The useful fiction

Posted on: 18 March 2026

The story arrives wearing a sports headline: Iran wants its World Cup 2026 matches moved from the United States to Mexico, citing the safety of its players in a country now actively at war with their own. The Iranian football federation president has said the team will not set foot on American soil. Trump has replied that while Iranian players would be "welcome," they probably shouldn't travel "for their own life and safety." FIFA has said nothing publicly. Three weeks into an open military conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, football finds itself being used as a stage for something considerably larger than a fixture relocation request.

The sporting dimension is almost beside the point.

The American soccer market, however much it has grown, does not register alongside the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball. Three group-stage matches in Los Angeles and Seattle generate no meaningful commercial anxiety for American sponsors if they disappear. Anyone analysing this through the lens of sport business is looking at the wrong thing entirely.

The mechanism worth examining operates at a different level: institutional legitimacy in wartime.

Iran did not submit this request because it particularly wants to play in Guadalajara rather than Los Angeles. It has used FIFA as an arena to construct a precise international narrative: we are the reasonable party, willing to participate in the world's largest sporting event, and it is the Americans who are making our presence impossible. When Trump declared the Iranian team should not travel "for their own life and safety," he handed Tehran a perfect quotation, an explicit contradiction between the word "welcome" and the substance of what followed, which Iran immediately converted into rhetorical ammunition.

This is the classic structure of the aggrieved reasonable party in conflict: force the opponent into making the first visible move, then occupy the position of the rational victim before an international audience. Football provides a global stage that no diplomatic communiqué can match.

There is, however, an architectural flaw in the solution being requested, and it is worth noting because it reveals something deeper about the entire exercise. Even if FIFA agreed to relocate Iran's group matches to Mexico, Iran could still find itself required to play in the United States in the knockout rounds, depending on where it finishes in the group. There is even a scenario, should both teams advance, in which Iran faces the United States on American soil. The request as presented does not solve the problem it claims to address: it defers it by three matches.

This suggests, with reasonable confidence, that the request was never designed to function as a genuine logistical solution. It is an instrument of positioning, not a negotiation conducted in good faith.

Which brings us to the more consequential mechanism: FIFA is trapped in a situation for which it has no institutional tools.

The organisation has built its authority on a specific operational fiction: political neutrality. Nations that refuse to speak to each other diplomatically meet on the pitch. Authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies compete under the same rulebook. FIFA functions as a buffer space where politics is, at least in the official narrative, left outside the dressing room. This fiction serves a real purpose. It allows the tournament to exist across geopolitical fault lines that would otherwise make it impossible.

The problem is that the fiction works under specific conditions: managed rivalry. When two countries despise each other but are not shooting, sporting neutrality is sustainable. When the conflict becomes hot, open, with military strikes and deaths at the highest levels of the Iranian command structure, the fiction fractures. Not because anyone has chosen to violate it, but because the conditions that made it viable no longer exist.

Infantino had moved with his customary tactical dexterity: on 10 March he had secured a public assurance from Trump that Iran would be welcome at the tournament. Trump then contradicted that assurance a week later, leaving FIFA in an impossible position, having guaranteed something its interlocutor had publicly withdrawn. This is not a diplomatic mishap. It is a structural demonstration of a problem that international sporting institutions do not yet know how to handle: what happens when the host nation is an active party to a conflict involving a participating nation?

Britain understands this dynamic rather well. The history of sport as political instrument runs deep here: the 1980 Moscow boycott, the debates over South Africa's exclusion from international cricket and rugby, the persistent questions about hosting rights awarded to states whose conduct sits uncomfortably with the neutrality claim. The pattern is consistent across decades: when geopolitical conflict reaches a certain temperature, the institution's declared neutrality becomes not a protection but a liability, because every decision, including the decision to do nothing, is read as a political act.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics remain the sharpest example of an institution that chose to proceed, trusting in its capacity to separate sport from politics in a context where that separation had already collapsed. The 2026 case is structurally different but shares the core feature: an institution designed for one set of conditions being asked to perform in conditions it was not built for.

What makes the 2026 situation operationally more complex than any historical precedent is the sheer logistical scale. Forty-eight teams across three countries, with broadcasting rights, commercial agreements and venue allocations already fixed, leaves FIFA with almost no margin for manoeuvre. Any decision, whether to accommodate Iran's request or to decline it, produces cascading consequences that no sporting institution is equipped to manage in the remaining months before kick-off.

The question worth holding onto, as this develops over the coming weeks, is not whether Iran will play in Mexico or the United States or not at all. That is the surface question. The structural question is whether institutions built on the fiction of neutrality can survive in a world where hot conflicts are accelerating faster than the planning cycles of global events. FIFA arrives here first. It will not be the last institution to discover that the rules written for a world of managed rivalry perform poorly in one of open wars.

The useful fiction has a shelf life. What comes after it is a question nobody in Zurich, or anywhere else, appears to have an answer for yet.