Even the Nazis tried to tone things down a bit. Before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, acutely conscious of how it might be perceived by foreign visitors, the Third Reich tried to soften some of its harder, more intolerant edges. Antisemitic signs and images were removed from shops and other public places. Der Stürmer was removed from newspaper kiosks. Paragraph 175, the country’s strict anti‑homosexuality law, was temporarily suspended.

By contrast, the 2026 men’s World Cup is being co-hosted in a country utterly indifferent to what a foreign visitor might think of it. In this respect, the US of Donald Trump is tonally different to any host of a major sporting event that has preceded it: a country that actively wants you to see the darkness in its heart, the inhumanity at its core, that gets off on your revulsion.

We can assume, for example, that the administration knew exactly what it was doing when it turned away Omar Abdulkadir Artan at its borders just days before the tournament. After all, Artan is from Somalia, one of the many countries about which Trump has made his views entirely clear, previously describing Somalis as “garbage” and “crooks”. “We want to make sure we are not going to allow a soccer tournament to be the opportunity for terrorists to potentially get in the country,” said Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House World Cup task force.

On one level you had to marvel at the levels of cartoon evil necessary to unite the rest of the world in sympathy for – of all people – a referee. But of course this was simply one scene in the World Cup’s theatre of performative cruelty. The vice-captain of Iraq was detained for seven hours on arrival. Thirteen members of the Iranian delegation are still waiting for visas, and their allocation of fan tickets has been revoked. According to the BBC, 11 of the 48 participating countries – all of them from the global south – are facing travel restrictions or unusually high rates of visa rejections.