SEATTLE — The tickets were the kind of gift that does not come twice. Twenty free seats to a World Cup round-of-16 match in Seattle, the sort that resell for around a thousand dollars each, handed to a youth-soccer academy whose kids come mostly from low-income immigrant families. Ali Abdulla gave every one of them back.
Abdulla runs the African Youth Sports Academy, and the decision to return the tickets was not really his alone. It came from the parents. After Somali referee Omar Artan was barred from entering the United States, the families of his 13-to-16-year-old players told him they could not in good conscience take the seats. “We feel heartbroken, we feel betrayed,” was the message Abdulla relayed. “We don’t feel right to go celebrate.”
What he said next is the part that stays with you. “I felt so emotional when the parents said that,” Abdulla recalled, “because to return a one-time opportunity for solidarity with our boy, that made me very proud to lead this organization.” The boy he means is Artan, a man none of these children has met, the first Somali referee ever chosen to officiate at a World Cup, and now the most famous person their community knows of who was turned away at an American airport.
The cost of the gesture is real, and Abdulla knows exactly who is paying it. The kids, he said, “are very sad, man, very heartbroken,” and then he framed it the way a coach frames a hard loss: “We have to teach them to stand up for the right thing.” The tickets did not go to waste. They were reallocated to the Somali Health Board, another local group that sponsors youth soccer, so that the seats would still be filled by the community even if not by his kids.
Abdulla is not a man with leverage to spare. A former semi-professional player with the Seattle Somali Stars who hung up his boots in 2017, he now works security on the city’s light rail, and he had signed on as a volunteer World Cup ambassador, the person who would have welcomed arriving fans and pointed them toward the stadium. He has withdrawn from that too. He says he will not watch a single match on television.
The protest is small in the accounting of a tournament this size, twenty seats among millions, and it will not change a CBP decision or move a single official in Zurich or Washington. That is not what it is for. Artan was interviewed for eleven hours at Miami and sent back to Istanbul despite a valid visa, and the only public reason ever offered was an anonymous official’s claim of unspecified ties, a charge he has never been allowed to answer. A youth club in Seattle decided that the appropriate response to an unanswerable accusation was to refuse the celebration built on top of it.
There is a coda that the families in Seattle may not have heard yet. The same week his case became a symbol, UEFA named Artan to officiate its Super Cup in Salzburg in August, the first African ever given the assignment, a quiet rebuttal from one federation to another country’s verdict. The official America would not let in will work one of European football’s showcase nights. What Abdulla’s kids will remember is not that ending, which they could not have known when they made their choice. They will remember that the adults around them gave something up for a stranger, and called it the right thing to do.
