Last week, the US Men’s National Team defeated Australia in Seattle as part of the opening round of the FIFA World Cup. The Pacific Northwest is hosting several of the games being played across North America in this year’s championship.
Pacific University Political Science professor and former footballer Jules Boykoff points out that while soccer is a beautiful game, the high ticket prices, FIFA corruption, high carbon footprint and scandals of this year’s competition bring a world of contradictions. Boykoff joins us to discuss his latest book, “Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine”.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Jules Boykoff loves soccer. He should. He devoted many years of his life to playing it collegiately, professionally, and on the U.S. national under-23 team. Despite, or maybe because of that love, he is a fierce critic of the corporate apparatus around the sport. Boykoff is now a professor of political science at Pacific University. His latest book is called “Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine.” Jules Boykoff, it’s great to have you back on the show.
Jules Boykoff: Great to be with you, Dave.
Miller: Can you help us understand first, cause we’re gonna talk a lot about FIFA here, how does FIFA work?
Boykoff: FIFA is based in Switzerland, where it is technically a non-profit organization – although I must say it’s a remarkably profitable one – and it chooses the site of each World Cup for both the men and women. And it takes in money from those events and distributes it to football associations from countries around the world.
It also, the members, it must be said, live quite the five-star lifestyle. The president, his name is Gianni Infantino, rakes in about $6 million a year. If you sit on the FIFA council, a powerful body of around 37 people, you’ll be making around $250,000 to $300,000 a year to meet two or four times. So it’s good work if you can get it, Dave.
Miller: Where does FIFA get its money from?
Boykoff: The main source of money is what people are now watching on their television screens, the men’s World Cup. This is their cash cow. In fact, they say that they are on track to make more than $11 billion from the men’s World Cup here in 2026 alone. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the GDP of some 60 countries, including two that are actually participating in the World Cup, Cape Verde and Curacao, and so that’s a lot of money.
Miller: And is it the same kinds of things that prop up professional sports in the U.S.? Is it TV rights and beer sponsorships? I mean, where does, where does the $11 billion actually come from?
Boykoff: Well, I would describe the FIFA business model as one that socializes the cost of the football or soccer enterprise, and it privatizes the benefits. And what I mean by that, by socializing the costs, the host city and country pay for things like security. They pay for things like making sure medical staff are on hand for fans and others. They make sure that there’s fan zones for people to go to.They make sure that there’s things like transportation to get fans to the matches, and they provide all the human beings that point people in the right direction.Well, you’ll notice about all those things, Dave, that they’re incredibly difficult to monetize. And so you see these burdens falling on cities with real little chance to actually make the money back.
But on the flip side of the fence, you see FIFA, and they make most of their money from broadcasters, television broadcasters, as well as corporate sponsors, big name corporate sponsors like Saudi Aramco and many other corporate behemoths.
They also make it from ticket sales, and it’s been a little controversial because they’ve used what they call dynamic pricing, which sounds nice. I like dynamic stuff, Dave, but it’s not nice when you’re trying to buy a ticket, because it means basically they’re using this pricing model to extract the maximum amount out of you. So they take that. They take the concessions when you buy a bottle of water at the match. They take the parking fees, and so you can see that that totals up pretty quick to a lot of money for FIFA.
Miller: Just not that long ago, within the last decade, FIFA was caught up in a huge corruption investigation and scandal. What came from that?
Boykoff: Well, you did have a number of indictments around corruption, and even convictions. There were really two things happening there at the same time. One of them was an investigation into bribery allegations in 2010, when they were picking the host of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which went to Russia and Qatar respectively, so looking into the sort of suitcases of cash that might have been flowing between people.
The other controversy or scandal that was happening at that time involved payments that people were making illegally, which is to say bribes, to get things like prime television contracts. At that time in 2015, 2016, a lot of us thought, OK, finally we’re going to see some changes in FIFA. But I think you could argue that actually they’ve solidified their corruption and legalized it in certain ways. And in some ways FIFA really hasn’t changed that much at all.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, before, under the era of Sepp Blatter – that was the president when they had that big bust in 2015 – that was the time of suitcases full of cash, there was a guy from the United States named Chuck Blazer who actually rented an apartment at Trump Tower in New York for himself for $18,000 a month, and he also rented the apartment next door at $6,000 a month for his cats, Dave. I mean, that’s the kind of cash we’re talking about.
Miller: I read that in the book and I thought, that cannot be true. $6,000 a month for his cat?
