The escalating conflict in the Middle East has created extraordinary circumstances for the world’s biggest sports event, the World Cup.
With the tournament just over three months away, FIFA, the global governing body of soccer, is trying to come to terms with the fact that the United States, a host country, has gone to war with a participating nation.
Hours after the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran started on Saturday, FIFA officials were in Wales for what would ordinarily be a low-key annual gathering to discuss the game’s rules. But they also found themselves considering contingencies to replace Iran at the 48-nation tournament that will mostly be played in the United States. Mexico and Canada are co-hosting.
The timing of the attack is particularly awkward for FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. In December, Mr. Infantino presented the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize to President Trump, with whom he has developed a close relationship. Mr. Infantino has not commented publicly on the conflict.
Iran, one of the first teams from Asia to qualify for the World Cup, was drawn to play group-stage games on the West Coast. Two games are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles, home to one of the world’s largest Iranian diasporas, and one is planned for Seattle.
FIFA was monitoring events in the Persian Gulf, said Mr. Infantino’s top aide, Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom, at a news conference in Wales on Saturday. He did not say, however, if Iran’s participation in the World Cup was in peril. Iran’s first game was scheduled for June 16. President Trump told Politico on Monday that he did not care if Iran played.
There are several possible scenarios for Iran’s exiting the World Cup. The team could withdraw from the tournament or the United States could bar it from entering the country. Iranian nationals have been prohibited from traveling to the United States since June 2025 under a travel ban by the Trump administration that exempted athletes, coaches and support staff traveling for major sports events, including the World Cup.
Iranian officials have cast doubt on their team’s presence at the World Cup following the attacks that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope,” said Iran’s top soccer official, Mehdi Taj, a vice president of the Asian Football Confederation who was denied a visa by U.S. officials to attend December’s tournament draw.
Teams still vying for the final spots of the World Cup, which will be decided later this month, have also been affected. Iraq said its Australian coach, Graham Arnold, cannot leave the United Arab Emirates because of airspace closures, while players and officials have been unable to obtain visas to Mexico because embassies have closed amid the conflict.
Andrew Giuliani, the top U.S. official involved with planning the World Cup, celebrated the fall of Iran’s leader on social media on Saturday, saying, “We’ll deal with soccer games tomorrow.”
The World Cup is not the only global sports event affected by geopolitical crises. The Middle East conflict comes just days before the start of the Winter Paralympics in Italy.
For the first time since 2014, a Russian team will compete at the Paralympics under its own flag, leading to Ukraine and some neighboring states announcing boycotts of Friday’s opening ceremony.
Russia has been a sports pariah, banned from major events including the World Cup and the Olympics for years, because of a huge state-backed doping program and, more recently, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“Will representatives of Finland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland and Estonia boycott the Paralympic Games due to the participation of the US and Israeli teams in the wake of their strike on Iran?” Russia’s sports minister, Mikhail Degtyarev, wrote on social media on Saturday, naming a group of countries that had joined Ukraine in planning to boycott the opening ceremony.
The International Olympic Committee released a statement on Tuesday describing its Olympic Truce as “an aspirational and nonbinding resolution.” It had in 2022 cited the resolution as one of the reasons for supporting its ban on Russia.
“At every edition of the Olympic Games, the I.O.C. has to deal with the consequences of the current political context and the latest developments in the world,” the statement said.
Other events, including preparatory games for the World Cup, are also in doubt. Egypt is scheduled to play Saudi Arabia and the European champion, Spain, in Qatar at the end of the month. Spain is also scheduled to play Argentina, the defending world champion, in a marquee match there. But, with Qatar among the Gulf nations being targeted by Iranian missile strikes, it is likely those games will have to be moved.
Several other sports have also been affected as the Gulf region has grown over the past two decades into a major hub for sporting events.
Formula One, the biggest competition in motorsports, said several teams had had to reroute staff ahead of the season opening race in Australia on Sunday.
“I’m guessing there’d be close to a thousand people that would have already booked their flights and would be landing somewhere between today, tomorrow, Wednesday — they had to all be changed,” Travis Auld, chief executive of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, told the broadcaster Channel Nine.
Participants at a tennis tournament in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday were sent scurrying by a drone attack, and remaining matches were suspended.
Tariq Panja is a global sports correspondent, focusing on stories where money, geopolitics and crime intersect with the sports world.
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