Expanded 2026 World Cup means FIFA can’t keep quietly facilitating discrimination against Israel
Alex Talel
In June 2018, the Argentinian Football Association canceled a World Cup tune-up match against Israel’s national team that was set to take place in Jerusalem.
National teams that have qualified for the World Cup do not typically schedule tune-up matches against each other. Instead, qualifying nations typically schedule such matches against national teams that will provide a rough approximation of World Cup-level competition, with such opposition often coming in the form of national teams that barely missed qualification. But Israel had not come close to qualifying for the 2018 World Cup.
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To understand why reigning World Cup Champion Argentina nevertheless wanted to play Israel in preparation for that 2018 World Cup — and why the match never happened — is to understand how FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, has long accommodated a discriminatory political ideology and manipulated World Cup qualification accordingly, so as to exclude Israel from competing in its rightful qualifying region.
Now that the Palestinian Football Association is gearing up to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, which will feature an expanded field of teams, it’s high time for FIFA to allow Israel to attempt to qualify for the World Cup through competition against its geographic neighbors — just like every other nation in the world.
World Cup qualification has an uncomplicated regional format. African nations can only qualify through competition against other African nations, just as European nations compete against each other for qualification, and so on. Middle Eastern nations compete in the Asian Football Confederation or AFC, with one notable exception: Israel.
While Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, the UAE, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine all compete in the AFC, Israel competes for World Cup qualification within the Union of European Football Associations — the far more competitive region known as UEFA.
This anomaly makes it all but impossible for tiny Israel to qualify for the World Cup despite a roster that consistently boasts players who ply their trade in top-flight domestic leagues. And this anomaly is due strictly and only to the fact that the Arab nations competing in the AFC — Israel’s geographic neighbors — have consistently refused to compete against Israel since it joined the AFC in 1954. But far from taking some corrective action against those nations’ national federations, FIFA presided over Israel’s eventual expulsion from the AFC.
Israel qualified for the 1958 World Cup out of the AFC without winning a single match — actually, Israel didn’t play a single match in that qualification cycle because several Arab nations refused to participate in it. Instead of honoring Israel’s qualification, FIFA no doubt enthused the boycotting nations by arranging a roadblock to Israel’s qualification: a two-leg playoff between Israel, founded as a nation just a decade prior, and far-stronger Wales.
Israel’s fledgling side lost.
In 1964, still competing in the AFC, Israel hosted and won the AFC Asian Cup, with 11 of the 16 participating nations boycotting the tournament. A 2015 commemorative video history of the AFC makes no mention of the 1964 tournament. When Israel did qualify for the World Cup out of the AFC in 1970, the result proved too difficult to bear for its Arab neighbors—upon motion by Kuwait at the 1974 Asian Games, Israel was formally expelled from the AFC.
FIFA took no action.
Israel attempted to qualify for the World Cup out of UEFA in 1982 and then joined the Oceania qualification group for two cycles, finally becoming full-fledged UEFA members in 1994, within which it today competes for World Cup qualification against soccer powerhouses England, France, Spain, and Italy, to name but a few — UEFA boasts eight of the world’s top-10 national sides, including 13 of the world’s top-25 national sides, whereas the AFC today boasts not a single one of the world’s top-10 sides, including just two of the world’s top-25 sides. In other words, Israel would stand a far greater chance of qualification for the World Cup if it were pooled in the qualification stages with its geographic neighbors.
And yet Israel’s geographic neighbors have not only refused to compete against it but have also made it difficult for Israel’s national side to obtain valuable exposure to elite international competition. This was the case in June 2018, when the Argentinian Football Association caved to organized pressure from the Palestinian Authority, with Argentinian FA President Claudio Tapia announcing that he was forced to cancel the Jerusalem match for “safety” reasons after several Argentinian players had received death threats.
It’s bad enough to refuse to compete against a national side for reasons having nothing to do with sport and worse to organize to ensure that the nation in question can’t compete at all. The world’s top athletes understand this, as indicated by the relationship between Judokas Sagi Muki of Israel and Saaid Mollaei, formerly of Iran. Mollaei, a world-class fighter, was ordered to lose in the 2019 World Championship semi-finals in order to avoid fighting Muki in the finals. Mollaei did so under protest but subsequently defected to Mongolia. Muki praised Mollaei’s courage, and the two are now close friends, competing together and against each other at the highest level. (Muki won the 2019 World Championships, and Mollaei took home an Olympic medal in 2020.) The International Judo Federation suspended Iran for four years because of this incident.
FIFA has made a great deal of its commitment to “fair play.” But it is the antithesis of “fair” to allow World Cup qualification to national sides that refuse to compete against their geographic neighbors. FIFA can’t stop Palestine and its fellow Arab nations from making a political statement by refusing to compete against Israel, but it shouldn’t be punishing Israel in order to relieve those nations of the consequences of their political statement.
If the U.S. Soccer Federation refused to participate in World Cup qualifiers against Canada, for whatever reason, the U.S. would forfeit those matches. Instead, by taking the approach that it has, FIFA accommodates and even orchestrates the discriminatory politics of a handful of nations. The governing body of the world’s most popular form of sport should be fostering honest competition between the Mukis and Mollaeis of the world, not preventing it by manipulating the qualification mechanism of the world’s most popular sporting event.
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Nations hoping to qualify for the World Cup can only do so through competition against their geographic neighbors. This proposition has guided World Cup qualification since 1934. And it should apply without exception. FIFA should reinstate Israel in the AFC and let the chips fall where they may.
That move wouldn’t please certain political factions. But it would ensure “fair play,” including all its attendant potential to build bridges between international competitors.
Alex Talel is an attorney who previously served as law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.