For the first time in World Cup history, eight Arab nations have qualified for this year’s tournament, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Jordan—double the number of teams that qualified for Qatar in 2022.
Yet, the tournament is taking place at an unprecedented moment of heightened geopolitical tension. The US-Israel war with Iran, which began in February of this year, has caused ripple effects across Gulf states and neighboring countries in the Levant, including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, reshaping the security around travel and mobility for fans and players hailing from the region.
The US State Department has fully suspended visa issuance for nationals from countries with teams that qualified, including Iran and Haiti—despite it being the first time Haiti has qualified for a World Cup since 1974. Just a week before the tournament began, the Iranian Football Federation, according to Reuters, reported that thousands of fans had their tickets revoked; before that, the US ruled that Iranian players and staff would have to commute to the US from Mexico on days the team has matches on American soil.
Iran is the most visible example, but it is far from the only one. The head of the Palestinian Football Association was denied entry into the US, while fans in Morocco have had their visas denied, with many losing money spent on travel costs.
“For other Middle Eastern countries, while they may not be outright banned, they face a steeper hill to climb depending on the country,” says Talib Visram, an independent reporter who has been closely covering this year’s World Cup through his Substack “America’s Cup,” where he has spent months interviewing experts and tracking the build-up to the tournament.
“Fans of nations like Jordan—one of the debutants—had to apply for visas many months in advance. While those wait times were later expedited, there was a reported denial rate of more than 40 percent,” he adds.
Similar barriers have emerged across Africa. Fans from the Ivory Coast and Senegal have been met with reported visa rejections, while a Somali referee with an approved US visa was denied entry when he landed in Miami, underscoring how official approval to travel does not necessarily guarantee admission at the border.
In addition to visa barriers, fans from Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia, and Algeria also faced the possibility of US entry bonds as high as $15,000 going into the tournament. In May, the State Department moved to waive the bond requirement for visitors coming into the country for the World Cup, but only if they’d purchased official tickets and applied for FIFA’s Priority Appointment Scheduling System (PASS) by April 15. That cutoff date means the waiver may not help many fans.
What sits behind these outcomes is a complex system. While obtaining a US visa is formally the same for all applicants, State Department guidance says applicants can be subject to expanded screening and vetting, including review of social media and online activity. Some cases are then pushed into administrative processing, an open-ended security review that can last weeks or months with no clear timeline. Layered onto that are biometric checks at both the visa and border stage, which can include fingerprinting and facial-comparison technologies, which can add further delays or lead to additional screening even for those with approved visas.
“We have seen examples of visa-triaging algorithms, automation, all sorts of decisions being made by artificial intelligence kind of behind the scenes, and this is changing the ways that people can enter countries,” says Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist at the Refugee Law Lab at Toronto’s York University who specializes in the impacts of technology on migration and border crossings. “It’s changing the immigration, detention, and deportation regimes as well.”