Political Tension in North America Builds Before the World Cup
On the first Tuesday in November, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda to Indian parents, scored a decisive victory in New York City’s mayoral election. In sports terms, it was a blowout; for soccer fans, Mamdani’s win is a gift.
Tickets for the FIFA World Cup 2026, which is set to kick off in mid-June across 16 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, are already shaping up as the most expensive in the tournament’s history. In September, Mamdani launched the “Game over Greed” campaign, which urged World Cup organizers to set aside 15 per cent of ticket inventory to sell to local residents at discounted prices and urged caps on resale prices in the secondary market. Eight matches, including the final, are scheduled for MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Mamdani’s election win sets up a fascinating push-pull, with the mayor and working-class soccer fans on one side, and World Cup organizer FIFA, with its close ties to U.S. President Donald Trump, on the other.
And a big-city mayor wading into World Cup ticket pricing points to a broader dynamic that has been developing since the United States, Canada and Mexico’s trinational World Cup bid was approved in 2018. Technically, the world’s biggest sports tournament is an apolitical event, but its ties to power run deep.
The three-way World Cup bid was accepted by FIFA just five months before the same three countries finalized the USMCA trade agreement. The tournament’s subtitle, “Unity,” reflected a renewed sense of trilateral co-operation.
Nearly eight years and several trade disputes later, that spirit has faded. Trump has deployed federal troops to U.S. cities under questionable pretenses, while the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively okayed racial profiling as a tool for federal law enforcement agents in search of illegal immigrants. What was conceived as a celebration of three-way allyship is now unfolding against a backdrop of political, social and economic turmoil that threatens to cast a shadow over the beautiful game.
Whether the public’s focus stays on the field might depend heavily on Trump, and whether he chooses to politicize the world’s largest sports event.
“This is someone who understands the power of sports, and he’s not going to squander the opportunity to use it to his political advantage,” says Jules Boykoff, a professor of government and politics at Pacific University in Portland, Ore., an expert on the politics of sport and a former pro soccer player. “It gives him one more lever to grab on to.”
Sports fans with an eye for social issues might already be aware of the spectre of “sportswashing”–wherein countries with questionable human rights records use major sports events to polish their public image–looming over…
