Also in Play: 2026 World Cup Hosts are Facing a Human Rights Test
June 11, 2026
This week, the billions of people who make soccer the world’s most watched sport will tune into the first men’s World Cup ever staged across three countries—the beautiful game on the largest stage there is. For the United States, Canada, and Mexico, that stage is also an opportunity: a chance to demonstrate that a World Cup can respect human rights, after a 2022 tournament in Qatar defined by, among other things, the exploitation of migrant construction workers and the silencing of LGBTQ+ fans.
But it’s already off to a rocky start. Before the opening whistle, Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained for seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare airport; Iraq’s team photographer was held for more than ten hours, then denied entry; and Omar Abulkadir Artan—a FIFA-appointed referee named Africa’s best men’s official last year—was detained at Miami International Airport, had his visa revoked, and was sent back to Somalia. The US government says he was barred because of his “association with suspected members of terror organizations,” but has refused to offer any further proof or detail to substantiate this allegation. The broader travel ban exempts players, coaches, and staff but bars fans from qualifying nations including Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire. Some members of the Iranian team only received their visas last Friday, while “key managerial and administrative members” were denied visas entirely. One scholar has called the result a World Cup of exclusion rather than inclusion—a pointed contrast with the “safe and inclusive tournament” that FIFA’s own human rights strategy promises.
That gap—between commitment on paper and conduct on the ground—is the focus of this series on the World Cup, “Also in Play.” While FIFA and this year’s World Cup hosts have paid unprecedented formal attention to human rights concerns, actual performance remains to be seen, and to date, both FIFA and recent hosts have very checkered human rights records. In this and a series of Quick Takes to follow, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights will unpack some of the risks associated with the 2026 World Cup and efforts to ensure human rights protection by the responsible parties—private businesses, local, state, and national governments, and FIFA itself.
The 2026 World Cup is the first of its kind in several ways: it is the first to be hosted across multiple countries, the first for which bidders were required to conduct human rights due diligence about the games’ impact and to submit a human rights strategy, and the first for which FIFA created a Sustainability and Human Rights Strategy organized around environmental, social, economic, and governance pillars.
The social pillar commits FIFA and the hosts to a safe and inclusive tournament free of discrimination; to safety and security operations that adhere to human rights standards; to the protection of local communities and vulnerable groups, fair labor conditions, safeguards for journalists and human rights defenders, and to meaningful remedy when things go wrong.
Much of this strategy reflects the legacy of Qatar 2022—the tournament Amnesty International branded a “World Cup of shame.” There, fans were barred from displaying rainbow flags or wearing rainbow attire and FIFA threatened to yellow card team captains who wore rainbow armbands. The stadium and infrastructure were built by migrant workers who endured conditions amounting to modern slavery—debt bondage exacerbated by worker-paid recruitment fees, excessive overtime, withheld wages and abusive living and working conditions. Those specific harms may look different across the US, Canada, and Mexico, but the underlying risks remain.
FIFA’s strategy instructs host committees to “develop tailored Host City Human Rights Action Plans in consultation with FIFA World Cup 26, local governments, civic society, and community groups.” But it set no penalty for failing to produce and publish the plans. Most host cities, New York/New Jersey among them, released theirs less than a month before kickoff.
Laudable as the plans are, they contain no mechanism to monitor or evaluate whether anyone actually meets the goals they include. The NYC Bar Association spotted this gap. The Business and Human Rights Committee, together with the Civil Rights Law, and Foreign and Comparative Law Committees released a letter calling for state and local governments and the NY/NJ Host Committee to commit now to an independent, public review after the tournament. This review would assess where parties met or missed their commitments, where the plan itself fell short, and what key lessons should shape preparations and provisions for future events, including the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup. That kind of after-the-fact accountability is how gaps identified in 2026 become fixes for 2031 and beyond.
Events of this scale present incredible and rare opportunities: they can expose the gaps in human rights protection and force solutions that outlast the final whistle. We have such a moment upon us now. The whole world is watching. The question is whether the hosts—and FIFA—give the world something to admire off the field as well as on it.
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