The People’s Game or a Geopolitical Tool?

FIFA’s Growing Alignment with American Imperialism.

By Alexandros Schulman
Following on from an article “The Americanisation of the World Cup,” it’s time to turn attention to FIFA itself and the deepening infiltration to it by the machinery of American imperialism. The myth pushed by footballing authorities that football stands ‘above politics’ has always been bourgeois propaganda that conceals the material reality: the superstructure of global sporting organisations are dictated by the base of finance capital and serves its geopolitical needs.

Under Gianni Infantino’s stewardship, FIFA has discarded even the façade of neutrality. It now functions openly as an ideological state apparatus of American hegemony, transforming the People’s sport into a platform for capitalist dominance. It has become a glittering spectacle of commodity fetishism, promoting western supremacism and imperialist triumphalism.

With the 2026 World Cup hosted primarily by the United States, football ceases to be a mere contest and becomes a full-scale weapon of ideological class struggle: a polished, commodified display of US ‘soft power’. This occurs at an historical moment when that empire’s global dominance is eroding under the weight of its own internal contradictions, competition from a China in ascendancy and BRICS, and mounting resistance from the oppressed nations of the Global South.

FIFA endlessly invokes ‘values’. But whose values? This is the will of a bourgeoisie masquerading as universal morality. The selective application of ‘principles’ exposes themselves as fraudsters. Russia and Belarus faced swift exclusion celebrated as a moral victory by western presstitutes and yet the United States, the central enforcer of finance capital and the architect of endless wars, regime-change operations, and economic coercion faces no sanctions whatsoever. From the criminal invasion of Iraq to the engineered destruction of Libya, to its complicity in the genocide in Gaza, the economic strangulation of Venezuela, the ongoing blockade of Cuba, and the unprovoked assault on Iran in early 2026, the empire’s crimes are not merely ignored; they are erased. This erasure is no accident. It reflects the class logic of imperialism, in which international institutions are mobilised to discipline rivals and suppress dissent.

On Palestine, FIFA’s complicity is a textbook case of colonial-settler ideology in practice. Despite the killing of 421 Palestinian footballers, workers and youths alike, the organisation maintains a criminal silence. This is not negligence but active collaboration with settler colonialism, a key pillar of imperialist domination in the region. FIFA’s selective ‘humanitarianism’, functions as bourgeois charity, obscuring the structural antagonism and oppression while ignoring the barbarism of its imperial patrons.

FIFA in essence is not external to global power structures but an organic product of them. Its billions in revenue represent surplus value extracted from global labour and channelled through multinational corporations. Its spectacles are broadcast by media monopolies controlled by the financial oligarchy. Its legitimacy depends on access to core imperial markets. The era of FIFA’s pretended independence is over. Infantino’s appearances alongside Washington and Wall Street elites are not diplomacy but open collusion with the transnational capitalist class.

This alignment was crystallised by Infantino’s participation in Trump’s so-called ‘Board of Peace’, a spectacle designed to legitimise US aggression. It was reinforced by FIFA’s decision to award its inaugural peace prize to the empire’s chief warmonger and cemented by a disgraceful pledge of $50 million for Gaza ‘infrastructure’. This is not aid; it is imperialist disaster capitalism in action and an attempt to launder war crimes, normalise genocide, and commodify suffering, while hundreds of Palestinian footballers lie dead.

This trajectory is inevitable under monopoly capitalism. Every institution is subsumed by the law of value and the logic of profit accumulation and FIFA is no different. FIFA operates as a quintessential bourgeois international apparatus, enforcing neoliberal discipline on defiant states while shielding criminals of the imperial core. Its proclaimed neutrality is false consciousness, serving as ideological cover for the maintenance of a global class hierarchy.

The World Cup effectively functions as imperialist soft power spectacle projecting order, inevitability, and legitimacy. It is part of an ideological superstructure that normalises exploitation and militarism. FIFA’s token humanitarian gestures, stripped of any anti-imperialist or class-struggle content, function as moral cosmetics: a veneer of benevolence masking its entanglement with militarism, neocolonial plunder, and primitive accumulation.

Where US backed settler-colonial violence escalates, or where illegal unilateral coercive measures suffocate sovereign nations, FIFA’s silence is deafening. Proletarian international solidarity is withheld whenever it threatens capital. In this calculated muteness, FIFA reveals itself not as a guardian of sport, but as a curator of imperial branding. FIFA is upholding a bourgeois ‘international order’ defined by selective enforcement and elite impunity.

Football’s latent promise lay in the possibility that the global proletariat and oppressed peoples might meet as equals, gesturing toward genuine proletarian internationalism. Under capitalism, this promise was always distorted. Today, it faces total assimilation.

Recent events provide final confirmation. Following a US–Israeli war of aggression against Iran, Iran has been pushed out of the World Cup. FIFA’s refusal to offer explanation or concession is not governance but class-war discipline—punishment for defying Yankee-Zionist hegemony through independent political development.

The struggle to reclaim our beautiful sport can therefore be seen as a front in the broader class struggle. Until FIFA is severed from the dictatorship of American finance capital, the ‘People’s Game’ will remain a captive spectacle. The international working class must organise independently, through mass struggle and alternative structures of popular sport, (as witnessed in recent years in China with local amateur leagues rising in popularity as fans across the country abandon the monied professional leagues) to reclaim this cultural force from the bourgeoisie and reconstitute it in the service of socialist internationalism. The task is to smash FIFAs imperial function and build a genuinely democratic, internationalist sporting culture as part of the struggle to overcome capitalism itself.