The World Cup Is Coming to America—and Heading for Disaster

When it comes to soccer, the U.S. Men’s National Team’s preparations for the 2026 World Cup are in crisis mode. A humiliating loss to Panama, the tiny Latin American nation most recently invaded by the U.S. in 1989, followed by a loss to Uruguay, sent the United States crashing out of the 2024 Copa America on home soil. The result bodes poorly for the U.S. team’s hopes to impress when it hosts the 2026 World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico.

But it’s not just the U.S. team that’s looking wobbly in the lead-up to 2026. The 2024 Copa America has also raised serious questions about the United States’ ability to successfully host 78 out of the 104 World Cup matches slated by FIFA to occur in the United States in just two years. Most recently, chaos in Miami ahead of the Colombia-Argentina final resulted in the game’s delay after many football fans without tickets entered the stadium. In the wake of that disaster, whispered questions about the USA’s fitness as a World Cup host have become a roar.

Compare the experience of the United States hosting Copa America with that of Germany hosting the simultaneous European Championship. While stadiums and streets from Dortmund to Leipzig burst with energy and life, the big U.S. stadiums have often seemed empty by comparison, when not descending into chaos as in Miami. No European coach has criticized the very pitch conditions or security situation of the games in Germany the way Uruguay’s coach Marcelo Bielsa condemned the security and pitch conditions in the United States.

Yet it is not the football or fan culture or quality that’s the issue. Latin American fans are, if anything, even more enthusiastic than their European counterparts. Instead, the sometimes dour, sometimes dangerous ambience to be found in the massive NFL-turned-Copa stadiums has much more to do with the United States own deep seated social, political, and infrastructure crisis. From dangerously hot temperatures to price-gouging over parking, the United States’ societal foibles are being exposed by football fans from across the Western Hemisphere. It’s a serious wake-up call for the United States ahead of the 2026 World Cup, prompting deeper questions about American society from gun violence to migrant rights.

Now, 2026 is the United States’ chance to showcase itself to the world. The U.S. success in hosting the World Cup at home may well be measured up against a major theme of Biden’s presidency—the question as to whether democracies can still deliver. In 2026, the U.S. will set out to prove that democracies not only still deliver the basics, but can put on a show to rival the accomplishments of any authoritarian society.

Yet this dream finds itself in growing risk of being tripped up as so many players have been on the poor quality of U.S. soccer pitches. One issue is simply distance. While Qatar was criticized as too small to host a World Cup, the U.S. might be too big. In contrast to Germany, where it was feasible for legions of festive Scottish fans to travel from Munich to Cologne to Stuttgart, it is hard to imagine groups of visiting Argentines fans following their team from Atlanta up to New Jersey and back south to Miami. The lack of U.S. population density jumps out here. California, which will host games in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, has 39 million people in 163,696 square miles. Meanwhile, Germany boasts more than 83 million people in 138,067 square miles.

Heavy traffic moves along Interstate 5 in Los Angeles on Nov. 23, 2022.Mario Tama/Getty Images

Yet it’s not so much the distances involved that will make getting around the U.S. difficult for visiting fans, so much as the lack of public transit. In Germany, even amidst Deutsche Bahn delays generating much tension and political controversy, it is plausible to get from Frankfurt to Berlin via a high-speed train in around five hours, and for less than filling up your car with gas. There is no comparable way to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles, both 2026 host cities, with California’s efforts to build high speed rail perhaps the greatest ongoing example of the decline of U.S. state capacity—and a sharp contrast to what China’s high speed rail efforts have been able to achieve, not to mention Spain’s. Biden has, to his credit, invested federal resources to get California’s high-speed rail project unstuck, but it’s already clear the San Francisco to Los Angeles line will not be operational by 2026. Instead visiting fans will have to purchase flights or rent cars, on top of getting to the United States in the first place.

Even once inside a host city, the transportation challenge getting to the stadium will continue to be a significant issue. During the Copa America, fans were exposed to the grim reality that is major event parking in the United States. It cost $80 to park at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles for the Mexico-Venezuela match, on top of $130 cheap seat tickets. It was not possible for Mexican and Venezuelan fans to take a metro or tram line to the stadium from downtown Los Angeles to SoFi stadium, just as it was not possible for Colombian and Argentine fans to take a metro or tram line from downtown Miami to the Hard Rock Stadium. In contrast, English and Spanish fans could take an S-Bahn from Brandenburger Tor right to the Olympiastadion Berlin for the Euro final in Berlin. But in the U.S., fans must make their way through the stadium through massive parking lots of sizzling concrete—unpleasant, chaotic, and hot conditions that no doubt contributed to the chaos ahead of the Copa America final.

