For the first time in World Cup history, eight Arab nations have qualified for this year’s tournament, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Jordan—double the number of teams that qualified for Qatar in 2022.

Yet, the tournament is taking place at an unprecedented moment of heightened geopolitical tension. The US-Israel war with Iran, which began in February of this year, has caused ripple effects across Gulf states and neighboring countries in the Levant, including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, reshaping the security around travel and mobility for fans and players hailing from the region.

The US State Department has fully suspended visa issuance for nationals from countries with teams that qualified, including Iran and Haiti—despite it being the first time Haiti has qualified for a World Cup since 1974. Just a week before the tournament began, the Iranian Football Federation, according to Reuters, reported that thousands of fans had their tickets revoked; before that, the US ruled that Iranian players and staff would have to commute to the US from Mexico on days the team has matches on American soil.

Iran is the most visible example, but it is far from the only one. The head of the Palestinian Football Association was denied entry into the US, while fans in Morocco have had their visas denied, with many losing money spent on travel costs.

​“For other Middle Eastern countries, while they may not be outright banned, they face a steeper hill to climb depending on the country,” says Talib Visram, an independent reporter who has been closely covering this year’s World Cup through his Substack “America’s Cup,” where he has spent months interviewing experts and tracking the build-up to the tournament.

​“Fans of nations like Jordan—one of the debutants—had to apply for visas many months in advance. While those wait times were later expedited, there was a reported denial rate of more than 40 percent,” he adds.

​Similar barriers have emerged across Africa. Fans from the Ivory Coast and Senegal have been met with reported visa rejections, while a Somali referee with an approved US visa was denied entry when he landed in Miami, underscoring how official approval to travel does not necessarily guarantee admission at the border.

In addition to visa barriers, fans from Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia, and Algeria also faced the possibility of US entry bonds as high as $15,000 going into the tournament. In May, the State Department moved to waive the bond requirement for visitors coming into the country for the World Cup, but only if they’d purchased official tickets and applied for FIFA’s Priority Appointment Scheduling System (PASS) by April 15. That cutoff date means the waiver may not help many fans.

​What sits behind these outcomes is a complex system. While obtaining a US visa is formally the same for all applicants, State Department guidance says applicants can be subject to expanded screening and vetting, including review of social media and online activity. Some cases are then pushed into administrative processing, an open-ended security review that can last weeks or months with no clear timeline. Layered onto that are biometric checks at both the visa and border stage, which can include fingerprinting and facial-comparison technologies, which can add further delays or lead to additional screening even for those with approved visas.

​“We have seen examples of visa-triaging algorithms, automation, all sorts of decisions being made by artificial intelligence kind of behind the scenes, and this is changing the ways that people can enter countries,” says Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist at the Refugee Law Lab at Toronto’s York University who specializes in the impacts of technology on migration and border crossings. “It’s changing the immigration, detention, and deportation regimes as well.”

According to the 2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory, the Department of Homeland Security already uses a range of AI systems across immigration and enforcement agencies, including tools for forensic phone analysis, cyber-threat detection, and case processing. Immigration officials are also known to use technology to track and monitor individuals crossing the border on temporary visas, even after they enter the US.

The algorithms and visa-triaging systems further muddy this already opaque decision-making space. “Social media monitoring is something that has really been ratcheted up. It’s becoming part of the application process to enter the United States,” Molnar says. “But this has a massive chilling effect for people coming in because you never really know how your social media history might play out once you’re at the border.”

Given the US government’s recent history of targeting what it labels as “antisemitic activity” and pro-Palestinian speech, there are concerns that political expression could factor into immigration scrutiny. This has left visitors attending the World Cup unsure how their online activity might be assessed during visa processing or at the border.

“People are genuinely afraid that they may be detained on the border or picked up by immigration officials,” says Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at SKEMA Business School. He says that concerns over entry into the US, combined with the rising ticket prices for fans hoping to attend matches, is creating “this perfect storm and incredibly complex, sensitive, and highly charged tournament,” the likes of which he doesn’t think he has ever seen before in World Cup history.

“I do sense that what a lot of people are doing is they’re conflating issues, and so basically it’s either all FIFA’s fault or it’s all the United States’ fault, and there are some interconnections, but I think for both FIFA and the United States, the event has actually been deeply damaging when it should have been an opportunity to showcase and project soft power,” Chadwick says. “If anything, it’s been detrimental to the political and diplomatic health of both organizations.”

FIFA is projected to generate around $8.9 billion from the 2026 World Cup alone, with television broadcasting rights making up the largest share at roughly 44 percent of total income (about $3.9 billion), while the US expects a multibillion-dollar economic boost driven largely by tourism and hosting infrastructure.