Boykoff: Yeah. I mean, I love treating cats well, but you know, that is taking it to the next level. But today it’s different. I mean, we’re not looking at cats in $6,000 apartments. We’re instead looking at a model of business inside of FIFA that’s basically a client holistic patronage network. So FIFA takes in all those billions that we were talking about before, and they’ll be the first to tell you that they spread quite a lot of it out to different football associations around the world. And the way that works is, everyone gets a similar amount. So if you’re France, you get the same amount as Curacao. And what that does is it builds up allegiance from these football associations around the world. These people are happy to get the cash, especially because of the fact that there’s very little transparency on that cash. They can essentially do almost whatever they want with it, so then they’re loyal to Gianni Infantino.
So any wild idea that the president of FIFA might have, they have a tendency to go along with it, even if they’re not on that 37-member FIFA council, raking in those $250,000 to $300,000 salaries, their FAs are getting money. So it’s a system built up for obedience, and I think that explains a lot of what we’ve seen, even though Gianni Infante has been snuggling up to U.S. President Donald Trump, there’s been very little pushback from inside the organization.
Miller: You describe Gianni Infantino as, “The pulsing id of the FIFA greed machine, an acquiescent jester willing to shape shift for the sake of accumulating power.” What kinds of shapes has he shifted into?
Boykoff: Gianni Infantino is sycophantic at the molecular level, and he has a long history of sucking up to whomever he needs to, so I’d say his primary shape shift is one of obsequiousness. In 2018, ahead of the men’s World Cup in Russia, he went to Russia, cozied up to Putin, played soccer with him on the Red Square a few months before the tournament began. Afterwards he said it was the greatest tournament ever. Putin gave him this Special Order of Friendship, everything was just grand.
Then he moves up residence to Qatar for the men’s World Cup of 2022, where he basically runs interference. As you and your listeners will remember, there was a lot of pressure on Qatar, because some 6,500 migrant workers had died in the lead-up to that event, toiling on various facilities and venues, many of them directly related to the World Cup. Infantino moves residence to Qatar and keeps popping his head into the press saying, “Hey, let’s focus on soccer, not these other things, football unites the world, etc. etc.”
Fast forward to 2026, he gives Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize in December 2025. He shows up to Melania’s opening in Washington, D.C. He shows up to the Board of Peace meeting wearing one of those stylish MAGA red caps and giving the president a thumbs up. He’s basically spent more time in the Oval Office than any world leader out there, and he’s renting space from Trump at Trump Towers in New York just to cover all his bases. So I’d say the first and main shape that Gianni Infantino takes is one of sycophance.
Miller: How would you describe what these two men, Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump, get from this transactional relationship? Starting with Donald Trump, what does he get?
Boykoff: Well, I think it’s helpful to think about Donald Trump’s actions through the idea of sportswashing, and that’s when political leaders use sports to deflect attention from chronic social problems or human rights woes at home, and to try to make themselves look important or legitimate on the world stage while setting up opportunities for political, economic, diplomatic gain. That’s sportswashing in a nutshell, and it’s often been thrown at countries like Russia and Qatar, the ones I was just talking about, and accurately so. They absolutely engaged in sportswashing. But a core argument of the book is that is exactly what Donald Trump is doing.
I mean, what, Dave, might he be trying to deflect attention from? Could it be those Epstein files that still haven’t been fully released? Could it be the terrible way that the war against Iran that he’s been carrying out alongside Israel has been going? Could it possibly be his epically low, historically low approval ratings? I mean, you and I could make a list that could go on for the rest of the show of things he’s trying to deflect attention from. But this gives him a chance to look important. This gives him a chance to pose next to the most important people in the sport of soccer.
And it also sets up all sorts of political and economic and diplomatic opportunities. I mean, crass family moneymaking opportunities. Let’s not forget at the last World Cup in Qatar, there were pictures of Elon Musk and Jared Kushner hobnobbing it up in those luxury boxes that you and I will never be invited to, cutting deals and who knows what they were doing, and that’s really this opportunity for Trump. The lower that his approval ratings go, the more he has a propensity and inclination to cling to sports as a sort of political life raft, and let’s be clear, he has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in the modern history of the presidency.
Miller: In what other ways are you thinking about?
Boykoff: Well, just a few days ago, he hosted this UFC mixed martial arts fight right on the White House south lawn, for starters. He has a long-term relationship with mixed martial arts fighting, going back to 2001 when he hosted one of these events in the early days of UFC at one of his casinos. So he’s long been cozied up to people at UFC. He also has made it very clear, stated many times, that the World Cup of 2026, as well as the upcoming Olympics in Los Angeles, are crucial to his legacy as a president. And this is also a guy that, if you dip way back in history, he owned a professional American football team in the USFL.
