The People’s Game

 

In June of 1994, under a summer sun that felt personal—the kind that gets right up in your face like a drunk looking for trouble—44,000 fans watched Rashid Yekini net an opening goal in the 21st minute against Bulgaria. It was a beautiful thing. Maybe you’ve never cared about soccer. Maybe you’re the type who changes the channel. That’s okay. That doesn’t matter here. What matters is this: a man kicked a ball, and the net rippled, and somewhere in the upper deck a boy from Lagos named Emeka—we’ll call him Emeka, because there were ten thousand Emekas in that stadium that day, give or take—screamed until his voice cracked in half like dry kindling.

The stadium trembled a little. Stadiums do that when 44,000 people feel the same thing at the same time. It’s one of the few remaining miracles.

Late in the first half, Yekini set up Daniel Amokachi to double the lead. Then, early in the second, Emmanuel Amunike headed home a third. A 3-0 victory. Commanding. Glorious. The kind of win that gets tattooed into the national memory, the kind parents describe to children who will describe it to their own children someday, the story getting slightly better each generation the way stories always do.

But here is the thing about that particular day—the thing that doesn’t get into the highlight reels, the thing that sits at the bottom of the story like a stone in a boot.

Hundreds of Nigerian supporters never made it to the stands.

Their visas had been flatly rejected by U.S. immigration.

Think about that for a moment. Really sit with it. These weren’t criminals. These weren’t people with malicious intent tucked into their carry-ons like a forgotten toothbrush. These were fans. Human beings who had scraped together money—real money, the kind that costs something, the kind you feel leaving your wallet—for flights and tickets and small pieces of the dream. They had ironed their green shirts. They had told their children they were going to America. Maybe they’d bought tiny American flags to wave alongside their Nigerian ones, some gesture of goodwill toward the host nation, some small olive branch. And the door had been shut in their faces. Not gently. Shut the way a door gets shut when whoever’s behind it has already decided about you.

At the time, Nigeria was reeling. Oil workers’ strikes. Political repression. An economic crisis that ground people down the way poverty always does—slowly, then all at once. Soccer was the population’s only escape. You understand what that means, really means, if you’ve ever needed escape badly enough. Not as entertainment. As oxygen.

Yet on June 17, 1994, Gary Sheaffer—a spokesman for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, a man almost certainly sitting in a cool air-conditioned office somewhere in Washington, D.C., a man who had probably eaten lunch and would eat dinner and whose visa was never in question—told the LA Times that all foreign visa applicants had to provide ironclad proof of ties that would compel them to return home.

Ironclad proof.

Of ties.

There’s a kind of bureaucratic poetry in that phrase, isn’t there? Ironclad proof of ties. It sounds almost reasonable, almost fair, right up until you think about what it really means: prove to us that you are tethered. Prove you are not the kind of person who might want to stay in America. Prove you are not desperate or hopeful or human in the wrong direction.

A few Nigerian fans managed to reach the stadium, in the end. They got there thanks to a U.S. Department of Transportation policy that eased flight restrictions, allowing Nigerian airlines to make emergency stopovers to support the national team. The Washington Post, reporting on June 10, 1994, noted that authorities had supervised the offloading of all passengers and baggage during a stopover in Senegal, treating each person like a potential problem to be managed, a variable to be controlled. Hundreds of Romanian and Bulgarian fans were also left stranded that summer, also having failed to secure U.S. tourist visas. This detail tends to get lost. It shouldn’t. It is the detail that reveals something systemic, something older and uglier than any individual bad actor.

The world knocked. America looked through the peephole and didn’t like what it saw.

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Now here’s the part of the story where you might expect things to have changed. Where thirty-two years of hindsight and progress and stated good intentions might have sanded down some of the rougher edges. Where the lesson was learned.

You would be wrong about that.

As the 2026 World Cup approached—with the United States co-hosting alongside Canada and Mexico, a tournament marketed with the kind of breathless enthusiasm reserved for things that are mostly being sold to you—history chose to repeat itself. History does that. History is, in my experience, not a river moving forward but a drain circling the same dark center over and over.

The system caught Omar Abdulkadir Artan.

You should know who Omar Artan is. He is a Somali referee, a man who had dedicated his professional life to a kind of thankless precision, to being the impartial authority in a sport that doesn’t make impartiality easy. He had just been named the Confederation of African Football Men’s Referee of the Year. Let that settle. He was, by any objective measure, among the best in his field. He had credentials. He had a record. He had, presumably, pressed his clothes and packed his bag and boarded the plane with the quiet confidence of a man who had done nothing wrong and had the paperwork to prove it.

When Artan touched down in Miami, he did not receive a welcome. He received a room.

According to the New York Times, airport authorities grilled him for eleven hours. Eleven hours. That’s longer than most transcontinental flights. That’s long enough for your feet to swell and your throat to go dry and your body to understand, on some animal level beneath conscious thought, that you are not welcome here. They asked him about Somali politics. They asked him about Al-Shabaab. They were looking, one supposes, for the monster hiding behind the referee’s uniform, the terrorist concealed inside the man who had devoted himself to the rule of law on a soccer pitch.

They didn’t find one. Because there wasn’t one.

Despite presenting immaculate official credentials and a clean record—the kind of record that should, in a just world, have been the end of the conversation within the first thirty seconds—he was denied entry. Detained. Deported back to Istanbul, his transit city, which probably felt nothing like a destination.

FIFA subsequently purged him from its tournament referee list. The governing body of the sport that calls itself the world’s game looked at this situation and did what institutions do when they’ve made a mess they don’t want to own: they quietly removed the evidence.

Omar Artan went home. Or to Istanbul. The distinction may not have mattered much that night.