At the same time, FIFA is taking a 15 percent cut on official ticket resales, even as prices have climbed sharply in recent cycles, with premium seats for the 2026 final reaching well over $10,000 compared to the few hundred dollars it cost to see previous World Cup finals. The gap is increasingly being absorbed by fans at the point of purchase.

For the first time this year, FIFA has instituted dynamic, demand-based pricing for World Cup tickets, allowing prices to fluctuate in real time based on market conditions.

According to an Amnesty International report, ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup were set at roughly three times higher than those for the 2022 tournament in Qatar, even before resale markups are taken into account.

“It used to be a football tournament—two teams, two goals, and a ball—and that was it,” Chadwick says of the World Cup. “Now the tournament is much more of an industrial process. It’s not just a moneymaking machine or a geopolitical flashpoint … certainly in those latter stages of the tournament, it’s becoming gentrified.”

That exclusion due to FIFA’s pricing system can be seen playing out across fanbases from all over the world. Adibir Singh, a 29-year-old sports consultant from New Delhi who has followed the World Cup for more than a decade, says he and two friends started planning to attend matches in the US in the summer of 2025. However, each fan was placed on a visa waiting list stretching nearly a year and a half, and their current appointments are still set for October 2026, long after the tournament ends.

Singh and his friends planned on attending Portugal’s match against the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Houston on June 17 as well as France’s group-stage game against Senegal in New York-New Jersey on June 16, partly to strengthen their case for emergency visa appointments. “We are massive Ronaldo fans, and this was definitely his last World Cup,” Singh says on why they chose the match.

But they found it difficult to commit fully. Singh’s cousin in Texas made the official purchase for the tickets, which cost roughly around $1,000 each, with the understanding they would be resold if the group could not travel due to visa issues. Singh and his friends also paid about $1,600 for refundable round trip flights from India and leaned on family in Texas and New York for accommodation, trying to hedge against the risk of losing money on a hotel if their visas didn’t come through.

“Our logic was, listen, if we’re going to be spending all this money and still have no guarantees, it’s not worth the hassle,” Singh says. The group ultimately stepped back from finalizing their plans around November of last year.

Singh attended the European Championship in Germany in 2024 and received his 90-day Schengen visa within seven days of applying. He was able to travel without tickets to any game; he later bought them on the resale market for $150. By comparison, he says, the US process felt far more rigid because FIFA requires tickets up front for visa considerations. “We’re better off going for the European Championships in the UK and Ireland in two years’ time,” he says.

Visa wait times are so long because of post-pandemic backlogs, limited consular staffing due to layoffs, and expanded security-screening requirements that slow down scheduling and add extra layers of administrative processing for many applicants.

“Decisions around the World Cup are being dictated by what the White House decides,” Chadwick says. “FIFA doesn’t have the same degree of control that it would normally have.”

On the topic of diplomacy with the Trump administration, FIFA could not be reached for comment.

But beyond that political back-and-forth, Visram says the impact is also being felt much more directly by fans, including Americans themselves. “You just think, ‘This thing’s in your backyard and you’ve been waiting for it for eight years … and to have it kind of snatched away at the last minute is tough,” he says, on the rising costs of games. Despite being based in Brooklyn, ticket prices are a barrier for his hope of attending this year’s World Cup.

That tension between access and affordability is also being raised by human rights groups tracking the tournament’s wider impact. Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Europe regional director says, “mega sporting events like the World Cup have huge human rights impacts, and we can’t separate sport and politics or can’t separate sport and human rights.” Amnesty’s work on sport and human rights dates back to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, when it used the tournament to highlight abuses under the host country’s military dictatorship at the time and has continued to scrutinize major tournaments since, Cockburn explains.

“We have to anticipate the risks of these tournaments,” Cockburn adds, noting that Amnesty called for action by FIFA and the US well before the World Cup, particularly to prevent potential raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to secure guarantees around protest rights.

In March, Amnesty reported that ICE had signed 1,544 287(g) agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, including in World Cup host cities like Dallas, Houston, and Miami. The 287(g) agreement is part of a formal arrangement that deputizes local police to carry out certain immigration-enforcement duties on behalf of ICE.

Across all three host countries, these overlapping pressures are already shaping what it actually means to attend a World Cup.

However, Visram says he did not want to end on a purely negative note, pointing to the enduring pull of the tournament itself. “I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, and that’s why I put out a podcast recently called Why the World Cup Matters—because it does,” he says. “We put up with it every four years despite all the darkness. We’ll ignore the ticket prices, we’ll ignore the immigration issues, we’ll ignore that they are trying to turn this into a Super Bowl halftime show. And it’s the purity of the football that really shines through, and that’s what people always remember.”

This article originally appeared on WIRED Middle East.