He also, I would say, made use of sports in a more cagey way during the recent election where he beat Kamala Harris for the presidency, and what I mean by that is, he would appear on all these podcasts that were like mixed martial arts podcasts, and he wouldn’t talk about politics, he would just talk about sports; and it was really interesting to me, because I’ve been sort of grappling with this theory of whether one can be actually more effective politically by being less explicitly political, and in a way, going on those podcasts and not even talking about politics sort of tested that theory.
And Trump did extraordinarily well in the last election. If you look at the demographics that watch mixed martial arts fighting, they went in droves to Trump. And so he’s been using sports pretty effectively to his political advantage.
Miller: You mentioned the 2024 election. Would you have written a book about the 2026 World Cup if Kamala Harris had won?
Boykoff: Well, the truth of the matter is, Joe Biden, back in 2024, he instituted what’s called a National Special Security Event. This is a special designation that gives loads of federal entities the power to surveil and also to enforce the law and to engage in security matters in the host city of Los Angeles. This was an all-time record four years before an event, this NSSE or National Special Security Event. My point in saying that is just that, when it comes to securitizing for sports mega events, this is a bipartisan game. This would have been happening, heavy levels of security at this World Cup.
What I don’t think we would have had is the kind of straight up racism that we’ve been seeing from the Trump administration. I mean, I think about a quarter of the way into this World Cup, the central message that the Trump administration is transmitting to the world is that the U.S. government is now essentially an openly racist entity. I mean, the U.S. refused entry to Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, subjecting him to an 11-hour interrogation before ejecting him from the country. They, in what I would call performative security theater, searched players and staff from Uzbekistan using drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors. The Iraqi soccer star Ayman Hussein was detained at U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in O’Hare Airport and questioned for seven hours before being allowed into the country.
And that’s not even to mention everything with the players from Iran that have basically been forced to live in Mexico and fly in for their games to the United States. I don’t think any of that would be happening under a democratic government right now. I think that the United States would be performing a much more open stance to the world.
Miller: You note in the book that this term “sportswashing” has only been used… it was coined in 2015, but you argue that examples of sportswashing greatly predates that. Can you tell us about the 1934 World Cup in Italy?
Boykoff: Absolutely. In 1934, Benito Mussolini hosted the World Cup in Italy, and he actually wasn’t that into soccer to begin with, but realized this was an enormous propaganda opportunity, and so he embraced the event. He built a bunch of stadiums. He even named one after himself, if that sounds familiar to anybody. He named one after another fascist martyr, heavily politicizing the tournament on the way in. He called the players who were representing Italy at that tournament “soldiers of sport,” and made sure that the world knew that they were the representation of what he’d like to call the “New Fascist Man.”
So sport was much bigger than sport for Benito Mussolini. He even created this big old shiny – six times bigger than the actual World Cup trophy – trophy that he also gave out to the winner. Again, shiny objects, another kind of similarity that might ring a bell to our modern moment. And when Italy won, they got this thing called the Coppa del Duce, and they celebrated and he used his power and the new fascist man, the soldiers of sport, to kind of pivot toward actual soldiers of war, supporting Franco in Spain with more verve and also going to East Africa to engage in bellicosity there.
And so I guess the point of me at the end there is just that sportswashing isn’t just this thing, oh, someone’s making a little bit of money, getting better prestige, no, that can actually lead to war if it’s done in the way that Mussolini did it.
Miller: What evidence can you point to, to show that now, in the 21st century, say, not just this year, but in the last 15 years or so, say that these efforts are successful? Whether for a domestic audience or an international audience, that sportswashing works?
Boykoff: And you’re making a key distinction there, Dave, between a domestic and an international audience, because typically, when people ask, does sportswashing work, what they mean is on the international audience. And so if you look, for example, at Qatar, we were talking about the 2022 men’s World Cup there. Yes, there was tons of attention on the horrific work situation in their Kafala labor system. But after that 2022 World Cup, you see a steady rise in tourism numbers to Qatar. You also see Qatar fortify its position as a diplomat in the region, as evidenced recently, it’s involved in the peace talks right now between Iran and the United States.
So you could argue that it was a successful sportswash in that it pointed to the world that look, Qatar is a place to come visit, and we are a trusty entity on the world stage. But I don’t think that’s necessarily always the case, so you’re right that sometimes the primary audience is a domestic one. And if you look at the decade of sport, that’s what both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump call their decades of sport, here. And in Russia in 2014, right after the Sochi Olympics, where Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings were at an all-time high of 86%, he was flying high on the domestic level, that’s when he invaded the Crimean Peninsula. So it’s more about a domestic audience.
