A World Cup on American Soil, but Not Everyone Can Get In

The 2026 World Cup is the biggest one ever — 48 teams, 104 matches, and three host countries. It is also the first in years where simply getting to the stadium has become its own ordeal. For thousands of players and fans, the hardest opponent this summer isn't on the pitch. It's the U.S. border.

Consider the teams. Iran and Haiti both qualified, and both are on President Trump's travel ban list, which bars their citizens from entering the country. Ivory Coast and Senegal made the cut too, and they face partial restrictions of their own, the American Immigration Council reports. The administration carved out an exemption so athletes, coaches and support staff could still compete. Their fans got no such carve-out. The result is a strange split-screen: teams allowed in, the people who love them locked out.

Iran's situation has been the messiest. After a Truth Social post from Trump questioned the safety of the Iranian players if they traveled, the team moved its training base to Mexico and, per the American Immigration Council, was told to enter and leave the U.S. on the same day as each of its matches. Iran's football federation also says FIFA revoked tickets that had been set aside for its supporters.

Even fans from countries facing no ban at all are running into a wall: time. Getting a U.S. tourist visa means getting an interview, and in some places the line is staggering. CBS News reports that B-1/B-2 appointments can run 600 to 700 days out in Brazil, Colombia and Turkey, and more than 400 days in India, the UAE, Peru and Honduras. Do the math, and a fan from São Paulo who applied today might get seen sometime in 2028.

The government says it's trying to help. The State Department launched a program called "FIFA PASS" to fast-track interviews for ticket-holders, aiming to cut waits to about 60 days, and says it deployed more than 400 additional consular officers to chip away at the backlog. The catch, spelled out plainly in the State Department's own guidance: a priority interview is not a guarantee of approval. A consular officer can still say no, and there's no appeal that lands before kickoff. 

And the worry doesn't end at the consulate. For some, the trouble starts at the airport even with paperwork in hand. Africa's leading referee, Omar Artan of Somalia, was denied entry when he landed in Miami despite holding a valid passport and visa, and will miss the tournament; Iraq forward Aymen Hussein was held for hours and questioned at Chicago's O'Hare, his phone searched, according to Yahoo Sports. The Washington Post has reported a string of players and officials detained or barred at the border. ICE agents will be posted at stadiums in a security role, and the Department of Homeland Security has not ruled out arrests. Ahead of the tournament, Amnesty International and more than 100 rights groups issued a travel warning flagging racial profiling, intrusive searches and the risk of detention — the kind of advisory usually aimed at travel to trouble spots, not the host of the world's biggest sporting event.

That uncertainty is already showing up in the numbers. Travel agencies and airlines report that fans from Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and several African nations are scaling back or scrapping trips to U.S. host cities, worried less about the visa stamp than about what happens at the airport. The fear of being turned around at the gate is enough to keep some people home. And it cuts both ways: the host cities that signed up for a tourism windfall are the ones absorbing the empty seats and quiet hotels, with one survey of host-city hotels finding bookings well below what was expected. The barriers meant to control who comes in are also thinning out the crowd everyone was counting on.

None of this is how organizers pictured the celebration. FIFA promised a tournament that would unite the planet, and the soccer itself may still deliver. But for the families who saved for years to follow their team across an ocean, the message has landed differently. The world was invited. Not all of it can come.