LOS ANGELES — Iran’s footballers will open their World Cup in a stadium with no place set aside for the people who came to cheer them. Days before the tournament begins, the United States, one of its three hosts, has revoked Iran’s entire allocation of tickets for its supporters, leaving the national team’s fans unable to buy a single seat through official channels for any of its group games.
Iran’s football federation said the withdrawal stripped away the quota that FIFA guarantees every competing nation, normally 8 percent of the tickets for each match. The body had already begun selling those seats to fans for Iran’s group fixtures against New Zealand, Belgium and Egypt, with supporters making travel plans around them, when the allocation was pulled. “With less than three days remaining until the start of the 2026 World Cup,” the federation said, “the United States has once again acted to obstruct the presence of Iranian supporters,” and it is now unable to provide even a single ticket to its own people.
The fans are merely the last to be cut out. Iran’s players reached the United States only on conditional visas granted ten days before kickoff, with a carve-out barring anyone tied to the Revolutionary Guard and several staff refused entry outright. Days later the same border turned away a Somali referee who held a valid visa, expelling one of FIFA’s 52 match officials at Miami airport. Now the supporters, the least powerful party of all, have been removed from the equation entirely.
None of it is happening in a vacuum. President Donald Trump signed an order halting visa issuance for a list of countries that includes Iran, which Washington brands a state sponsor of terrorism, with full bans on Iranian and Haitian nationals and partial bans on Ivory Coast and Senegal. Roughly 150 Ghanaian fans have already had their applications rejected, and there are no special World Cup exemptions for supporters from the nineteen countries caught by the travel ban. The host that sold this tournament as a celebration of nations is staging one of the most exclusionary editions in its history.
For Iranians the measure reads as collective punishment, ordinary people barred from a football match because of the passport they carry, at a moment when the United States is already at war footing with their country. The squad arrived on American soil wearing pins reading 168, the number of children killed when a US missile hit their school in Minab. The players were allowed in to be beaten on the scoreboard; their countrymen have been told they may not even watch.
The contrast with the imagery the host prefers is hard to miss. The same administration that has posed with the World Cup trophy at the White House, presenting the tournament as proof of American openness, has quietly ensured that one participating nation’s people stay home. More than 120 rights groups, led by the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, have warned visitors of the risks of travelling to the United States for the games, with immigration agents expected to operate around the stadiums.
FIFA, whose own rulebook promises each federation its share of seats, has let a host set that rule aside for a political target and has said little in public about it. The organisation never tires of describing football as a force that unites the world across every border, a message that sits awkwardly beside the host’s immigration policy. When the unifying ideal collides with Washington’s politics, it is the ideal that has given way.
So Iran will take the field in Los Angeles and play to a crowd made up of everyone except its own. Whether FIFA restores the allocation, or whether any Iranian supporter finds a way through the wall of vetoes and bans, is still unsettled. What is already clear is the message the host has sent before a ball has been kicked: at the tournament that calls itself the world’s, some nations are welcome and some are not.
