Category: Politics

After months of planning, some griping and a few tit-for-tats, the three top Democrats from New York and New Jersey showed up to watch the World Cup — together.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are all attending this evening’s Brazil–Morocco match.

The TV broadcast captured the two New Yorkers sitting together. Sherrill also joined them during the match.

Before heading into the stadium, Sherrill stepped off a New Jersey Transit train carrying fans from both teams just before 4 p.m. to hold a quick press conference with her top transit advisers.

“This is the easiest, fastest way to get in and out of the stadium,” she said.

New Jersey Transit generated international headlines for its high ticket prices — $150 at first, then lowered to $98.

Sherrill said about 21,000 people booked tickets on the New Jersey Transit system to get to the match. New Jersey Transit planned to carry up to 40,000 to each match.

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Where is the World Cup being played again?

In the northeastern United States, eight World Cup games, including the final, will be played in what FIFA calls “New York New Jersey.” But elected leaders from this portmanteau place are jostling over where exactly it is.

The state of New Jersey and New York City bid for and won the right to be a host city, but New York state officials have become increasingly involved. So politicians on both sides of the river are just bursting with border-state rivalry that can be lighthearted and serious all at once.

The matches, for the record, are at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. But that hasn’t stopped New York Gov. Kathy Hochul from repeatedly declaring that “New York is not just hosting the World Cup, New York is the World Cup.”

There’s some truth to it — most of the fans are expected to stay in and visit New York between matches. But New Jersey doesn’t shrug off such slights because they reinforce long-running dynamics of New York as the bigger sibling and the Garden State’s struggle for recognition.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) made avenging this wrong a dayslong cause célèbre and taunted Hochul with social media posts such as: “If you’re planning to watch a FIFA match in New York, you’ll be SOL.”

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill pushed to get one of the temporary signs hung at MetLife changed to read “New Jersey New York” instead of “New York New Jersey.” On Friday, she posted a six-second video from outside the sign. “For those keeping score at home, the World Cup is in New Jersey. And now the sign reflects that.”

The New York-New Jersey combo isn’t new.

“I never liked it,” said former U.S. national team goalkeeper Tony Meola, a native of nearby Kearny, New Jersey, who was subjected to the indignity of playing under a neighboring state’s banner during his years with the New York/New Jersey Metrostars, since renamed Red Bull New York.

“I grew up there, I played there — it’s New Jersey,” said Meola. “That’s just my opinion.”

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FIFA President Gianni Infantino is working on his third World Cup, which spreads across North America this weekend. His first tournaments were held in autocratic countries with governments willing to splash cash and use the games to sportswash their tarnished image on the global stage.

In America, where 78 of the 104 matches will be played, he’s dealing with something dramatically different — democratically elected leaders spread across 11 host communities.

Infantino at first seemed to approach North America largely the same way he did Russia and Qatar: Win over the head of state and go from there. He went so far as to court President Donald Trump by giving him a peace prize before he started a war with Iran.

State and local politicians, however, had their own priorities.

In America, Infantino has found himself foiled not only by democracy but the country’s federalism — the separation of national and state power that gives local officials unique power. He can blame Thomas Jefferson for that.

“I think that’s just a big difference, even compared to other western democracies, our federalism is a huge difference,” said Alex Lasry, the CEO of the New York New Jersey Host Committee.

As a result, FIFA’s national partners in Mexico and Canada have more say over how the World Cup is playing out in their countries than the White House does in America, a country that does not even have a sports minister.

In practice, this has meant that even as FIFA presented itself as the world government of the globe’s most beloved sport, local officials in America started standing in its way.

A senior FIFA official earlier this year said it was exaggerated to say one person in Qatar or Russia snapped their fingers and things got done, but the official did describe America as more decentralized.

Back in 2023, one of Infantino’s longtime advisers spoke at length about the FIFA president’s public image. “This whole idea of shoulder-rubbing with dictators? It’s not real. Sometimes the U.S. president is Joe Biden, sometimes it’s Donald Trump. Gianni can’t change that,” the adviser told Tim Röhn of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO. “He’s not interested in politics — only in football.”

But those politics have been creating roadblocks for months, leading up to the first American game on Friday in Los Angeles.

There was a five-member special board in Massachusetts that had to sign off on a license to allow FIFA to play seven matches there, a power it used to extract concessions from the local host committee.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — one of the newly elected politicians who didn’t bid for the World Cup but now has to pay to put it on, despite having other priorities — got in a public scrape with FIFA over transportation costs. FIFA didn’t budge, but the fight was ugly.

When it tried to ban water bottles from stadiums, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attacked and FIFA backed down.

On the legal front, a quartet of attorneys general — three from blue states and one from red Texas — are now investigating the soccer body’s ticketing practices.

Alas, there isn’t one person Infantino can call to smooth things over. He isn’t the first European to puzzle over America’s decentralized governance, but this 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville seems to be learning the hard way.

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President Donald Trump’s name was removed from the facade of the Kennedy Center on Saturday, capping off the president’s longtime effort to assert control over the institution, one of Washington’s most iconic cultural landmarks.

In a Saturday court filing to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Matthew Floca, the Kennedy Center’s chief operating officer and executive director, confirmed work crews had removed “all physical signage” from the building and grounds “that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any individual besides President Kennedy.”

