Whenever my kids and I are stationary in the same room, within five minutes they will have started talking about football. Every now and then, a name will float out that I recognise – Jude Bellingham, say – but most of the time it lacks the dramatic texture to hold my attention. Everyone is either a genius or an irretrievable loser.

There’s a lot of counting. “Would you watch a play in which everyone was either entirely wise or entirely stupid and the rest of it was mainly a body count?” I ask, trying to wedge myself back into the conversation. They reply: “Hello? Romeo and Juliet?!” then go back to the shortcomings of La Liga, so I go back to looking at my phone.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ve constructed an elaborate code, the way parents switch to French in front of small kids when they want to talk about getting the cat put down, although their dad and I never did that, because he’s very honest and I don’t speak French.

Imagine their surprise and delight, then, to discover that, on the eve of the World Cup – the first such epochal event for which the oldest child has authentic ID – I have an array of very strong views, complete with merch. I came home the other day with Football Against Fascism beer mats, hot off the press, to the inevitable queries about what the hell I know about football. I can still cheerfully say: ‘Absolutely nothing,” but I know a thing or two about fascism.

One person who is all over both those things is Shaista Aziz, the founder and director of The 3 Hijabis, a long-term campaign against racism in football. She, along with the rest of the Stop Trump Coalition, has nailed down the main problem with the main World Cup host.

The US isn’t a safe place to visit. This point was made vividly when the Swiss forward Breel Embolo was denied an Esta visa waiver three hours before he was due to take off for the US last Tuesday. The Swiss authorities remained optimistic and careful in their language. In many ways, Embolo could thank his lucky stars that he was denied entry while still in Switzerland. Had he been denied entry on US soil, who is to say he wouldn’t have spent six weeks in detention, as numerous tourists have?

What could border officials possibly have had against Switzerland’s first-choice striker? Perhaps they misunderstood our European jargon and thought he was liable to go on strike, as is threatened by numerous US labour unions representing hospitality workers, worried about potential ICE raids of stadiums during the tournament.

Perhaps it was about Embolo’s criminal conviction for an altercation in 2018, although that would lay some landmines, since he’s not the only footballer to have one of those. Could it have been because he isn’t white? In this pantomime, you’re not really supposed to ask: you mention racism, the authority either denies it or stonewalls it, then it hangs in the air and it’s your fault, because you summoned the word. Whoops, now it’s Thursday and Embolo has permission to travel after all – the authorities were just checking that the incident for which he was convicted was nonviolent. Don’t you look stupid?

Travelling fans, meanwhile, run the risk of having their social media trawled for anti-Trump sentiment – this may be what happened to a bunch of Scottish fans, whose Esta status suddenly changed to “travel not authorised” without explanation. But then again, how can you know for sure?

Pathocracy is a system of government in which a small pathological minority has taken control of a society of normal people. If we were going to go over again whether or not the US is one, we would definitely take in Pete Hegseth’s D-day speech, in which he equated migrants and Nazis. But this is what a pathocracy does – it constantly tests your boundaries, looking for the point at which you’ll say: “That is unacceptable.” International football is a great canvas for that: the stakes are so high; there’s so much money involved; the imperative to play nicely and not ruin things is so strong. Governments and football’s governing bodies the world over, it quickly transpires, will accept almost anything. But it’s a canvas, too, for fans to name what is staring them in the face, starting with a beer mat.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist