“It may sound bizarre,” Ilan Pappé, the renowned Middle East scholar and Israeli dissident, said recently, towards the end of a talk he was giving for Novara Media, “but the one thing that really frightens a lot of Israelis, is if Israel would be thrown out of UEFA.” The audience chuckled a bit. In a war as grotesque as the one Israel has unleashed upon Gaza—children and babies are presently wasting away in a purposeful campaign of starvation—how can it be right to talk about soccer? Why should we care whether or not Israel has a place within UEFA, European football’s governing body? But Pappé persisted. “Seriously. I don’t think people understand what it means…Sport is very important, and sport is something that reaches every walk of life.”
While some of us may be slow to recognize sport’s—particularly soccer’s—political resonance, there are plenty of powerful people who appreciate it. Several of the Gulf petrostates and their regimes have become thoroughly enmeshed in the game, and, today, they bear an outsized influence over its trajectory. Manchester City, the most dominant English team of the last decade, is owned by an investment company for the Abu Dhabi royal family. One of this year’s Champions League finalists, Paris Saint-Germain, is effectively owned by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, while Newcastle, a team on an upward trajectory, is owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup and Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 one. For all of this and more, these Gulf regimes have been widely accused of “sportswashing”—of using the popularity of soccer and their associations with it to clean up their image and distract from their human rights abuses.
While, in the West at least, this notion of sportswashing is most closely associated with the Gulf states, they are not the only ones to engage in it. The United States, due to host the Club World Cup in a few weeks and, alongside Mexico and Canada, the actual World Cup in 2026, could be argued to be doing it, too, with Human Rights Watch suggesting it is unfit to host the World Cup in light of the Trump administration’s border policies. Putin’s Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup and Hu Jintao’s China hosted the Olympics in 2008, while, looking back further, Mussolini’s Italy hosted the 1934 World Cup and Hitler’s Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics. Sportswashing, if that’s what we want to call it today, is at least as old as fascism itself.
Tyrants clearly enjoy the pomp and grandeur of hosting big, global sporting tournaments, but whether or not that is about “washing” their record of human rights abuses clean is a little bit dubious. If anything, in the example of, say, Qatar, people have arguably become more aware of the country’s brutal treatment of migrant workers and sexual minorities than they ever were before the World Cup shone a light on it. But what participation and leadership in sport does seem to provide regimes is a certain sort of legitimacy. Regardless of whether or not they appear clean, it places them firmly on the map. Israel, among others, recognizes this. While it has hosted major sporting events in the past—the most significant, perhaps, was the 2013 UEFA European Under-21 Championship—it would like to do more, as we see from its failed bid to stage matches for Euro 2020.
“Israel is extremely sensitive to the way its image is viewed abroad,” Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of the British group Jewish Voice for Labour, told me in a phone conversation recently. “Being able to take part in international [sporting] competition gives the state a platform.” It stands to reason, then, that preventing Israel from assuming that platform could prove an effective tactic for opposing its crimes, which is why Jewish Voice for Labour, an organization founded to represent Jewish members of the U.K.’s Labour Party who oppose Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, has called for FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, to suspend Israel. Such an outcome would certainly look bad for the country.
Having said that, Israel’s international reputation has already been greatly tarnished since the genocide began, so what good, really, would kicking the country out of international soccer actually do? So long as it maintains the support of Western governments, a willful Israel clearly can continue to unleash genocidal violence. But, as Nick McGeehan, a founding co-director of the human rights advocacy group FairSquare, argues, a soccer ban would be felt keenly within Israeli society itself, and that’s why it might prove so powerful.
“Sport is incredibly culturally important,” McGeehan says. “Citizens in countries that are excluded really feel the weight of that in ways that more conventional, international accountability mechanisms don’t [bring about]. A lot of ordinary Israelis would really feel the impact of their teams not being able to participate in European or international competition. People care about sport, and they care about it in a way that they don’t care about politics.”
An international soccer tournament, as with a war, can help to bind a nation that is competing in it, providing that country with meaning and helping its citizens to identify with one another. But for Israel, there is particular significance in its participation in European competition specifically. That it does so is a quirk of the country’s history—Israel was, in 1974, excluded from the Asian Football Confederation, which, geographically speaking, would be a more appropriate governing body for it—but UEFA membership, which it obtained only in 1994, has become a powerful part of its national identity.
That is how Ofer Neiman tells it. Neiman is a member of Boycott from Within, an organization made up of Jewish and Arab Israelis who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to pressure Israel into respecting Palestinian rights. “Most Israelis view connections to Europe and the West as a cultural, political, and, of course, military lifeline,” he explains to me via email. “[Banning them from UEFA would] remind them that they are not really a part of Europe or the West. This outcome would be both symbolic and material.”
According to both Neiman and Wimborne-Idrissi, a key reason for Israel’s desire to participate in Western cultural institutions is that it helps Israeli culture differentiate itself from the Arab cultures that surround it. “That cultural connection with the West, as opposed to with the ‘barbarian Arab,’ which has always been the discourse, is absolutely vital to [Israelis],” says Wimborne-Idrissi. “It’s totally part of their self-image. They want to be able to say to themselves, look, we are welcomed at this film festival or that sporting event, that musical event…If we can undercut that, then we can get a message to Israelis and their institutions.”
