The world’s soccer governing body reminded fans what its theoretical commitment to “neutrality” means in practice: siding with the genocidaire.

President Donald Trump poses for a selfie with Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw on December 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.

FIFA released a pair of highly anticipated decisions regarding Israel and Palestine last Thursday, and the world’s soccer governing body reminded fans across the globe what its theoretical commitment to political neutrality means in practice: siding with the authoritarian, the aggressor, the oppressor.

FIFA touts a commitment to staying “neutral in matters of politics” and claims that “discrimination of any kind…is strictly prohibited and punishable,” but under the rule of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, neutrality means the powerful win—and for Infantino, that means MAGA. Taken together, the decisions are an obscene abdication of FIFA’s responsibility to follow its own statutes and its publicly stated commitment to human rights. They’re also a foreboding sign of what we can expect from Infantino during this summer’s World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

FIFA issued two decisions regarding the Israel Football Association. The first responded to a formal complaint by the Palestinian Football Association that its Israeli counterparts were staging matches on illegally annexed land in the West Bank. This complaint is based on facts, not contentions. In 2024, the United Nations pinpointed at least eight Israeli soccer clubs that have either developed or staged matches “in Israeli colonial settlements of the occupied West Bank.” The following year, the sports and human rights group FairSquare published a letter by international scholars explaining how Israeli settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, UN Security Resolutions 446 and 2334, and rulings by the International Criminal Court (ICJ) in both 2004 and 2024. Human Rights Watch has been providing evidence for a decade that the Israel Football Association has organized matches on “settlements in the West Bank on land unlawfully taken from Palestinians.”

And yet, FIFA’s Governance, Audit, and Compliance Committee decided that no action was required because “the final legal status of the West Bank remains an unresolved and highly complex matter under public international law.” That would be news to the ICJ and a cavalcade of international law specialists. In response, former ICJ judge Michael Dugard went off: “FIFA and UEFA [the Union of European Football Associations] have to be held accountable for deliberately contradicting an International Court of Justice ruling on the Palestinian occupied territories.”

In the second ruling, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee found that the Israel Football Association failed to do anything meaningful to curtail racist and proudly violent behavior by the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem FC, whose ultras are infamous for their racism and bigotry. The club’s most devoted fans often chant “Death to Arabs” during matches and belt out songs with lines like, “I don’t care how many and how they will get killed / Eliminating Arabs makes me thrilled.”

At times, the ruling was scathing, asserting that “by failing to condemn or remediate discriminatory practices and exclusionary policies—particularly those affecting Palestinians—the IFA has become institutionally complicit in a system that violates the core values of the game.” It added, “This complicity not only exposes the association to disciplinary liability but also damages the moral authority of football as a tool for social cohesion and intercultural dialogue.”

In short, the IFA breached FIFA rules outlawing (1) “offensive behavior and violations of the principles of fair play” and (2) “discrimination and racist abuse.”

What was FIFA’s response to these breaches of its neutrality doctrine? A trifling fine, a “warning” for the IFA, and a requirement “to display in its next three A-level FIFA competition matches at home a significant and highly visible banner with the words ‘Football United the World—No to Discrimination’ alongside the Israeli Football Association’s logo.” Seriously. A banner. One that will surely be mocked endlessly among the Beitar Jerusalem thugs.