Workers, hidden behind a large white tarp, removed Trump’s name from the building’s white exterior early Saturday morning, after blowing past a Friday deadline due to what Floca cited as “weather-related delays.” The tarp remained in place on Saturday night.

The removal comes after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in late May that Trump’s rebranding of the performing arts center in his own name was illegal, contravening federal law that the center could only honor Kennedy and usurping authority from Congress.

In the weeks since, officials have removed references to Trump on the Kennedy Center’s website, issued new identification cards, edited employee email signatures and rescinded any trademark applications adding Trump to the institution’s name, Floca wrote in his filing. The restoration of the building’s original name followed denials Friday by both Cooper and an appeals court of last-ditch attempts by the administration and Department of Justice to stay Cooper’s May ruling.

It’s a stinging blow to the president, whose ambitious plans for the Kennedy Center included packing its board with loyalists and shutting it down for two years to conduct major renovations.

Cooper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, also nixed the Kennedy Center’s closure in his May ruling, prompting Trump to angrily announce plans to transfer the institution back to Congress in a Truth Social post shortly after.

“Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!” he wrote. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.”

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BRUSSELS — A growing number of soccer supporters say chaotic visa procedures are keeping them from attending World Cup matches in the United States.

One Belgian-Moroccan soccer fan, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue without fear of repercussions, told POLITICO he thought he had secured tickets to Saturday’s Morocco vs. Brazil match through FIFA’s lottery system, booked flights to New York and applied for entry to the U.S.

That’s when things began to go wrong.

The fan, who had previously traveled with an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) — the online authorization system used by travelers from countries that don’t need visas for short visits to the U.S. — said his application was approved on May 27, but abruptly revoked one week later.

“There was nothing mentioned except for travel not authorized,” he said. “That’s the whole frustrating situation — the opacity of the whole thing.”

His attempts to apply for a non-immigrant visa were fruitless. Ahead of the World Cup, the State Department launched an expedited process for some fans seeking visas to attend matches in the U.S., but the Belgian-Moroccan national said he was never able to access it because an initial appointment platform failed to register his payments.

That, in turn, made it impossible to book the mandatory interview at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels required before requesting an expedited appointment. He added that calls to the embassy went unanswered because they were automatically forwarded to an inactive Belgian number.

Other World Cup attendees have reported similar problems. Scottish musician Kenny Smith said his ESTA was revoked despite recent travel to the United States. Meanwhile, Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan was recently denied entry to the country despite being selected to officiate at the tournament.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino on Wednesday acknowledged that the special World Cup visa system was “not working always, and with everyone.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended visa denials Thursday, citing security concerns.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to say if dual nationals were more likely to have their applications revoked, but said ESTA applications are continuously vetted and approval “does not guarantee admission” to the U.S.

For the Belgian-Moroccan fan missing Saturday’s match, the visa ordeal undermined the point of the tournament. “The whole experience of a World Cup is intended to bring people together,” he said. “Now actually being rejected for no reason, it actually has the opposite effect.”

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High-stakes geopolitics aren’t the only external factor threatening to hijack the tournament.

Perhaps ironically for a competition hosted by a U.S. president who is highly skeptical about climate change and says assertions about rising temperatures have been made “by stupid people,” the heat is very likely to be a problem.

Heat waves have become a persistent part of Northern Hemisphere summers — each one made hotter, longer and more likely to occur as a result of man-made global warming. The locations of several stadiums across the U.S. and Mexico, as well as the peak-summer timing of the World Cup, are expected to put players and fans at risk of overheating.

The problem isn’t just heat, but also humidity. The combination of the two feels far hotter and is measured with wet-bulb temperature, which mimics how the human body cools off through sweating. A wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit can be fatal even to healthy people; the football players’ union FIFPRO says wet-bulb temperatures above 79 degrees — which can be reached through a combination of 86 degree heat and 50 percent humidity, for example — will affect performance and health, and 82 degree heat should prompt the postponement of a match.

When scientists last month ran the numbers, they found that 26 of 104 matches are expected to take place in conditions of at least 79 degree wet-bulb temperature. Five matches are estimated to breach the 82 degree wet-bulb barrier. And a peer-reviewed study found that during last year’s FIFA Club World Cup in the U.S., average wet-bulb temperature exceeded 82 degrees in 31 of 57 matches analyzed by scientists.

That study also found that high temperatures were associated with players covering less ground, forcing a change of tactics. Exhaustion sets in faster under high temperatures — at the Club World Cup, 10 players asked to be substituted in a single match. But heat doesn’t just affect gameplay. At the 2024 Copa America, an assistant referee collapsed in the heat and, last month, two people died during sports events held amid a heat wave in France.

As climate change continues to heat the planet, FIFA will have to grapple with the growing threat at every subsequent tournament. The 2030 men’s World Cup in Spain, Portugal and Morocco takes place in a global warming hotspot. The women’s World Cup next year will be in Brazil during a warming El Niño event, expected to supercharge the heating effect of climate change.

And that’s not even counting the other growing climate risks — from wildfire smoke to extreme rain — that threaten to disrupt future events.

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