Even if you weren’t a basketball fan, and thought Michael Jordan was just an athletic footwear designer, you very likely now know that the 2026 NBA Finals is a championship contest between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks.
How could that possibly be, you wonder, this formerly arcane and uninteresting informational tidbit at your disposal?
Essentially,
‘Thank you for your attention to this matter’.
The President of United States, one Donald J. Trump.
He decided to show up for game 3 at Madison Square Gardens in New York on Monday and flipped the table on the proceedings, transforming a sporting event into a political shitshow, holding 18K spectators inside the arena hostage and creating a military zone for blocks in midtown Manhattan. Holed up in the suite of James Dolan, the already reviled, creepy surveillance-mad, nepo baby Knicks owner, the president’s mere presence at the game made it increasingly difficult to pull for an end to the New York team’s 53 year championship drought. Blue has become red, red, blue.
As big as it is, the NBA Championship, an upper tier sporting spectacle, followed at a healthy global level, imagine this dynamic at perhaps the second largest international athletic event in the world. Never mind. You don’t have to. World Cup 2026 kicks off today in all its red, white & blue, stars & stripes gory.
That all 48 qualifying teams in the tournament have shown up in North America to compete is a testament to the sports’ full commitment to setting politics aside and just playing the game. Hell, human rights qualms were summarily ignored in 2022 in Qatar. Ditto Russia in 2018. Games meant to transcend ideology and all that. Gold, silver and bronze made into green, lots and lots of green.
Leave your politics at the door.
Except,
that’s a barn door already left wide open.
Visas denied arbitrarily, if by ‘arbitrarily’ I mean out of pure racism. Tickets revoked for fans of a country under bombardment by the United States. Team members from that same country unable to stay in between games in the U.S. because, well, the U.S.
Back in 2018 when the U.S.-Canada-Mexico bid to host the 2026 World Cup was granted, perhaps the majority of FIFA members voting in favour of the bid believed the Trump era would be thing of the past. At worst, a possible second Trump term would be two years in the rearview mirror, the country on the mend. There’s no way he’d still be president in 2026, they thought, they hoped, the prayed, when checking their ballot.
Or perhaps, FIFA members couldn’t give a fuck. World Cup history would point in that direction. Money’s money, the more of it the better. The politics of the moment don’t change that.
And nothing that’s occurred since then suggests any change of that mindset.
Last year, when 45-47 was whining about nobody giving him a Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary efforts to restore calm and serenity around the globe, the equally greasy president of the football organization, Gianni Infantino, awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize. A meaningless gesture attempting to placate an insatiable ego intent on devouring the world in the hopes of filling the massive void that passes for a human soul. FIFA and Trump, two peas in a pod. FIFA, the Donald Trump of international sports organizations.
Don’t allow that, though, to distract you from the game, the beautiful game. The Beautiful Game™. Leave it on the pitch, and all that. For five weeks, push politics aside and be a fan not a partisan. Don’t let Trump to steal the spotlight. Don’t let FIFA stench taint the game.
Nice, rosy sentiments that already ring rote and hollow.
No matter how great this tournament plays out, how magnificent some of the games may be, the upsets, the upstarts, the comebacks and blowouts, outcomes determined by penalty kicks—What the fuck is that, even?—if your team wins it all and hoists the trophy, that’s not how history’s going to remember it. Donald Trump won’t let it. World Cup 2026 already is and will only ever be remembered for that time the World Cup came to Donald Trump’s America.