The US is co-hosting the tournament this summer, despite having banned tourist visas for some participating countries
By Albert Samaha
Louicius Deedson was nine years old when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, in 2010. He remembers running out of his family’s Port-au-Prince home as it crumbled behind him, and eventually taking shelter in makeshift tents that his parents and neighbors constructed in a nearby dirt field. Within three days, he told me, he and his friends had turned the field into a soccer pitch.
He was the best player in the group, rising through the ranks of the country’s youth-academy system. His parents sent him to live with a host family in the United States at the age of thirteen, but he kept in touch with his friends and family back in Haiti, speaking on the phone daily, describing his efforts to acclimate to American life. Deedson kept playing soccer, and when he was eighteen, he signed his first professional contract, with a club in Denmark. He called his childhood friends after every game, recounting his glories and setbacks. “Sometimes they make little motivational videos for me,” Deedson said.
At twenty, he made his début for Haiti’s national team, part of a generation of Haitian players who grew up away from their country, then came together to represent it on the international stage. Now, for the first time since 1974, Haiti’s men’s national soccer team will compete in the World Cup, which the United States is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada this summer. “To be able to put that flag at the best competition in the world, it’s something big,” Ruben Providence, a twenty-four-year-old striker whose parents migrated to France before he was born, said. “Haitian people have faced a lot of negativity.”
Nearly every player I spoke with keeps in touch with loved ones back on the island. Hannes Delcroix, a twenty-seven-year-old center-back, who was two years old when a family from Belgium adopted him, connected with his birth mother and cousins in Haiti several years ago. Duke Lacroix, a thirty-two-year-old full-back, whose parents had grown up in Port-au-Prince before migrating to the US, told me his “dream would be to play a match in Haiti” in front of his aunts and uncles. For Deedson, his dream would be to take the pitch for Haiti’s World Cup matches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in front of his childhood friends. But Haiti happened to qualify for the World Cup in a year when it takes place in a country that has banned Haitians from visiting.
“The ones that want to come do not have the visa,” Deedson told me. “For me, it’s sad. A lot of people would try to come if the games were in Mexico or Canada.” Haitian fans are used to travelling to watch matches. After the assassination of Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, left the country in the grip of gang violence, the team has trained and played its home games abroad, most recently in Curaçao. Last November, hundreds of Haitian fans made the trip across the Caribbean Sea for the national team’s biggest game in half a century. Filling the rows of blue bleachers on that warm and clear night, they waved flags, chanted songs, and bumped kompa. Les Grenadiers, as the team is often called, were in the midst of a magical run through the regional tournament that determined which teams from North America would earn a place in the 2026 World Cup. By the tournament’s final night, one spot remained up for grabs. To qualify, all Haiti needed was to beat Nicaragua. The game happened to be on November 18th, the anniversary of Haitian revolutionaries defeating the French Army in 1803 before declaring independence.
“I feel like everything was written: two battles won that day,” Garven Metusala, a twenty-six-year-old defender whose parents moved to Quebec before he was born, said. “Everyone just knew we were gonna qualify.”
Nine minutes in, Deedson cut across the edge of the box and unleashed a left-footed strike that found the back of the net, loosening nerves and igniting the crowd. Haiti held on for a 2–0 win. Some players collapsed onto the turf in joyful tears. Others sprinted to the chain-link fence surrounding the pitch to dance alongside their supporters. The CBS Sports announcer described the scene as “the stuff of football dreams.” While many of his teammates went out to celebrate, Deedson returned to his hotel to call loved ones in Haiti. In punching a ticket to the world’s most popular sporting event, Haiti’s players had staked their claim as underdogs in a competition dominated by wealthier nations—exactly the sort of Cinderella story that FIFA aimed to spur when it expanded the World Cup field from thirty-two to forty-eight teams, giving more countries “the chance to dream,” as the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, put it.
