World Cup politics are already part of the 2026 build-up, with Iran and Haiti facing full US travel restrictions and Senegal and Ivory Coast under partial restrictions.
Those rules are not expected to stop the teams themselves from playing, with athletes and official delegations covered by exemptions. But it did make us think about just how closely tied the World Cup is to global affairs.
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What about countries that were not just restricted by a host nation, but banned from the tournament by FIFA or football’s governing structures? These are the World Cup-related cases where politics, war, sanctions or government interference kept
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