Since When Does Soccer Require a Visa?
On Afghan refugees, the Iranian national soccer team, and the one language the state can't fully police
It was three am at the Philadelphia airport when the soccer ball came out.
I was at the airport doing COVID-19 screenings for Afghan refugees who had just been evacuated as the US withdrew from the war. Philly’s airport was filled with families who had left everything behind from their homes to their language to their entire context for understanding the world. Some people were alone, hoping to be reunited with family members somewhere in America. Many were trying to get some sleep on the floor of an airport terminal. We didn’t share a language. I was working through a translator just to ask basic health questions. Everyone was exhausted in a way that comes after surviving something unspeakable.
In the downtime, I started kicking a ball around.
Soccer has always been my refuge. The field has been my home when I felt I didn’t have one. So I turned to my comfort object in the middle of a long, heavy night. Within minutes the refugee children, mostly the boys though a few girls joined too, were playing soccer with me in the middle of the airport at three in the morning.
We didn’t need a translator for that. Nobody needed paperwork. Nobody needed to prove they belonged. The ball didn’t ask where we were from. It just rolled and we ran after it and for a few minutes, kids who had just lost their entire world got to be kids again.
I have been to a handful of countries outside of the United States. I have stood in places where I didn’t speak a word of the local language and felt completely lost until someone produced a ball and suddenly I wasn’t lost anymore. Soccer is the closest thing I’ve found to a universal language. It doesn’t require a shared history. It just requires two feet and the willingness to run.
That’s why what’s happening to the Iranian national soccer team right now makes me so angry I can barely sit still.
Iran qualified for this World Cup fairly. They earned their place on the field, the same as every other team. They are scheduled to play all three of their group stage matches on US soil in stadiums built for the world to gather, to compete, to share the one global language that doesn’t require a passport to play.
Except the United States has decided that even this, even this international soccer tournament, even the most universal act of human connection there is, needs to be policed according to geopolitics.
After Iran’s opening match, their head coach Amir Ghalenoei was told his team would have to leave the country within hours. Not after the end of their participation within the tournament, but after every single game. Despite playing all three of their matches in the US, Iran has to remain stationed in Mexico and commute back and forth across the border for each game — a restriction no other team in the tournament faces. Ghalenoei didn’t mince words. He said he and his players are being oppressed.
And he’s right.
Iranian fans who spent years dreaming about watching their team play on American soil were barred entirely by a travel ban that took effect before the tournament even started. One fan told a reporter it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slipping away. It wasn’t because he couldn’t afford a ticket or because Iran had lost, but because his passport made him politically inconvenient.
This is happening across the board, not just to Iran. ICE has confirmed agents will be stationed at World Cup stadiums and when asked directly whether they would make arrests, the response was essentially: that’s what we do. Amnesty International has called this a human rights emergency, warning that masked, armed federal agents pose a chilling threat not just to fans but to players themselves. Visa restrictions have already kept team staff, journalists, and even a match referee from entering the country at all.
The state has found a way to surveil and restrict the one thing that was supposed to be exempt from all of it — the beautiful game itself.
I think about those kids in the airport a lot. I think about how none of them needed to prove anything to play. I think about how the ball didn’t care what country they were fleeing or what their parents’ immigration status was or whether the place they were running to would ever fully let them in.
I think about how the United States is currently doing to grown men on a soccer field exactly what it does to women’s bodies, to people on the wrong side of an abortion law, to anyone whose existence becomes politically inconvenient: deciding, after the fact, that their presence requires special handling. That they can be here, technically, on a conditional basis, as long as they leave fast enough and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and remember at every moment that their belonging is provisional.
Iran’s players didn’t do anything wrong. They won a match. They earned their place in this tournament through exactly the kind of merit the United States claims to admire. And the response was to put them on a clock. They have to get out within hours, come back across an international border for the next match, repeat until they are eliminated or the tournament ends.
This has nothing to do with security. It’s a message. And the message is the same one this administration sends everywhere else it operates: your presence here is conditional, your safety here is conditional, your right to participate in the most basic human activities is conditional on whether the state finds you convenient.
The ball never asked any of those kids in the airport for their papers before they could play. It just rolled and they ran after it and for a few minutes, the distance between us collapsed completely.
I wish I could say the same was true of this World Cup. It isn’t. The state has found a way to insert itself even here, even into the one place that was supposed to be free of all of it. The World Cup is supposed to be one of the few places we can come together as a global community.
But I keep coming back to that airport floor at three in the morning. Exhausted families. A translator standing between us. A ball rolling across the tile. For a few minutes, none of it mattered, not the language, not the visa status, not what we had survived to get there. That’s still possible. It’s just gotten a lot harder to protect.
If you want to know what oppression actually looks like in 2026, it doesn’t always look like a wall or a detention center. Sometimes it looks like a coach standing on a soccer pitch, having just played the match of his career, being told he has six hours to get his team out of the country.
I’m rooting for Iran this World Cup. They aren’t my usual team to support, but somewhere deep within me, from the little girl who found her home on the soccer field, I want to believe that the beautiful game is bigger than the men trying to control it.