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Soccer is routinely romanticized as “the people’s game.” The phrase has been repeated so many times it’s started to lose its shape, the way a word sounds wrong when you say it too many times in a row—people, people, people—until it becomes just noise, just vibration.

But consider what it means. Consider that the game was born in the streets. Consider that its earliest American practitioners weren’t professionals or corporate sponsors but immigrant communities holding onto the one thing that still felt like home. Amateur clubs like New York’s Greek American Atlas Astoria, helmed by Greek-American coaching legend Alketas Panagoulias—a man who worked in real estate and was earning a postgraduate certificate in international relations while simultaneously leading his team to three consecutive U.S. Open Cup titles from 1967 to 1969, as Leander Schaerlaeckens detailed in The Long Game (2026). That’s the kind of detail that should hit you somewhere. A man doing two or three things at once, none of them glamorous, holding something together through sheer stubbornness and love.

When FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States in Zurich on July 4, 1988—Independence Day, a date that must have seemed auspicious to someone—America was competing against Brazil’s five-time champion pedigree and Morocco’s pan-African ambitions. The U.S. won on pure commercial promise. The USSF’s 381-page proposal, which came anchored by a video message from Ronald Reagan, offered sweeping political and security guarantees. Pre-existing NFL stadiums. A relatively modest $500 million investment. The proven logistical muscle of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. And a promise—a solemn, binding promise—to launch a formal professional league after the tournament, to permanently weave soccer into the American cultural fabric.

I declare on behalf of FIFA that the host country for the 1994 World Cup is the United States, said FIFA Vice President Harry Cavan.

What followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Total tournament attendance skyrocketed to 3.58 million—averaging nearly 69,000 fans per match, a record that has stood, unbroken, for more than thirty years. The finale at the Rose Bowl, where Brazil outlasted Italy on penalties in front of 94,000 people, was the kind of night that gets into your blood. The USSF, true to its word, launched Major League Soccer in 1996. The U.S. Men’s National Team advanced past the group stage for the first time since 1930. The Women’s National Team built on the new infrastructure toward their iconic 1999 World Cup victory on home soil. Something real was created. Something that mattered.

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Three decades later, the euphoria of 1994 has curdled.

Curdled is the right word. Not spoiled all at once, not dramatically, not in a way that gave anyone time to object or intervene. Curdled slowly, the way things do when the temperature is just slightly wrong and no one notices until they open the container and get a noseful of something gone bad.

The 2026 tournament—48 teams, 104 matches, three nations, marketed as the most inclusive in history—is playing out like an exclusive party that keeps running out of guest list space for the actual guests.

Iran’s delegation was the first high-profile casualty of the visa chaos. Their star players eventually secured entry, but over a dozen staff members, including federation president Mehdi Taj, were barred completely. The squad abandoned its planned training camp in Arizona and scrambled across the border to Tijuana. Head coach Amir Ghalenoei and Iranian officials did not hide their fury. This is the worst form of political interference in sports, declared the Iranian Embassy in Ankara, which is a sentence that sounds like an accusation and is one.

Iraq faced similar friction. Striker Aymen Hussein was detained for seven hours in Chicago—seven hours, while the clock ticked and his legs stiffened and somewhere a team was waiting for him, a game was being prepared for, a World Cup was happening—and team photographer Talal Salah was simply deported. Teams from Uzbekistan and Senegal were subjected to invasive physical searches and equipment interrogations. Athletes and staff from African and Middle Eastern nations have been handled, routinely, like criminal suspects dressed up in soccer uniforms.

Visa bond policies implemented under the Trump administration demand up to $15,000 in upfront financial guarantees for travelers from countries like Algeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. Fifteen thousand dollars. As a precondition for the privilege of watching a soccer match in a country that promised the world an open door.

Nigerian football legend Segun Odegbami spent a grueling fourteen months just waiting for a visa interview slot. Fourteen months. Think about that. Think about what fourteen months of waiting does to a person, to their enthusiasm, to their sense of their own dignity.

And the tickets. The cheapest seats for the final command $8,625. Corporate VIP packages scale into the hundreds of thousands.

Vancouver is bracing for a $729 million hit to host just seven matches. Kansas City has had to siphon tens of millions in federal security grants. Local tax dollars burned by the hundreds of millions, and economists trying to do the math on the return and coming up short, and residents looking at the numbers with the quiet, resigned expression of people who already know the answer but had really hoped not to.

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FIFA President Gianni Infantino promised an open-door tournament. He said everyone would be welcome.

He has gone quiet.

The organization ducks behind the defense that border control is strictly a domestic sovereign issue. No investigations. No threats. No accountability. Just the smooth, institutional sound of a door closing gently in someone’s face.

“The World Cup—if it has any positive impact—can open many people’s eyes to the double standards we’re talking about here,” noted Jules Boykoff, author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, “and start looking at the United States and other democracies through a more critical lens that also considers their human rights issues.”

He’s not wrong. He’s not wrong about any of it.

But here is what I keep coming back to, what I can’t quite shake loose from the back of my mind like a song stuck on repeat:

In 1994, in that stadium, in that blazing summer sun, a boy from Lagos—let’s keep calling him Emeka—screamed until his voice cracked when Rashid Yekini found the net. He was one of the lucky ones. He was there. He made it through.

And somewhere outside the stadium, somewhere in the geometry of bureaucratic rejection and consular offices and ironclad proof of ties, other people stood with their green shirts and their small flags and their tickets that turned out to mean nothing, and they listened. Maybe they could hear the crowd from wherever they were. Maybe not. Maybe they just knew.

The game went on without them. It always does.

The game goes on without them still.

Soccer has always called itself the people’s game. The question the 2026 World Cup is forcing us to answer—the question it is, in a sense, screaming at us whether we want to hear it or not—is a simple one, and a brutal one, and one that deserves an honest answer:

Which people?

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