Omar Abdulkadir Artan is a FIFA-accredited referee. He is also Somali. Days before the 2026 World Cup kicked off on American soil, US border authorities turned him away — a decision that surprised almost nobody inside the Trump administration. Trump has previously called Somalis "garbage" and "crooks," and Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House World Cup task force, framed the rejection in the language of counter-terrorism.

The irony — that a referee was being cast as a security threat — was not lost on the watching world. The Artan incident is one scene in a wider pattern. Iraq's vice-captain was held at the border for seven hours on arrival. Thirteen members of the Iranian delegation are still waiting for visas, and their fan-ticket allocation has been cancelled.

According to the BBC, 11 of the 48 participating nations — every single one of them from the Global South — are facing either travel restrictions or unusually high rates of visa rejections. These are not bureaucratic accidents; they read like a message. What makes this moment historically striking is the contrast with previous hosts. Before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Nazi Germany quietly removed antisemitic signage and suspended its anti-homosexuality law, acutely aware of the image it projected abroad.

The current US administration appears to want the opposite: it seems to relish the global discomfort, to broadcast the exclusion as a feature rather than a flaw. FIFA, meanwhile, has largely gone quiet. The body that threatened to strip the Brazilian city of Curitiba of hosting rights in 2014 over a delayed stadium, and that pressured Russia into offering visa-free travel in 2018, has issued no meaningful ultimatum to Washington. For an organisation that promised last summer that "everyone will be welcome," the silence raises an uncomfortable question about exactly whose welcome it meant.