2026 World Cup Boycott: DFB Stance & USA Host Debate

Oke Divine has started a small fire. Last week he spoke about something that should be kept silent as much as possible in German football: the boycott issue. The time has come to think about whether to go to the USA for the World Cup, said Göttlich in an interview with the Hamburg “Morgenpost”. This was a debate in the football world that the most powerful men in this industry absolutely want to prevent.

Göttlich is president of the publicly very political FC St. Pauli, and it is not surprising that he is the one who is bringing this debate into the league. But Göttlich is also a member of the executive board of the German Football Association (DFB), which is currently publicly very apolitical. And he has a different strategy for dealing with the political implications of this tournament: close your eyes tightly, seal your lips, and then head to the USA. Politics is not an issue because it is not allowed to be an issue.

This is the association’s World Cup tactics, its post-Qatar calculation. At least these days it’s clear: it’s a milkmaid’s calculation.

These things have to be discussed in the executive committee, but his and Neuendorf’s opinion is clear anyway: the discussion is completely misguided, it is coming at the wrong time. Neuendorf’s most influential colleague, DFL President Hans-Joachim Watzke, saw it the same way: “I don’t think the time is right at the moment to discuss such things.”

Four and a half months before the start of the tournament, after the Greenland threats, the regime change in Venezuela, the deaths in Minneapolis, “the time is not ripe” for a debate. This has to be emphasized because that is what it is all about: discussions.

Oke Göttlich did not call for a boycott of the DFB in the interview; he demanded to think about it. One could say: He called for an attitude to be developed towards this tournament. But the DFB, traumatized by the World Cup in Qatar, has decided: no attitude is the best attitude. He seems to hope that the problems, questions and dangers that this tournament will bring will pass quietly if he just ignores them decisively enough.

They come closer to him the closer the opening game gets: in the form of the news from the USA, which people in Germany are constantly confronted with; in the form of the depressing video snippets from American cities that are circulating through social media these weeks. It becomes harder to ignore them every day. And so the DFB’s post-Qatar bill looks worse with every passing day.

Hans-Joachim Watzke said on Monday that he was confident that “Qatar’s mistakes” would not be repeated under Neuendorf’s leadership. But the association overlooks the fact that it did not stumble over its own stance in Qatar. He stumbled over his own poor preparation and how he communicated and sold his attitude. There is currently nothing to suggest that things will go better this summer.