Soccer game, ICE raid, or both?
FIFA's Club World Cup kicks off this weekend in the United States. Will hospitality packages include a possible deportation?
Last week I wrote a piece for the Toronto Star on the World Cup, Donald Trump, and the ever-increasing problem with those two things co-existing. A host nation that is actively hostile to foreigners seems like it might just have trouble attracting foreign visitors. Or, indeed, locals who are from foreign nations.
In the days since, the problems have become that much more glaring. The Trump administration announced travel bans on people from 12 nations, including Iran, which has already qualified for the World Cup. (Players and staff are said to be exempt from the ban, fans are not.) And amid the ongoing protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement outrageousness — masked officers raiding schools and hardware stores and snatching innocent people off the street — Trump has now mobilized the military against his own citizens. On Thursday a U.S. Senator was shoved to the ground and shackled because he dared interrupt a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who meanwhile insisted that American troops will “liberate” Los Angeles from its local and state governments, which is really the best example yet that Trump and allies want to govern the United States like a Third World police state in which the side with the most guns makes up all the rules.
Oh, and Kim Jong-Trump is holding a big military parade in Washington tomorrow to celebrate his birthday. Will his face be painted on the side of any missiles? We shall see.
All of which brings us to FIFA’s Club World Cup, which begins Saturday night in Miami. As I wrote last week in that Star piece, ticket sales have been somewhere between slow and disastrous. A piece in The Athletic this week noted that FIFA had announced special student pricing for the tournament opener between Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami and Egyptian side Al-Ahly, offering a $20 seat with “up to four” complimentary tickets thrown in. That is, obviously, a hilariously desperate discount, the kind of thing that only happens when you have a 65,000-seat stadium and tens of thousands of still-unsold seats. The 5-for-1 pricing might even lead to a decent crowd, provided enough Miami-area students can be bothered to give up their Saturday night for a tournament that they probably didn’t even know existed until they received the email offering the sweet deal.
A tour through the FIFA ticketing site shows that there are thousands of tickets available for most games — only those featuring famous clubs like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have sold briskly — and that the hoped-for late surge of interest in the tournament hasn’t materialized.
Here’s a wild paragraph from that Athletic piece:
As of last Tuesday, Inter Miami’s game against Al-Ahly had dropped to $55, according to prices on Ticketmaster, the portal FIFA is using to sell tickets for the tournament. This was half of what they were available for in May, while tickets were $230 for the cheapest seat in January and $349 after the draw in December. FIFA is now hoping that the reduced prices will draw people in during a publicity blitz in the final week before the tournament.
That is an 85% reduction on the original price. Steep! And on that last sentence about a late rush on sales, good luck with that. The U.S. government has already announced that ICE agents will “provide security” at games in Miami and elsewhere, and there have been reports that non-U.S. citizens will be asked to provide identification. “Show us your papers,” basically. This seems likely to create a scenario in which non-white people, Americans included, will be stopped and questioned. The particularly crazy thing here is that countries that are more practised at being police states — China, Russia — would never do something like harass visitors at a global sporting event. They make sure everything looks good for the cameras, and save the really appalling behaviour for when foreigners are no longer present and paying attention. But Trump is so keen to get his way, and his people so eager to boost deportation numbers with haste, that it seems at least possible that some soccer fans will end up scooped up and sent to detention facilities. And suddenly the tournament that not many people care about will have a lot more attention on it.
Which would, on one level, be kind of funny. This Club World Cup, expanded from four to 32 teams, taking place at a time when most teams should be enjoying a brief offseason, only exists because FIFA wanted a piece of the lucrative club-football pie. They put this bloated thing in the United States, despite it not being a soccer hotbed, partly because Americans are used to paying exorbitant prices for sports tickets and then discovered that they had wildly overestimated the interest. The event had such little appeal to international broadcasters that it was only bailed out by a late-game deal with global streaming service DAZN, which reportedly paid a billion dollars for the rights. Conveniently, Qatar-based DAZN also received a billion-dollar investment recently from Saudi Arabia, to which FIFA has awarded the 2034 men’s World Cup. Feel free to connect the dots here.
That all said, these big events sometimes have a way of working themselves out. There are often stories of disorganization and apathy before an Olympics, and then the Games begin and everyone has a nice time. But this one feels different. If I was a Brazilian fan of, say, Palmeiras FC — or even an American of Brazilian descent — I think one of the last places I would want to be right now is a big public gathering with other Brazilians. It just feels like a invitation to the goon squads.