Quick Take

Also in Play: FIFA’s Commitment Without Oversight

June 18, 2026

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is underway—and with it, a test of whether FIFA’s landmark human rights commitments will hold in practice. Last week, my colleague Isabelle Glimcher introduced this series, which will consider some of the human rights concerns surrounding the 2026 World Cup. The 2026 World Cup is the first with human rights bidding requirements, the first with a Human Rights Strategy as part of the award process, and the first with a Human Rights Framework—a significant milestone in the decade since FIFA President Gianni Infantino pledged that FIFA is “fully committed to respecting human rights” and to meeting its responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These developments did not happen by accident.

They are the result of years of sustained pressure from civil society organizations, the Dignity 2026 coalition, and advocates who made human rights commitments a condition of their support for the tournament—and they represent a meaningful shift in how the world’s most powerful sports body understands its responsibilities. The question is whether these commitments can be verified. And here, a structural problem remains unresolved.

The New York City Bar Association recently wrote to the New York and New Jersey host committees urging them to undertake a rigorous, public post-event human rights evaluation of the 2026 World Cup, assessing what was promised, what was delivered, and what lessons should carry forward to future events, including the 2031 Women’s World Cup. The letter is a timely reminder that commitments without independent evaluation are, at best, incomplete. New York and New Jersey have an opportunity to set a standard. But meaningful evaluation requires something FIFA has long resisted: genuine independent oversight.

Ten years ago, that resistance had a face. In May 2016, Domenico Scala, the Swiss businessman credited with spearheading governance reforms at FIFA, resigned as chairman of the independent audit and compliance committee, complaining that the reforms were being undermined. A new rule, passed by the FIFA Congress in Mexico City, gave the FIFA Council the power to appoint and dismiss members of its own oversight committees, including the ethics and audit bodies. In his resignation statement, Scala warned that committee members had been “factually deprived of their independence and are in danger of becoming auxiliary agents of those whom they should actually supervise.” He called it “a wake-up call” for people working to reform FIFA.

That wake-up call has gone largely unanswered. The governance structure that prompted Scala’s resignation—in which the executive leadership retains the ability to appoint and remove the very bodies meant to oversee it—remains substantially in place. This is not a technical footnote. It is a central obstacle to assessing whether FIFA’s human rights commitments are being met.

The UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has recently called on companies and institutions to ensure that human rights expertise is embedded in governance structures and that independent oversight is possible. FIFA, as one of the world’s most influential non-state actors, should be at the forefront of this shift. A Human Rights Framework that instructs host committees to develop action plans is a good start. But without an independent body empowered to assess FIFA’s own performance, one that cannot be dismissed by those it is meant to scrutinize, the framework rests on uncertain foundations.

The 2026 World Cup offers a moment to change that. The commitments are in place. What is missing is the architecture to hold them to account. As Domenico Scala put it to me in an interview last week: “commitments on paper are one thing—paper has a lot of patience.”

Global Labor