Not Playing By the Rules
Undercutting Israel’s sporting connection to Europe is, in practice, proving difficult. Both UEFA and FIFA are ignoring the calls to suspend Israel from their respective organizations, despite ample reasons to do so. Quite simply, Israel breaks the rules of those bodies. There are several Israeli soccer clubs active within the occupied Palestinian territories, which clearly breaches a FIFA statute stating that “member associations and their clubs may not play on the territory of another member association without the latter’s approval.” Palestine has been a member of FIFA since 1998, and, obviously, it does not approve of Israeli clubs operating on its legal territory.
The occupation, and its consequent extreme policing of Palestinians’ movements, places a heavy burden upon the development of Palestine’s own soccer culture. Quite aside from the day-to-day oppression Palestinian players experience, there have been multiple instances over the years in which players have been denied the chance to compete in serious games, including in World Cup qualifiers. And, while the challenges to Palestinian soccer didn’t start in October 2023, the situation has only worsened since then.
At least 715 Palestinian athletes, of whom hundreds were footballers, have reportedly been killed over the last year and a half, and who knows how many more will never play again because of injuries sustained during the genocide. As a spokesperson for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) puts it to me in an email, “This is a sporticide within the genocide.”
Sporting infrastructure, too, has been devastated. By May 2024, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor was reporting that over 80 percent of Gaza’s stadium- and club-level sports facilities had been destroyed, while multiple other reports have told of how one of the enclave’s oldest stadiums, Yarmouk, was transformed into makeshift torture center. Footage purportedly from the stadium shows Palestinians stripped to their underwear and forced to kneel with their hands tied behind their back. Women and children were allegedly held here, too.
Amid all this horror, FIFA has ostensibly launched investigations into whether or not it should, as the Palestine Football Association demands, suspend Israel, but nothing concrete has yet been done. “The failure to sanction Israel is part of a long-standing pattern of selective enforcement of FIFA statutory rules,” says McGeehan. “Really, it just looks like a case of bending over backwards in response to what I presume is pretty intense political pressure from, not just the Israel Football Association, but from the Israeli state itself. They’re going to significant lengths to make sure [a suspension] doesn’t happen.”
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz last year openly threatened to imprison the head of the Palestinian FA in response to its calls for Israel’s suspension. “FIFA has a ban on political interference,” says McGeehan. “They say you can’t mix politics with sport. But when an Israeli government minister comes out and publicly says, ‘If this member association exercises its right to submit a complaint under the FIFA statutes, we’ll throw them in jail,’ that in and of itself is an act of political interference that could see them excluded. But [FIFA] had nothing to say about it at all. They seem quite content to let the Israelis say whatever they want.”
On this subject of FIFA’s inaction, the spokesperson from PACBI says, “As Palestinians, we are fully aware of the corruption in FIFA. The football governing body has been actively shielding Israel from accountability for years, making a mockery of its own statutes and now flaunting the legal obligations of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings not to facilitate Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.”
FIFA and UEFA are not always so reluctant to act in matters of politics. The Scottish team Celtic has been fined by UEFA several times over the years for its fans’ repeated shows of solidarity with the Palestinians. And, perhaps more pertinently, there are multiple examples of countries implicated in human rights abuses being barred from competing altogether. It was only days after its invasion of Ukraine that Russia was banned by both FIFA and UEFA. Yugoslavia was banned in the ’90s while war was fought there. And, crucially, South Africa was suspended in 1961 because of its system of apartheid.
“It wasn’t the sporting boycott that brought down the apartheid system [in South Africa],” says McGeehan, “but it was certainly a huge part of it. South Africans felt like they were international pariahs because their teams couldn’t participate. I think the same pressure being brought to bear on Israel could obviously have a significant impact.”
Wimborne-Idrissi agrees, but she is keen to emphasize that the BDS movement does not target individuals. “You have to be very clear. It’s not directed at Israeli individuals. They can’t help where they’re born. They have the absolute right to operate as artists or sportspeople or whatever. But if people are engaged in an activity representing an institution, like the Israeli national football team, that parades itself on the world stage as an ambassador for Israel…the boycott campaign says, we want to prevent this happening. This state deserves to be a pariah.”
A vital part of imposing this pariah status on Israel, trivial as it may seem, could well be a soccer ban. “There’s understandable focus on stuff that’s happening at the International Criminal Court and at the International Court of Justice, and rightly so—that deserves full attention,” says McGeehan. “But this [soccer ban], in my view, could be quite an effective lever to shift Israel in terms of how it’s conducting itself. It is incredibly politically important for Israel to remain part of FIFA and UEFA. The political ramifications of exclusion would be incredibly significant.”
To that end, the PACBI spokesperson, concluding their message to me, calls for peaceful disruption of FIFA matches moving forward. “Palestinians in Gaza,” they write, “have had no rest or respite from Israel’s bombings and weaponization of food and other essential needs. There should be no rest for FIFA until it ends its corrupt and hypocritical shielding of genocidal Israel by banning it from world football.”
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