I don’t think too many people in the United States or in a lot of places were like oh, I actually like Vladimir Putin, and I’m gonna go vacation there. Same thing with Donald Trump. I don’t think that the international audience is the target of his attention. I think he’s very much focused on a domestic audience. You know, when I was talking before about the performative security theater around people from Uzbekistan or Senegal, or just saying that there’s going to be ICE around stadiums, policing during the games, as Markwayne Mullin has said, that sends a message to his base that, you know what, we don’t want these people here, and we’re going to stand up for our principles, of America first. And he’s using it to talk to them ahead of the midterm elections. So I would say it’s very much about a domestic audience with Trump and very little about an international audience in this instance.
Miller: You do have a big focus on the relationship between Trump and Infantino’s FIFA, but a quarter of the games in this World Cup are being held north or south of us, in Canada or in Mexico. What role do Mexico and Canada play, in your thinking, about these games?
Boykoff: Well, it’s fascinating when you look back at the bid that Canada, Mexico, and the United States put forth for this World Cup way back in 2017. I mean, when I was looking at this the other day, it felt like I should be wearing white gloves. It felt like it was from another era and I should be in an archive or something. Because it’s just so rosy, it’s all unicorns and rainbows, and this is going to be the next era of friendship between the three countries. This is going to take our friendship to the next level, NAFTA plus plus plus.
And wow, have things changed since then. I mean, who would have thought that in the wake of getting the actual event that the President of the United States would threaten Canada, one of the co-hosts, to make it the 51st state, or threaten Mexico, the other co-host, to basically invade their territory and try to take out the drug cartels there? So, Canada and Mexico, I hate to say it, but they’ve always been junior partners, and it goes back to the reason that we talked about at the outset. And that is that FIFA is essentially a money volcano with a little bit of soccer attached to the side, and they look at the United States as a market with a lot of growth potential, alongside places like China, India, and Indonesia. So they wanted to come into that cash cow in the United States and milk it with both hands.
That’s why you see they got 78 of the matches here in the United States and much less in Canada and Mexico, and it’s kind of embarrassing, but President Trump has even pointed that out in kind of a crude and rude way to those countries. So it hasn’t helped with relations like we thought it would back in 2017.
Miller: So to go back to your volcano line there, I mean, the only reason that I can see that FIFA is able to bring in billions of dollars from this World Cup or anyone is that people all over the world desperately want to watch it and will watch it and are watching it. What role do you think fans play in all of this?
Boykoff: Fans play an enormous role in all of this, you’re right. For starters, fans are the ones that buy tickets. I mean, they’re the ones who are experiencing FIFA’s extractivism through the dynamic pricing model, and fans, a lot of them don’t want to talk about anything that you and I have been talking about today. I know plenty of fans that fall into that bucket. But there are a lot of people out there, including in Portland, that I know personally, that care a lot about soccer and think that football is bigger than FIFA, and that it’s definitely worth fighting for. So you’re seeing a rising tide of people right now around the world who are really disgusted with FIFA.
There’s actually a campaign that has started online, that you can go check out at rebootfifa.com, where people can sign their names if they wish, onto what the organizers want to be the biggest class action complaint ever against FIFA for breaking its own rules around not engaging in politics and a number of other issues. You can sign on there. I signed on.
I should say, full disclosure, I’m one of the advisory members of the board of this organization called FairSquare. It’s based in London. A lot of people are signing on, and then you get updates about things that you can do, action items that you can take.
There are people out there in the soccer world, Lisa Klavness, she’s the head of the football association in Norway. She supports this kind of effort from rebootfifa.com, and she’s been one of the few people inside FIFA that’s been outspoken. For example, she said that it’s ridiculous that Gianni Infantino gave this FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump. So you have a lot of people on board. You’ve got Bonita Mersiades, she’s a whistleblower who called out some of the corruption that we were talking about earlier from FIFA, and paid a big price personally for it. She’s involved in the campaign.
So you have a lot of people who either love soccer, have been involved as soccer administrators, journalists, or just people who love the game, who are signing on to this, to try to think about how we can push back. The ultimate goal is to send a proposal to the FIFA Ethics Council. I don’t personally think that’s going to go too far, but we’re also taking it to the European Parliament, and I think serious waves could be made there.
Miller: In the lead up to this World Cup, the former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who you talked about, and a number of European football club executives, they talked about or endorsed the idea of boycotting this World Cup, but that effort really seems to have fizzled. Why do you think that is?
