2026 World Cup: FIFA says Iran coming for sure, but is Trump listening?

The 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America is still more than 50 days away, and all the talk is about whether Iran will be eventually making the trip. While FIFA president Gianni Infantino insisted in a public forum on Tuesday, 14 April that Iran will be ‘coming for sure,’ FIFA has once again refused to play ball to Iran’s request to shift their three group matches from the US to co-hosts Mexico.

Speaking at CNBC’s Invest in America Forum in Washington, Infantino said: “We hope that by then, of course, the situation will be a peaceful situation, that would definitely help. But Iran has to come, of course. They represent their people. They have qualified. The players want to play.”

Infantino said he recently visited the Iranian team at their training camp in Antalya, Turkey, where he said the team indicated it wanted to play. “They should play — sports should be outside of politics,” the supremo of football's world governing body said. “Now, okay — we don’t live on the moon, we live on planet Earth but if there is nobody else that believes in building bridges and in keeping them intact and together well we are doing that.”

The World Cup, expanded to a 48-team format, will stretch over more than a month for the first time (11 June – 19 July), and will be held in the US, Mexico and Canada. Iran, one of the first teams to qualify for the showpiece, with an enduring legacy as a footballing nation, is scheduled to play all three group stage matches in the US: against New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June; Belgium in Los Angeles on 21 June and Egypt in Seattle on 26 June. If it advances in the tournament, its future games will also likely be held in the US.

The fragile ceasefire in West Asia between Iran and the US-Israel axis, meanwhile, is unlikely to convince football authorities in Iran about the safety of their team to travel to the US in early June. FIFA,

which honoured US President Donald Trump with the inaugural 'FIFA Peace Prize' last December — a decision which came in for widespread criticism — is expected to be more proactive if it wants to thwart the first case of a possible boycott since 1950, when multiple teams did not participate in the first tournament held post-World War II.

Last month, Iran’s sports minister had said: “Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup. Trump, meanwhile, had been ambiguous in a post on Truth Social in March where he said while Iran’s team would be “welcome” at the World Cup, “I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety”.

As the countdown to football's greatest show on earth draws near, it has been facing two other major fan concerns: the cost of tickets and the safety and security of the millions of international fans expected to attend. “Security is obviously key, it’s crucial, it’s important,” Infantini said. “You can, of course, always hear and read there are bans or this and that, but the fact is, we received ticket requests from all 211 countries. Everybody’s coming and everybody wants to come.”