If any country knows about sports and fascism, it’s Germany.
In 1931, Berlin won its bid to host the 1936 Summer Olympics. Two years later, the failed former coup leader Adolf Hitler was in control, his Nazis were brutalizing citizens in the street and antisemitism was government policy. Calls by athletes, organizations and even some Olympic officials for relocation subsequently dogged the Games, which nonetheless took place on schedule in Berlin.
Hitler got his one-of-a-kind global propaganda stage, and humanity got a timeless lesson on the perils of letting a dictator’s show go on, no matter what.
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So it stiffened some antiauthoritarian spines last week when Oke Gottlich, a vice president of Germany’s national soccer association, wondered aloud if things had gotten so bad in America that participating nations might consider boycotting the 2026 World Cup (which will also have matches in Mexico and Canada).
I’m a sports nut whose kids dream of seeing Norwegian superstar Erling Haaland suit up on American soil for the old country. In normal times, I would be the last person to welcome a boycott. But these aren’t normal times. So here’s my answer to Gottlich:
Do it now. Boycott the World Cup. And start talking about the 2028 Olympics.
The United States that was picked almost a decade ago to host the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics isn’t the same country today. This isn’t to say things were fine in 2017 and 2018, when America won its bids for both events: Donald Trump was president, various “Muslim bans” were in force and Charlottesville happened – but America would snap back, right?
Jon Regardie
Oh, we’ve snapped all right.
Today, our country is led by a man who tried to overturn an election and instigated an attempted coup. Where the judiciary declared a president’s criminal acts unprosecutable if they were “official” and Ok’d the detention of people if their perceived ethnicity is a “relevant factor.” Where the president identifies and targets minorities he wants his followers to believe undermine the national character (as he understands it, of course).
And all that happened before unaccountable brute squads started killing dissidents in the street. Why would any sane government send its athletes – and by extension those athletes’ fans – into all that?
And this isn’t just about visitors’ safety. A boycott would signal support for Americans in besieged cities and tell perpetrators of the violence that none of this is normal. That a place where protesters are shot and children coming home from school are abducted by federal agents is a fundamentally different society than the one thought stable enough to host the World Cup.
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It would also deprive the president of a propaganda asset as he seeks to maximize his authoritarian overreach. And if you think Trump will resist making a globally televised, quadrennial sporting event about himself, two things: This is a guy who shit-talked President Obama at a Boy Scouts Jamboree, and I have a FIFA Peace Prize to award you.
Predictably, there are warnings that the host cities would incur catastrophic financial hits from World Cup and Olympic boycotts. In Los Angeles, some City Council members have expressed concerns about local taxpayers having to backfill lost revenues if tourists and athletes stay home in 2028.
Such worries are real – and comparatively meaningless. Take it from someone raised by grandparents who vividly recalled the depredations of full-blown fascism: A boycott’s costs pale in comparison to the future horror invited by letting the show go on amid the assault on American democracy.
This is a conundrum: Boycott the World Cup and deprive Donald Trump the world stage he craves? Or boycott the World Cup and deprive host cities an economic boost and regional pride?
Considering armed and masked immigration enforcement officers apparently have a license to kill; considering journalists are arrested; considering the 2026 election is being threatened, starting with the FBI's seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia; considering the Department of Justice is Trump’s weapon of mass revenge; considering the extortion of universities; and considering the ruthless assault on our democracy, a boycott seems the right choice.
Donna Sloan
Paul Thornton
