Paris. Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter was in favor of fans not traveling to the United States during the 2026 World Cup, which will be held from June 11 to July 19, for security reasons.
“To the fans, just one piece of advice: avoid the United States! I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup,” wrote the former soccer patron between 1998 and 2015 on his account on the social network X.
Blatter made reference to a recent interview with the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger by Pieth, a renowned lawyer specializing in corruption cases and commissioned between 2011 and 2014 by the then president of FIFA to create a plan to combat corruption within the football body.
“What we are seeing domestically — the marginalization of political opponents, the abuses of immigration services, etc. — hardly encourages fans to go there,” Pieth said Thursday about the current situation in the United States.
“For fans, just one piece of advice: avoid the United States! In any case, you will see better on television. Upon arrival, fans should expect that, if they do not behave correctly with the authorities, they will be immediately sent back home. If they are lucky…” the lawyer added in the interview.
Blatter, 89, highly critical of the current FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, was his predecessor until he resigned in 2015, dragged down by a cascade of scandals.
Accused in particular of fraud, Blatter, as well as the then head of UEFA, Michel Platini, were definitively acquitted in 2025 by Swiss justice.
Faced with the tensions arising from the desire of the American president, Donald Trump, to annex Greenland and the threats of increasing tariffs against European states that oppose it, positions in favor of a boycott – or even a cancellation – of the World Cup organized in the United States, Mexico and Canada are beginning to be heard in Europe.
However, the president of the French Football Federation, Philippe Diallo, ruled out such a measure on Sunday in an interview with the newspaper Ouest-France.
“There is no will on the part of the French Soccer Federation to boycott the World Cup in the United States,” Diallo said.
