, and the Ivory Coast case makes it explicit. The president of the Ivorian Supporters Association told AFP that U.S. officials told them directly they didn't want supporters from Ivory Coast and Senegal on American soil. Doyle. Miles: That's not vetting language, that's a preference stated out loud. Speaker 3: Over forty Moroccan supporters' club members were denied visas, too, according to Moroccan outlet Hespress. They had tickets. They had Speaker 4: visas. Grant: Had hotel bookings. Miles: Morocco isn't even under the travel ban—that's additional scrutiny on top of the formal restrictions. Grant: Which tells you the written policy is the floor, not the ceiling. Miles: In FIFA's position through all of this, Infantino gave Trump a FIFA peace prize in December. The "Conversations" piece from June eleventh put it squarely: "Instead of bringing the world together, the tournament risks being remembered for a climate of exclusion driven by one host nation. Grant: Strong framing, and it gets harder to argue against when you look at what Iran specifically went through, not just fans, but the team itself. Miles: That's a different tier of problem entirely when a participating nation can't reliably get its own staff in. Dive into the country. You've moved past fan access into something FIFA can't quietly absorb. Grant: And Iran didn't absorb it quietly. So flip that outward from fans who can't get in to a team that technically can, just barely. Miles: Iran's situation is its own category. Their training base was originally Tucson, Arizona. ESPN reported it moved to Tijuana after 14 staff members were denied U.S. visas entirely, including the Federation president. Grant: Think about what that means operationally. Your support staff can't cross the border. All three group stage games are in the U.S. You're flying into Los Angeles on a charter, playing the match, and then flying back to Mexico that same night. Miles: After the two two draw with New Zealand, U.S. officials ordered the team to return to Tijuana immediately, not the following day as they had planned. Iran's coach told the Guardian: "We were supposed to stay tonight to recover and return tomorrow. We don't know why they're returning us. Grant: You can't recover from a World Cup match on a red eye back to Mexico. That's not a visa inconvenience. That's a competitive disadvantage written into the schedule. Miles: And it gets more specific. The Iran Football Federation confirmed that Mehdi Torabis visa was single entry only. The moment he crossed back into Mexico after that New Zealand game, it expired. He needed a brand new visa to play Belgium. Grant: Every other player got multi-entry. One guy gets a single. That's not a processing error. Miles: The backdrop matters too. Israel and the U.S. launched airstrikes on Iran and And then February – Iran's domestic league shut down, the national team was training in Turkey before any of this started, they came into this tournament already running on fumes. Grant: And when U.S. Ambassador Tom Barrack posted on social media congratulating his staff for processing the players' visas, Iran's embassy in Ankara fired back. The American Immigration Council flagged the quote, you cannot whitewash conduct that violates FIFA regulations. and breaches the United States host obligations merely by praising yourselves. Miles: Iran has since filed a formal complaint with FIFA. They wanted to arrive two days before their Belgium match, standard preparation denied twenty four hours only. Grant: The math on that is brutal. Every other team gets to acclimate, Iran commutes from a different country. Miles: Southern California has the largest Iranian diaspora outside Iran, hundreds of thousands of people. Four. Their team is playing thirty minutes away and most of those fans can't get tickets. Iran's supporter allocation was revoked before the tournament started. Grant: So the team is in Tijuana, the fans are locked out and the staff can't cross the border. That's the full picture. Miles: Now take that enforcement logic-who gets in, who gets monitored, who gets flagged-and bring it inside the stadium, because the people running the concessions at SoFi are dealing with a version of version of the same question. Grant: Same enforcement logic, different address inside the stadium now. Miles: SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles. Nearly 2,000 food service workers, cooks, bartenders, dishwashers represented by UNITE HERE Local 11. They voted 96% to authorize a strike days before the U.S. opening game. Grant: 96%. That's not a close call. The American Immigration Council flagged two pressure points. Stalled wages and direct fear of ICE deployment at matches. Miles: And the workers forced a tentative agreement by June eighth, which is the detail that doesn't get enough attention. The contract preserved an explicit right to walk off mid-match if the union decides ICE poses a worker safety risk. Grant: Mid-match. Think about the operational exposure there. SoFi's hosting eight games; those one hundred thousand dollar suites go dark. Go dark if the kitchen walks out. That's a real business risk, not a political statement. Miles: The union also filed complaints with California's Privacy Protection Agency over FIFA's accreditation process. Workers had to submit nationality and country of birth; they asked FIFA not to share that data with ICE. Grant: Which tells you something about who these workers are: majority immigrant, many from the exact populations being targeted. The accreditation form wasn't abstract; it was a roster. Miles: DHS Secretary Mayorkas confirmed ICE agents at every venue. His line to CBS News: "Immigration enforcement were always going to do that. He didn't rule out arrests. Grant: And Border Czar Tom Homan separately threatened to send "his words" according to the American Immigration Council, more ICE agents than you've ever seen to New York City. New York hosts eight games. Miles: So you've got workers who had to legally