Soccer Belongs to the People. These Activists Want to Keep It That Way.

With World Cup soccer matches fast approaching, FIFA is engaged in price gouging for front-row seats. In New Jersey, the transit authority is charging exorbitant rates for transportation and parking. Beyond the mistreatment of fans, the games are being protested by activists who are putting a spotlight on the growing inequalities in their communities. In the host cities of Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, they are organizing to fight ICE raids, jail-expansion projects, rising housing costs, and homelessness.

Anyone who follows soccer is aware that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, known as FIFA, is no stranger to scandal: In 1978, the dictatorship in Argentina likely fixed a World Cup match; vote-rigging in 2018 hoisted Sepp Blatter to the FIFA presidency; and Qatar gave million-dollar payouts to FIFA executive committee members in order win the right to host the World Cup in 2022. As Dave Zirin wrote in The Nation, FIFA is “not only an utterly corrupt and immoral entity but a supporter of dictators and bulwark against democracy.”

The organization invited further criticism when on December 5, 2025, it awarded the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize to President Donald Trump for his efforts to, in the words of FIFA head Gianni Infantino, “promote peace and unity around the world.” Amid a growing sense of embarrassment over the award, FIFA doubled down on its decision, saying it still “strongly” supported the decision. Of course, after attacking on Iran, Trump’s claims of being “the peace president” are growing ever more absurd.

Across the United States (Mexico and Canada are also hosting matches), FIFA promoters and city boosters are working to capitalize on the games, but communities are making sure that they benefit, too. On the ground, union members, abolitionists, and immigrant rights activists are working together to ensure that the World Cup lives up to its promise of making soccer a force for good.

Miami Activists Issue Travel Advisory

Florida is at the forefront of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The state is home to the infamous Alligator Alcatraz. And more than 280 local and state agencies across the state are empowered to carry out immigration enforcement. At the same time, Miami is a host city for the upcoming World Cup. Soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo will be playing there in what will likely be his last World Cup. Miami is expecting to welcome tens of thousands of soccer fans from around the world.

Given the state’s embrace of Trump’s war on immigrants, a coalition of human rights groups has put out a travel advisory for visitors to the World Cup games in Miami that warns, “Florida is no longer a safe destination for international tourists. With the FIFA World Cup 2026 coming to Miami, travelers may face unprecedented risks of racial profiling, wrongful detention in inhumane conditions without consular access, and heinous human rights violations—regardless of legal travel status.”

Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, policy coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee, a member of the coalition, said compared to matches in California, New York, and New Jersey, the games in Florida will likely be especially dangerous for foreign tourists. “We’re seeing a highly policed state when it comes to immigrants,” she said. “We’ve heard stories about tourists with valid tourist visas who have been caught up in this operation.”

The Florida Immigrant Coalition held a demonstration outside the FIFA offices in Coral Gables, a city in the Miami metro area. It called on FIFA to block federal agents from entering the soccer matches. Mendez-Zamora cited the story from Los Angeles last year when DHS agents were denied access to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.

This comes as more than a dozen countries have issued travel advisories in response to the increasingly repressive political climate in the United States.

Kansas City Fights the “World Cup Jail”

Anew jail is being built in Kansas City, Missouri, which officials say is needed to promote public safety for the games. The abolitionist group Decarcerate KC is leading a coalition to protest what they have dubbed the “World Cup jail.”

“The city has made it explicitly clear,” Amaia Cook, the executive director of Decarcerate KC, said, “that the jail was to be built before the World Cup.”

In November 2025, the City Council approved a $25 million plan for a jail to be turnkey-ready by June when the games begin. Kansas City currently relies on nearby county jails and claims there is a bed shortage. The new facility has a 100-bed capacity. It is being built by Brown and Root, the multinational construction company (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company where deceased Vice President Dick Cheney was once CEO) that built Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay for detainees captured after 9/11.

At a recent City Council meeting, drone footage of the jail’s construction was shown, prompting several council members to comment on how it looks like one of the warehouses being built by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It looks like an ICE detention center,” councilwoman Melissa Robinson observed. Indeed, public pressure forced the company to pull out of the deal for an ICE warehouse in south Kansas City.

Activists suspect the city wants to sweep up unhoused people to make the city more “presentable” for tourists flooding into the city for the soccer tournament. Last year, the City Council passed an anti-loitering ordinance. Cook said the law can be used during the World Cup “to lock up people and take them off the sidewalks, take them out of areas, in order to arrest them and eventually detain them.”

The coalition argues that the jail will disproportionately harm Black, immigrant, and working-class communities. A survey conducted with the help of Prison Policy Initiative, a national nonprofit organization, found that while Kansas City is 26.5 percent African American, 71.2 percent of people sent to jail are Black.

