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Episode transcript
HOST (ANDIE CROSSAN)
Hey there, State of Play listeners and those new to the pod.
Last year we brought you stories about how sporting events like the Olympics change cities. We went to Paris, Los Angeles and Vancouver so you could hear from community members who were pushed out, priced out and moved out in the name of sports.
In Los Angeles, we met people fighting to keep their homes in the face of major development to prepare for what can only be called a mega-event tsunami.
PROTESTORS
Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a human right. Fight Fight Fight! Housing is a human right. Fight! Fight! Fight!
No Olympics here, no Olympics anywhere! No Olympics here, no Olympics anywhere!”
ANDIE
Those Summer Games are still three years away.
Before the torch arrives in LA, the sports capital of the world will be hosting the NBA All-Star Game, a Super Bowl and the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup.
But since we last reported from Los Angeles so much has changed.
LA RESIDENT
The canyon is literally on fire on both sides. I thought it was just the canyon across from my house, but no, it’s literally on both sides.
REPORTER
The pacific palisades fire growing to nearly 16,000 acres. 40 miles away the Eaton Fire turned deadly and exploded to over 10,000 acres. Tonight, thousands in the region are under evacuation orders, filling shelters, schools are closed, while power is out for millions of Southern Californians.
REPORTER
This is like nothing you’ve ever seen with multiple fires raging across the LA region right now. And here in Malibu it’s truly an apocalyptic scene.
ANDIE
And as bad as that was, there was so much more to come.
PROTESTOR
We see you for what you are, a terrorist organization. ICE out of Paramount. You are not welcome here.
REPORTER
In breaking news, Governor Newsom says that President Trump is moving to deploy the California National Guard. The National Guard is controlled by the governor but Governor Newsom says the federal government is moving to take over the guard and deploy 2,000 soldiers.
PROTESTOR
All we’re doing is trying to help our people from being separated from their families. That’s all we’re doing. That’s all.
ANDIE
In the next few weeks we’ve got some bonus episodes for you.
I’m your host Andie Crossan.
And this is State of Play.
Where we talk about sports, politics, human rights, and where they meet.
It’s fair to say that Angelinos have been through a lot.
Wildfires, ICE raids, protests – and of course, in the middle of all of it right now – sports.
So to get caught up on what’s been going on, I called up Alissa Walker.
Alissa is a journalist and she writes Torched LA. It’s a newsletter about megavents coming to her city.
ALISSA WALKER
You know, in that very first week, these fears, talking to people who either worked at the venues or had family members who did, or lived nearby, were worried about. You know, not just these raids, but just the overall militarization of the city that we know is going to happen because we signed up for it. That’s what we, that’s what we agreed to when we decided to, to host these events. And that’s something that is already. In place. We have a special security designation, which puts the Secret Service in charge. They’re the lead public safety agency, and it requires this, uh, unprecedented collaboration with every level of law enforcement from local to federal. And there’s been moments over the last. Few weeks where, for example, the Club World Cup, games are happening at the Rose Bowl, and we’re not sure if ICE is there because they’ve said they’re going to be at other cities that are hosting these events.
In Miami, for example, they came out and said like, ICE is gonna be for the there, for these first round matches, and we’re hosting some of those first round matches at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. People were getting off the shuttle to take from the transit stop to get to the stadium. There were Homeland Security people there because it’s part of their responsibility to keep people safe on transportation, but you just don’t know anymore. You know? And, and this is going to be continuing over the next three years.
ANDIE
I think what’s interesting and you, I, I’d love to talk more about the club World Cup because in some ways this is like, I’m gonna get yelled at by a million people for saying this, but it’s, it’s the baby World Cup and there is talk that there has been a cooling effect around the Club World Cup because of travel bans, uh, which went into place in June because of ICE raids that all of this potentially is foreshadowing next summer. When the big World Cup is coming.
ALISSA
I don’t even think this was on many people’s radar until the issue started happening with the federal government. Right? And then all of a sudden people are looking in our own backyard and saying, well, you know, are people gonna even wanna travel to the United States? All these questions about if people could get visas to come here. Um, the announcement of the travel ban, which was basically the week before, and then you saw FIFA slash ticket prices. I mean, you could go to a game in June for $33 at the Rose Bowl, which is just unprecedented. I mean, maybe it wasn’t the most popular game of the tournament, but only $33, right? And then you literally had ICE raids happening in the city of Pasadena. Someone took a video of people being taken from a bus stop in Pasadena. A, a mile or two from the, from the stadium and had a gun pulled on them by some kind of masked federal agent. We don’t know who it is.
