Miguel Delaney

Now, one of them, of course, is, as I said, it's the precedent and there are, you have to say, if it was a different country, there would have been much more calls for boycotts or calls for the USA to be stripped in that it's the first time that a host has attacked, bombed, engaged in conflict with a participating nation.

I mean, that's,

A remarkable precedent.

And it also kind of points to a shift here as well, because generally with World Cups, obviously it's like it's part of the build of 20 tournaments.

All of the issues around the country get discussed and all the issues related to World Cups get discussed.

Foreign policy hasn't generally been a part of that, maybe for obvious reasons because of Western hegemony, whatever you want to describe.

But even foreign policy with Qatar wasn't discussed that much.

That's something that has shifted over recent years, not least because of how Russia has been banned from this very tournament.

So it's changed the dynamic.

And obviously the fact then that this isn't just about foreign policy, but about how one of the participating nations are affected.

And of course, a lot of human rights groups would even point to kind of, beyond human rights groups as well, would point to the USA's relationship with Israel and all this, kind of the ongoing crisis in Palestine.

the United Nations panels have described as genocide.

All of this swirling around, and I think putting foreign policy more as a central point of whether a country should host a World Cup.

But even from that, there are so many other issues from just beyond anything, how the Trump administration will use it.

I mean, we talked about sports watching in the past.

It's generally not applied to liberal democracies because they have changing governments.

They can't use them the same way.

But

Obviously, Trump is of a type of Western politician now who is authoritarian-facing.

And the talk from human rights groups like Fair Square has been about using this World Cup to further an authoritarian shift in the world and project a certain type of politics.