Organizers recently held a rally titled “We All Deserve a Shot” at a park near the jail site. Protesters called on city leaders to divest from incarceration and fund services for the unhoused community, public transportation, and schools. As the coalition stated in a press release, “Soccer, the world’s sport, belongs to the same immigrant families, working-class communities, and communities of color who would be most harmed by the new facility.”

Atlanta Loves the Game

In Atlanta, Play Fair ATL has brought together a coalition of about 30 organizations that span labor, housing, immigration, and criminal justice issues to ensure that the World Cup games there will “benefit—not criminalize—Atlanta communities.”

“All of our coalition, we’re big soccer fans. We love the game. We want the World Cup to happen. We just don’t want it to happen to people. We want it to happen with people. And thus far, it’s happening to people,” explained Michael Collins, the director of Play Fair ATL.

The World Cup in Atlanta is estimated to generate $1 billion in revenue, but the city is expecting to only make $4 million. “The money is all going to corporations,” Collins said, “but we’re not seeing a penny. We’re paying for this World Cup, but we’re not benefiting from it.”

Many Atlantans still remember when the city hosted the 1996 Olympics. Before those games, the city displaced thousands of people from their homes and jailed unhoused individuals in order to make way for the influx of athletes and fans. Play Fair ATL worked with students at Georgia State University to host a roundtable discussion of the 1996 Olympics and a historical walking tour of the affected neighborhoods.

The group organized a “People’s Cup” tournament in April to educate the public about expensive ticket prices, immigration issues, and the city’s lack of engagement with the community.

Additionally, the group is pushing for policy changes such as a recent resolution passed by the City Council to expand diversion services for low-level arrests in anticipation of the World Cup. They are trying to form a tenants advocacy office for the city. Working with state and local legislators, they are supporting a ban on ICE detention warehouses. They are also advocating for a responsible contractor policy so workers can be paid a fair wage.

“We’re not just about the World Cup,” Collins said. “We’re setting ourselves up for mega events in general. Atlanta is going to have the Super Bowl in 2028 and Final Four in 2031.”

Spectacle LA

In Los Angeles, the games will take place at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, the newest and most expensive World Cup venue. For many LA residents, the stadium symbolizes the gentrification of Black and Latino neighborhoods in South Central LA.

In August 2025, the Anti Fascist Football Coalition, a transnational coalition of 50 organizations, launched a boycott of the World Cup games in the United States. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, one of the coalition members, said in a statement that the United States has become a “hostile environment for people of the world—particularly for Black, Brown, Indigenous, migrant, and non-European peoples” and should not be allowed to “normalize its violence and international gangsterism.”

After the United States bombed Iran and Trump threatened to wipe out its “whole civilization,” it’s unclear whether Iran’s soccer team will play in the games. Iran is scheduled to play on June 16, 2026, in Los Angeles at the SoFi Stadium against New Zealand. Shortly after the bombing began, Trump posted that he did not think it was “appropriate” for Iran to play in the World Cup “for their own life and safety.” Iran’s sports minister has said that under these circumstances, the possibility of the team’s participation in the World Cup matches is “very low.” Iran wants to move its games to Mexico.

“The US shouldn’t be allowed to host the World Cup games,” said Eric Sheehan, from NOlympics, an organization founded to fight such mega-events in Los Angeles and a member of the coalition calling for a boycott. “And Israel should be kicked out of international football.”

People’s Football Club matches, similar to the ones in Atlanta, have been promoted in South Central Los Angeles in support of pro-Palestinian and anti-ICE causes. “The dream is to merge the athletic side of Los Angeles with the organizing side,” Sheehan said, “and hopefully radicalize people into understanding how life in the imperial core is connected to these spectacles.”

The movement is also getting traction among major labor organizations.

UNITE HERE Local 11, the union representing workers at the SoFi Stadium, is threatening to strike just weeks before the start of the World Cup games. It is calling for affordable housing, fair wages, protection from ICE raids, and that jobs won’t be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

Many union members are soccer fans, union copresident Kurt Petersen said: “They’re excited about the games, for sure, but they want to make sure the games benefit themselves and their communities.”

There are 2,000 workers at the newly built SoFi Stadium, including bartenders, servers, cooks, and dishwashers. There are so many workers, Petersen explained, because the stadium is designed around high-end suites. “They’re built for rich people, and those suites have a higher head count of workers per guest. Because they are paying a lot more for those seats, the expectations are higher.”

Half of the workforce there are Latino, “but there’s no daylight between [them] in terms of our position around ICE,” Peterson says. “When we had our first bargaining session, we had five or six workers, of all different backgrounds, tell the company, ‘No ICE in the games.’”

The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against operators of the SoFi Stadium and FIFA. “The presence of ICE,” Petersen argued, will “chill” collective bargaining because workers are fearful.

Despite efforts, the union has not heard back from FIFA. “FIFA is the power of these games. They have taken over the stadium,” Petersen said. “They are running everything in the stadium according to their own standards. So it’s really about FIFA deciding whether or not ICE is good for the games.”