REPORTER
A gun pulled out by what appears to be a federal agent in Pasadena following ICE raids in the community. One agent can be seen taking at least two people into custody at a bus stop outside this …
ALISSA
You think people are gonna wanna come to these and, uh, next year when this is kind of the, the backdrop under which all these games are, are being played, I’ve heard from a lot of people who are too scared to go and we actually had a yet another tournament not related to FIFA, but this is the Gold Cup tournament happening at SoFi and the at Dignity Health Center, which is in Carson and there was actually immigration lawyers who told the LA Times, if you have any concern or if you are worried, do not attend the Mexico match, because there’s no real way to guarantee people’s safety.
ANDIE
What’s interesting to me also is the way that Mayor Karen Bass is in some ways using the coming World Cup next year as kind of a cudgel.
LA MAYOR KAREN BASS
We are 12 months away from the World Cup. We need the administration to help us prepare. They are talking about spending over $100 million with this deployment, which is why I say that I feel like we’ve all been, in Los Angeles, a part of a grand experiment to see what happens when the federal government decides they want to roll up on a state or roll up on a city and take over.
ANDIE
Sort of an interesting thing that this is actually being used as a tool to get control right now.
ALISSA
It seems so out of touch with reality that we’re facing right now, not just the fire recovery, which was also, I think, a huge hurdle. But we’ve gotten funding and, and we’ve got. Some plans in place for how to address that. I don’t know how you address basically the federal government occupying your city and imploding your economy and then going to a press conference and saying, oh, in 12 months we’re gonna be hosting this in cooperation with this same federal government that’s terrorizing us. It just seems increasingly unlikely that that will be the case.
ANDIE
Do you feel like, even for those who are enthusiastic about soccer or mega events in sports in general, do you think it is souring people who even may have come from a place of feeling positive about sports?
ALISSA
You know, I should add a disclaimer that I don’t really care about sports at all or follow them. I’m great, like very, um, that’s okay. Yeah, I’m, I’m a very impartial person when it comes to, you know, the boosterism of our, you know, our sports industrial complex here in LA because I don’t actually care about what happens with any, with any of these teams or any of these competitions, but you see, for example, what happened with the Dodgers really refusing to step up and say something as this began and the fans really got livid. And then they said they were gonna make an announcement and then all of a sudden there was this ICE activity…
PROTESTOR
Get out! We don’t want you here!
LA RESIDENT
They are trying to intimidate the Dodgers who’s the largest economic engine in this area. The most LA Latino team that we have from not taking a stand. They actually helped us force the Dodgers to take a stand because the Dodgers said get out of here!
ALISSA
Well, I think the fans of all sports are wanting to know. Are these teams and venues and even the organizers of the mega events, are they on our side or not? A lot of these organizations refuse to take a political stance on what’s going on. I think the games will probably be held. Will they be more reminiscent of the 1936 games in Germany? That’s to be determined, but that’s the track we’re on at this point. You know, they’re going to take control of it and do whatever they want, just to say that they happened.
ANDIE
As an Angelino, as somebody who loves this city, what is the thing that is concerning you most around this? There are, again, there’s a, there’s a myriad of issues. There’s a buffet of things to be concerned about. What’s the thing that’s really on your radar?
ALISSA
It is dangerous for half of the city’s population to be outside in public space right now. I don’t know any other way to put it. They are doing racial profiling and attacking and kidnapping people based on what they look like, and that is a majority of this region’s population. So how do you have things like fan zones and watch parties and open streets events? I don’t know how this changes unless there’s a substantial decision to get these federal agents out of our city, and I don’t see the pathway for that happening as we’ve made a deal for them to stay here for the next three years.
ANDIE
That was Alissa Walker.
And you can stay up to date with what’s happening in Los Angeles by subscribing to Alissa’s newsletter Torched LA.
When we were researching the first season of State of Play we connected with one of the leading experts on sports and politics.
Jules Boykoff is a professor of Political Science at Pacific University in Oregon and he’s written books about the history of protest movements and the Olympics.
He is also a former professional soccer player.
I called up Jules because I wanted to get his take on something that Alissa Walker mentioned.
ANDIE
Jules it’s great to chat with you again. I’m hoping that you can answer a really important question, which is: what the heck is FIFA Club World Cup?
JULES BOYKOFF
It is a tournament that involves teams from around the world Club teams who’ve either won their league or won a tournament inside of their league. That’s the most generous way of putting it. If you scratch and sniff a little bit, you’ll see that it’s basically a money grubbing festival and it is designed to get FIFA money while at the same time allowing FIFA world’s governing body for soccer to fortify its relationship with big time sponsors, such as those coming from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. So I think it’s sort of a split screen event. On one hand you have the spectacle of it all and the positive maybe way of looking at it, the greatest soccer players, some of the greatest around the world playing against each other to see who club team’s the best. But the other part of the screen is the sort of ugly underbelly that you always get with FIFA. But this time in the blistering hot summer in the United States in half empty stadiums.
ANDIE
This seems to be an event that a lot of people are missing out on or they’re not bothering to buy tickets. Ticket sales have been low. Is this just not a great fit for the U.S.