Never before in the history of the World Cup has a host nation barred tourists en masse from a participating country in the way the US has done this year. In fact, FIFAruless prohibit “discrimination of any kind against a country, private person or group of people,” including on the basis of “national or social origin,” with violations “punishable by suspension or expulsion.” But over the past year, President Donald Trump has issued proclamations blocking tourist visas for passport holders from forty countries, “to protect the security of the United States,” including four with teams that have qualified for the World Cup: Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.
In addition to these travel bans, the decision to issue any visa is entirely at the discretion of the US government, and Trump has made no secret about which arrivals he deems worthy. All told, Trump has restricted immigrant visas in some capacity from seventy-five countries, fifteen of which are sending teams to the World Cup. All of these teams are from Africa, South America, the Caribbean, or Asia —including perennial powerhouse Brazil, 2022 semifinalist Morocco, first-time qualifier Cabo Verde, and consistent contenders Colombia, Egypt, and Ghana. Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal, along with fellow World Cup qualifiers Tunisia and Algeria, are also among the fifty countries whose passport-holding citizens are required to pay a bond of as much as fifteen thousand dollars to enter the US on a tourist visa.
Infantino cannot claim he didn’t anticipate the possibility that US policies might come into conflict with FIFA requirements. When FIFA considered candidates to host the 2026 World Cup nine years ago, the President was Donald Trump, and Infantino acknowledged at the time that Trump’s 2017 executive order banning visitors from predominantly Muslim countries threatened to disqualify the US from contention.
“It’s obvious when it comes to FIFA competitions, any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup,” Infantino said at a 2017 press conference, in London. A year later, Trump wrote a letter to Infantino saying that he was “confident” that “all eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination.”
Despite Infantino’s concerns, and before the Supreme Court had even issued a final ruling on Trump’s travel ban, FIFA’s voting committee awarded the World Cup to the US While Canada and Mexico share in the hosting duties, seventy-eight of the tournament’s hundred and four matches, including the final rounds, will be on American soil.
Geopolitical tensions simmer in the backdrop of every World Cup. For the 1934 World Cup, in Italy, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini built new stadiums around the country to showcase the strength of his regime. When Argentina hosted in 1978, the military junta that had taken power two years earlier staged elaborate ceremonies as markers of the country’s stability amid growing evidence of violent political repression. When the US faced Iran in the 1998 World Cup, after years of diplomatic tensions, President Bill Clinton said he hoped the match “can be another step toward ending the estrangement between our nations.” During the 2002 World Cup, fans across Africa celebrated Senegal’s upset victory over defending champion France, its former colonizer, as a symbol of liberation.
Over the years, FIFA has prohibited play for countries with government policies that violate the organization’s stated values, including South Africa during three decades of apartheid; Yugoslavia, in 1994, following United Nations sanctions during the Balkan wars; and Russia, after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The US under Trump has faced no such consequence—quite the opposite. In the past year, Infantino attended Trump’s Inauguration, honored him with FIFA’s first “Peace Prize,” and, after a White House meeting, assured everyone that “America will welcome the world.”
In response to questions about the impact of visa restrictions on the World Cup, a spokesperson for the US State Department told me that “America’s safety and the security of our borders will always come first.” The State Department did offer expedited appointments in the visa-application process for visitors with World Cup tickets, but the program doesn’t accommodate “foreign nationals who are otherwise not eligible for visas.” For countries barred from receiving visas, Trump’s proclamation only allows “exceptions for any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives.” The exception explicitly “does not apply to fans.”
But Issa Laye Diop, of Senegal, has applied for a visa anyway, telling me he hopes the rules change in time. As the president of le 12ème Gaïndé, a fan club for the Senegalese national team, he has attended all three World Cups for which Senegal has qualified in the past, in 2002, 2018, and 2022. This year, Senegal boasts a strong roster, led by the star forward Sadio Mané. “The whole country will apply for a visa,” Diop said. “Why not?” And, even if Diop’s US visa doesn’t come through, he still has a chance to keep his streak alive: teams are guaranteed to play three group-stage
for our players.” For Iranian athletes who play in domestic-league games in their attempt to reach the “knockout” tournament, and, while Senegal’s first two games are in the US, its third will be north of the border, in Toronto.
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