A World Cup boycott has to be a live threat all the way up to June

With reality being made and unmade daily, football can’t know whether this week’s apparent de-escalation over Greenland ends, or merely suspends, talk of a boycott of next summer’s World Cup.

According to the Grand Old Duke of York, military force in Greenland is suddenly off the agenda, along with tariffs on European nations who defend the Nato charter. With such volatility in the US president’s policy-making, a World Cup boycott – or boycotts by individual nations – will stay on the table until June, if only in theory.

Until a year ago, when Donald Trump returned to office, the idea of cold-shouldering a World Cup in America would have seemed hallucinogenic.

The 2018 tournament proceeded despite Russia endangering the whole city of Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok. Qatar 2022 went ahead despite human rights objections. The 2034 version coasts into Saudi Arabia with disquiet smothered before it could start.

And yet, out of the miasma of disorder comes the creeping assertion that the US, with its high visa walls, militarised immigration policing and adventurism abroad, is no place for a football team or its fans to be.

The picture of America as aggressor, as rogue state, is not one the world could have imagined even as Trump returned to the White House last year in a scrum of America First ideologues.

The disorientation in global politics was bound to spread to this World Cup. We should allow it to – not because moral distaste is widespread. The reasons are more specific: Canadian statehood being threatened, Danish territory being menaced by a fellow Nato member (as it may be again) and South American countries being placed on notice of possible attack.

In Britain, 26 MPs tabled a motion calling for the US to be “excluded” from the World Cup and other international competitions until it complies with international law.

In Germany, a foreign policy spokesman for the Christian Democratic Union party, Jürgen Hardt, said a boycott should be kept as a “last resort”. The German minister for sport, however, said the decision rested with the German FA and Fifa.

On the left in French politics, Éric Coquerel demanded that America be stripped of hosting rights but France’s government said it currently had “no desire” to withdraw. So far these are rumblings, rather than becominga campaign.

There is plenty of time, though, for more chaos to shape deliberations. A pattern is set of inflammatory actions that could produce more flashpoints between now and the World Cup kicking off on 11 June. Peace now with Europe and Denmark wouldn’t guarantee a serene tournament because the Trump administration is advancing on so many fronts.

Maybe America could annex Fifa instead. Its president, Gianni Infantino, has already passed the Uriah Heep sycophancy exam, granting Trump a made-up peace prize that hasn’t assuaged the president’s obsession with the Nobel version.

Never before has a World Cup approached with the main host menacing its neighbours. Or bullying its co-hosts – Canada and Mexico. The co-hosting arrangement is a complication for proponents of a boycott. A no-show in the US punishes Canada and Mexico as well.

The recurring point is that a World Cup boycott would be small beer compared with the craziness all around. Which is not to say it should not happen. It’s too soon to know what the world will look like in June.

Rather, the sense is that we shouldn’t fear a mass pull-out, or the tournament collapsing, because it wouldn’t be the calamity it would have been in previous years. Ukraine and Gaza are calamities. Nato imploding would be a calamity (not for Russia and China). A football World Cup falling foul of extreme geopolitical instability? Notso much.

What would the gains be? The chastening effect on Trumpism can only be guessed at. It would hurt, for sure, and provoke retaliation. The tariff stick would doubtless come back out. A veto would need more than mere symbolic value. Sporting boycotts diminish human experience and rarely make a lasting point. The Americans boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan the previous year. In 2001, America launched its own invasion of Afghanistan – for different reasons, but with similarly dire consequences.

Sport’s mantra of “bringing people together” sounds like marketing chat but tournaments really do weave that kind of magic. These, however, aren’t normal times. The chief World Cup host is one who invites Vladimir Putin on to a “peace board” and tells European leaders at Davos: “Without us, you’d be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps.”

Being constantly offended, as we are, isn’t a good enough reason to withdraw from an event that belongs to everyone, not just Infantino and Trump. Arguably the biggest losers would be the “minnows” who have qualified for an expanded 48-team tournament: Curaçao, Haiti, Cape Verde, Jordan and Uzbekistan. Scotland, too, would be aggrieved at missing their first World Cup for 28 years.

But this isn’t a typical boycott conversation. The world needs all the pushback it can find. Countries need at least to reserve the option of not turning up.

One kind of retreat is already detectable: emotional disengagement from a devalued spectacle. If this World Cup didn’t happen or took place in truncated form it would be sad, but not tragic. Football is omnipresent anyway and in these times there’s much bigger stuff to be upset about.

Photograph by Hector Vivas – FIFA via Getty Images