The cost and sheer hassle of getting to games leads directly to the many empty seats visible in many of the Copa America telecasts. Significant investments in public transit ahead of the 2026 World Cup would be a no-brainer—yet the extremely low likelihood that these investments will be made, or that they would be able to finish such public infrastructure projects in two years speaks volumes about America’s weakened state capacity and lack of political vision or ambition. Qatar’s ability to build entire stadiums and public transit infrastructure from scratch ahead of 2022 seems the image of dynamism in comparison—a sobering thought for proponents of democracy, as well as worker and migrant rights. Thankfully, the Biden administration has begun to take action against Ticketmaster and other ticket-seller monopolies that were responsible for much of the outrageous price gouging in Copa America ticket sales, forcing these online platforms to at least show the full price of a ticket up front.

Montenegro supporters clash with security personnel and riot police during the Euro 2024 qualifying match between Serbia and Montenegro in Belgrade on Oct. 17, 2023. Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images

There is also a real concern regarding fan safety in the United States. Europe is often criticized for its hooligan culture, and indeed the 2024 Euros included the usual clashes between rival groups of fans, such as the English and Serbian fans who fought each other in the German streets. Yet it’s actually a sign of a healthier society that young European men can cheerfully engage in street combat, safe in the knowledge that not even the most violent hooligan brawl is likely to turn into a gun battle. In contrast, major sporting events in the U.S. require almost airport-like security. Multiple developed nations even issue travel advisories regarding the U.S. epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings, a topic the international press will certainly revisit in 2026. The recent attempted assassination of Trump will send a message to football fans from around the world: No one can be sure they are safe in America, certainly not in public, crowded spaces.

All of the above describe challenges that visiting fans will face in the United States in 2026. But for many fans perhaps the biggest challenge for most fans will be simply getting to the U.S. in the first place. Leaving aside the cost of a plane ticket, getting a visa to the United States is impossible for many of the world’s football-loving people. While Germany’s Euros benefited from fans from across Europe easily moving through the Schengen Area to cheer on their teams, the United States has spent years creating an Anti-Schengen Area across most of the Western Hemisphere, with Latin American states now imposing visa requirements on their neighbors at the behest of the United States’ migration management strategy.

I have personally known Mexican nationals denied visas to attend the funerals of their U.S. citizen relatives. Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, U.S. consular officials don’t even owe U.S. citizens an explanation for why their relatives were denied a visa. In such a harsh and arbitrary visa system, in which visiting dying relatives or securing life-saving medical care requires navigating a callous and complicated bureaucracy, how many die-hard fans from across the world will be denied the chance to cheer on their teams? This is before even considering the very real possibility that in 2026 we will be in the middle of a second Trump administration that has promised a historic crackdown on immigration. There’s also an honest question: If Iran qualifies for the 2026 World Cup, as it has for the past four consecutive tournaments, would its visiting fans be allowed in?

This brings us to the question of migrant rights. While migrant rights—or human rights more generally—have never been a priority for FIFA, discussion of migrant rights became a major part of Western commentary in the lead-up to the Qatar World Cup in 2022. Like in Qatar, extreme heat is also a significant factor in the deaths of many migrant workers in the United States.

The United States’ increasingly extreme heat waves also impact the course of a football tournament. Brazil’s Copa match against Colombia at Levi Stadium in Santa Clara kicked off with the temperature at 98 degrees, as California experienced a dangerous heat wave that also impacted many immigrant farm workers in the fields. Extreme heat also assuredly played a role in the chaos and danger outside of the final in Miami, with fans fainting outside the stadium. Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting local governments from instituting their own local heat protections. When it comes to heat safety, hosting a final in Florida might be little better than hosting it in Qatar.

A protester holds a red card during a demonstration in Paris against the 2022 World Cup in Qatar on Nov. 20, 2022.Julien de Rosa /AFP via Getty Images

Given Russia and Qatar’s experience, the question as to whether the World Cup can foster any lasting positive change in a hosting society is decidedly undecided. After hosting the World Cup, Russia has effectively given up on any hope of being part of the international football world it played host to as recently as 2018. While many international football players still play there, Russia has been banned from international football in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and did not participate in either the 2022 World Cup in Qatar or the 2024 Euro Cup in Germany. Qatar for its part claimed to make significant progress in response to migrant and labor rights concerns in 2022—the lasting impact of which remains to be seen.

Yet the United States should hold itself to its own standards, not those of Russia or Qatar, and certainly not those of FIFA. The 2026 World Cup is a chance for the United States to score a major goal in the game for global public opinion—to invite the world to discover a diverse nation with vibrant immigrant communities, strong labor protections, effective public transit, and safe, walkable cities surrounding world class stadiums. It would be a shame to miss the chance to score, having already gone to the trouble of getting the ball before the goal.