When Iranian soccer player Amir Nasr-Azadani was arrested and sentenced to prison for standing with women who dared to protest, the soccer world fell silent. There were no mass boycotts, no urgent meetings, no reckoning. A player disappeared into the machinery of repression, and the sport that claims to unite the world simply turned away.
That silence is what the World Cup should be answering for this year.
Soccer claims to be a force that unites. Its language is spoken by billions, across every border and belief. But that reach is not just a triumph; it is a test.
Again and again, the sport has failed it. Racist chants, antisemitic campaigns, the exclusion of Israeli athletes, homophobic abuse and the punishment of players who speak their minds are not isolated incidents. They are a recurring script. When a sport that commands billions in attention and revenue tolerates this, it is not neutral. It is choosing.
Iran offers its own grim lesson. Nasr-Azadani was not alone. Players Hossein Hosseini and Ramin Rezaeian were punished for the simple act of embracing female fans, a gesture of humanity turned into a crime by decree. Members of the women’s national team who refused to sing the anthem in protest faced retribution; some fled, seeking asylum, only to be forced back by pressure. These are not exceptions. They are the sport abandoning those who give it life.
Elsewhere, the discrimination takes different forms. Israeli athletes have been targeted for exclusion from international sporting participation, a form of antisemitism dressed up as politics. Racist chants directed at black players continue across leagues on multiple continents. Homophobic abuse remains so normalized in many soccer cultures that it barely registers as news.
Sports can reach places that classrooms and governments cannot.
Figures like Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestinian Soccer Federation, actively corrode the sport’s stated values, naming stadiums and tournaments after those who killed civilians, threatening Lionel Messi and his teammates with harm to pressure them out of a 2018 friendly match in Israel and publicly refusing to shake hands with his Israeli counterpart at FIFA’s own General Assembly.
Soccer has no shortage of statements condemning all of this. What it lacks is architecture. That is, systematic approaches that go beyond punishing incidents after they occur.
That is the vacuum the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 11 Point Program Against Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia in Sports was designed to fill. Developed in the spirit of international human rights standards with the support of the Organization of American States, it offers clubs and federations a concrete framework to reject intolerance, establish clear sanctions, keep extremist materials out of stadiums, address harassment online as well as in person, and build lasting partnerships with players, supporters, schools and civil society.
This is prevention, not just punishment.
Three of Argentina’s most storied soccer clubs—River Plate, Racing Club and Boca Juniors—have already committed to our 11-point program. Their participation demonstrates that sport can be fiercely competitive and deeply enjoyable while still upholding the values of mutual respect, tolerance and civility.
In Latin America, we have seen what this looks like in reality. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has partnered with clubs like Boca Juniors, River Plate, Racing Club, Talleres de Córdoba, Defensa y Justicia and Estudiantes de La Plata. These clubs have shown that soccer can take responsibility for the communities it shapes, and that doing so makes the game stronger, not weaker. Soccer reaches places that classrooms and governments cannot. When a club stands up, when players embody that commitment, it carries a weight that official proclamations never will.
The World Cup concentrates that influence to an extraordinary degree. For a few weeks, billions of people have been paying attention, not just to the scorelines but to what the sport represents. That is an opportunity that comes around only once every four years, and it should not be wasted on ceremony.
The question for FIFA, national federations and clubs participating in this tournament is not whether discrimination exists in soccer. It plainly does in forms both brutal and mundane. The question is whether the institutions that govern the sport are willing to treat its elimination as a structural obligation rather than a public relations problem.
Soccer’s strength has always come from what happens when people from radically different backgrounds compete towards a common goal. That is not a slogan; it is what the sport looks like at its best. Protecting that requires more than a banner on a stadium wall. It requires education, enforceable policy and the institutional honesty to name what is happening even when it is politically inconvenient.
With the World Cup in full swing, the question is whether soccer will choose to be worthy of the world that watches.