Boykoff: Well, first of all, Sepp Blatter is no paragon of integrity.
Miller: He was the “suitcases of money” guy.
Boykoff: Yeah, that’s our suitcases of money amigo. And if he’s saying it’s bad, you know it’s bad. I mean, this is the guy who, in the ‘90s, when he was asked how the women’s game could improve, he suggested that they wear tighter shorts, OK, that’s who we’re talking about here. And when the cretans and lowlifes of FIFA of yore are standing up and saying things have gotten way out of control, you definitely know things have gotten way out of control.
Now, boycotting is a very difficult matter, in part because of the money shuffle that we were talking about before. If you are involved in this tournament, you get at least $9 million just to cover your costs and that. So all the 48 teams. In fact, they upped that by $2 million right before the tournament, because a lot of teams were disgruntled and saying they were going to lose money by just coming to participate. They’re not going to give up their money to engage in a boycott. So the teams, wow, that’s a tough call.
Could there be a diplomatic boycott? Absolutely. I think that could be a way of sending a message. That’s, for example, what the Biden administration did for the Beijing Olympics in 2022. They didn’t send any diplomats, to send a political message. There’s also different levels of fan boycotts. I guess you could say in a way that I’m doing a fan boycott this year, in the sense that I chose my line in the sand was, I was not going to buy a single ticket to a single match, thereby not giving a single dime to FIFA.
Does that mean that I’m not watching matches here in Paris with my friends and getting together and enjoying the beautiful game? No, I’m absolutely doing that because I don’t think it’s right for FIFA to steal the joy from my friends, myself and billions of other people around the world. So boycotts are always tricky propositions, and there’s many ways of doing them.
Miller: Well, I’m curious about just your own experience of watching the game. We’ve talked in the past about your lifelong love of the game of soccer and your time playing it. And I know that you try to separate your thoughts, your critique of the organizing corporate, “nonprofit” structure of FIFA from the action on the field, but is that getting harder as the years go by?
Boykoff: You know, in some ways it is getting harder, because the FIFA greed machine is just cranking up at such a higher and higher level, it does become difficult to stomach. But I’ve seen, in Portland and elsewhere, people coming together through soccer, to make social change, to get a better deal for the players who play the sport, and for fans as well.
You know, I just came out with my memoir, it’s called “Kicking,” and it includes a lot of stories that kind of braid my work as a critical scholar but also my time as a player. And I document a lot of amazing things that happened through soccer. You know, supporters of the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns fought back against the ownership, very successfully, of their teams to get what they wanted.
I remember them standing on the corner outside of matches, making political claims against the organization for the things that Merritt Paulson and his organization were brushing under the table, mainly abuse of women and harassment of women. So I’ve seen it work, and I don’t think we necessarily need to cede the terrain to those who are abusing the sport.
And one other thing, you know, Gianni Infantino, if he were listening and he knew that we were having this conversation, he’d be thrilled if I ducked out. I mean, not me personally, but critics. He’d be thrilled if the critics just pulled out of the game. That would make his life so much easier. It would just grease the palm and make the whole life of FIFA proceed in an easier fashion, and I’m not quite ready to do that yet, Dave.
Miller: Given the size and the money and the parties involved right now, can you imagine any World Cup or Olympics that wouldn’t somehow fall under the category of sportswashing?
Boykoff: Well, I could. You could create an event that is actually quite a bit more sustainable from a money perspective, but also from an environment’s perspective. I mean, we haven’t talked about it, but this World Cup is a sporty carbon bomb. It is the most polluting World Cup ever, and you could make it much more equitable on the environmental front if you prevented people from flying into the country, and if you wanted to go to the World Cup, you’d have to be able to get there by train.
Picking the United States, where the train system is weak and the country is huge, and throw in Canada and Mexico, it’s extra huge, means people are going to be flying everywhere. That is not a great idea for the world moving forward in an era of climate disruption and global heating. So you could easily make changes to that structure to make the sport less deleterious for the environment.
You could also actually institute transparency measures on all this money that’s swishing through the FIFA system. As I said before, there’s very little transparency of where this money actually goes. You can minimize corruption that way. And also you could listen to the big professional football union, FIFPRO, who’s raised a lot of issues around the amount of games that these players are playing, the fact that they’re being asked to play in extraordinary heat in places like Miami where the wet-bulb temperature is at unsafe levels. So there’s a lot of things you could absolutely do to make the game better, no question.
Miller: Jules, thanks very much.
Boykoff: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Jules Boykoff is the author of, “Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine.”
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