contract the right to flee their own workplace-that's where this landed. Grant: The math on that is stark: a walkout mid tournament doesn't just embarrass the host, it costs the host. Los Angeles County projected five hundred ninety four million dollars in economic impact from this tournament. Miles: Right. Grant: You can't collect that number without the workers. Miles: And FIFA's response to all of it? Silence to NPR, according to their reporting, the governing body that brokered this entire deal nowhere. Grant: Which raises the question we're getting to. FIFA signed host agreements. FIFA controls the accreditation process. Where exactly has FIFA been? So FIFA stayed silent through the entire stadium standoff. And that silence has a context people need to understand. Miles: The FIFA Peace Prize. Grant: Right. December 5th, Kennedy Center. Infantino invented a brand new award, the FIFA Peace Prize, specifically to hand to Donald Trump at the World Cup draw. Gold trophy, metal, certificate, created from scratch for the occasion. Miles: And Infantino told Trump on stage, you can always count on my support. That was six months before the tournament kicked off. Grant: Politico tracked Infantino's face time with Trump in twenty twenty five more than any world leader. UFC events, Oval Office meetings, public. The line went throughout; so when referees start getting turned away at Miami airport, what does FIFA say? Miles: The same line every time. FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes; the host government determines who receives a visa. NPR got that statement verbatim. Grant: That's the statement from a governing body that extracted hosting rights with explicit non discrimination commitments attached-I had contractual standing; I chose not to use it. Miles: David Niven, a University of Cincinnati professor who studies These sports and politics told NPR exactly what that amounts to. He said FIFA raised the surrender flag on this question. Grant: That phrase is going to follow Infantino for a while. And look, I'd push back slightly. Did FIFA ever have real leverage over the U.S. in the first place? The U.S. is the host. The revenue is enormous. Miles: That's the honest question. But FIFA has pulled tournaments from countries over far less. The leverage existed on paper. They just didn't want to spend it. Grant: Because spending it means a fight with the White House, and Infantino had already made his position clear at the Kennedy Center. Miles: The American Immigration Council framed it simply: "Infantino promised everyone would be welcome; then his organization deferred entirely to the government that was doing the excluding. Grant: And the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for a, their words, "massive rethink" of US immigration policies in the context of this tournament. FIFA didn't echo that, didn't acknowledge it. Miles: What we're watching is an institution that decided the relationship partnership with the host nation was worth more than the commitments it made to get there. Grant: There are three more weeks of group stage left. Iran plays Egypt in Seattle on Thursday. Whether any of this shifts, we're watching that closely. Miles: And there are bigger questions still outstanding about what the 2026 precedents mean for every future host bid. That's where we're going next. Speaker 3: So watch Thursday, Iran versus Egypt in Seattle, June twenty sixth, two teams that have each been pushed around by U.S. security authorities just trying to get to the city. Grant: Egypt got blocked from flying directly Vancouver to Seattle after their New Zealand win. Forced back to Spokane, Iran of course. Speaker 5: Commutes from Tijuana—same day return every match. Grant: That hundred twenty seven mile charter from Tijuana to LA took five hours with security checks. Speaker 3: Seattle's the same setup—watch whether those conditions shift at all by Thursday—or whether they don't, which is its own answer. And the backdrop matters: Grant: the ACLU and Amnesty International led more than one hundred twenty civil society groups issuing a formal travel advisory back in April. Device searches, social media screening, arbitrary detention risks for journalists and fans throughout the tournament. arbitrary detention risks for journalists and fans throughout the tournament. That advisory is still live. Speaker 3: What I'll be watching past Thursday is whether FIFA builds anything enforceable into the Brazil 2030 bid or Saudi Arabia 2034. Right now the 2026 template says host nations can restrict team travel, block fan entry, detain officials, and FIFA issues a statement. Grant: Saudi Arabia 2034 already has its own human rights record. If FIFA carries this framework forward unchanged. 2026 stops being the anomaly and becomes the model. Speaker 3: That's what the next four years will show. The tournament's still running. The damage to who gets to attend is already done. Grant: That's a wrap on today's episode. The image that stays with me-thousands in Mogadishu filling a stadium for a referee, not a match-that's the story this World Cup will carry. Miles: And then UEFA turns round and appoints him to the Super Cup-good enough for Austria, inadmissible in America. The contradiction writes itself. Grant: Iran training in Tijuana fans from four World Cup nations locked out. So far workers winning a contract clause against mid-match ICE walkouts, the downstream effects are real, and they're not stopping. Miles: The watch item heading into this week is Iran versus Egypt in Seattle on Thursday, June 26, both teams navigating the same border haze, and FIFA still hasn't enforced a single one of its non-discrimination commitments. Grant: That's the question for Brazil 2030 and Saudi Arabia 2034, whether host nations' standards ever get teeth. Miles: If this episode opened something up for you, share it with someone who deserves the fuller picture. Subscribe wherever you listen. Grant: Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time.