JULES
Well, it’s a new tournament and under the current FIFA president Gianni Infantino, it’s a greatly expanded tournament. So there are many games in this tournament and that means there’s many tickets available. And it’s not a tournament that most people have heard of. They’ve heard of the World Cup, but not necessarily the Club World Cup. And there’s some confusion there. It has to be said that the current political situation in the United States right now is not helping matters in terms of attracting fans from other countries to the United States. And if I can put a finer point on it, what I mean is the Trump administration letting its immigration and customs enforcement run wild, scooping up people off the streets regardless of their status. ICE is essentially running like a Gestapo crew. It’s quite out of control. And a lot of people from other countries are like, why would I wanna deal with that? If I even managed to get through the customs then I might have to deal with the possibility of getting scooped up and thrown in an overcrowded detention center. And so the Trump administration’s policies are certainly ghosting behind everything that we’re seeing this summer in regards to the FIFA Club World Cup.
ANDIE
Do you think this is foreshadowing what we’re going to see next summer? Because obviously, you know, as I said to Alyssa Walker, this is like sort of the baby version, but we’ve got the real full World Cup in US, Canada and Mexico happening in the summer next year.
JULES
In some ways, it does foreshadow what we’re likely to see next summer. I think you’ll see much stronger attendance, much greater global interest of course in the actual Men’s World Cup in 2026. But Trump is not likely to squander an opportunity to engage in sports washing using sports to self-aggrandize on the global stage, while at the same time stoking nationalism bolstering the state security apparatus and deflecting attention from domestic social problems. And Trump often talks about how the 2026 World Cup is one of the events in his second term that he’s looking forward to most. And so you can bet that he’s going to want to use that event to bolster his own profile. I just wanna say as a side note, a lot of times when you hear the term sports washing, it’s applied to places like Qatar during the last Men’s World Cup or Saudi Arabia, and rightly so, they’re definitely engaging in sports washing, but you can also see it in punitive democracies such as the United States. And Trump in a way helps us see that with greater clarity that sports washing can happen anywhere along that spectrum from authoritarianism to democracies.
ANDIE
Would it not be an important moment for FIFA to look as though it was turning a corner in terms of corruption after 17 years with Sepp Blatter, after all of the scandal after scandal, after scandal? Should this not be a moment of a reputation lifting tour at this point?
JULES
One might think that under the current president Gianni Infantino, there would be a real interest in pivoting away from any discussion of corruption. But in some ways it’s only gotten worse under Infantino, the culture of corruption that existed under Sepp Blatter has continued if in slightly amended form under Gianni Infantino. Infantino has done just about everything he can to cozy up to US President Donald Trump.
GIANNI INFANTINO
We are organizing a Club World Cup this year. The first ever FIFA Club World Cup with 32 teams in the United States of America. We’re organizing a World Cup next year in the United States, Mexico and Canada. And let’s not forget when the bidding happened for that World Cup, President Trump was already president of the United States then. I’ve been president of FIFA when we organized the World Cup in Russia, and when we organized the World Cup in Qatar. I think it is absolutely crucial for the success of the World Cup to have a close relationship with the president, with the government. You know, I have a lot of friends.
JULES
I mean, if you look at the tape of Trump’s inauguration, you can actually see Gianni Infantino’s unmistakable pate bobbing at the back of the VIP section. Just a few rows behind former US presidents. They are two birds of, of the fascist feather, as I heard someone say recently. And so they have decided to run or fly together.
ANDIE
All that said, do you have any hope for change considering this is, this could be an opportunity because there will be protests, there will be moments for people to be able to stand up and speak their truth around this.
JULES
Absolutely. And I think it starts with the players in a lot of ways. When the FIFA Club World Cup was getting ready to start, you had players from the Seattle Sounders who wore basically protest t-shirts to one of their matches on the front. It said Club World Cash grab. And on the back it said Fair Share Now because the money wasn’t being distributed fairly or properly or evenly from this tournament. And if you look back at the last World Cup, uh, men’s World Cup in Qatar, you similarly saw numerous players standing up for their political beliefs. It was pretty interesting to see how much support there was for Palestine at that moment in 2022. A lot of Palestinian flags being flown by teams after they won their matches, for example. And so I think it’s important to kinda look to some of these players as leaders.
At the same time, in my experience doing research on these issues, it’s the social movements off the field that create space for these athletes to take that activist athlete mantle on the field. And of course the entire world’s media will be here to cover that event. And they’re always looking for interesting controversies. And so there’s a real opportunity for domestic activists here in the United States to speak out. Now all that said, I would not necessarily recommend, and I do not recommend coming to the United States for this World Cup. I think you’re actually asking for trouble. Of course, it depends a lot on what country you originate from. But the Trump administration is already now floating sort of two levels of a travel ban. And now it involves some 48 countries, some of which have actually qualified for the World Cup. I’m thinking about you, Iran, our fans from Iran going to be allowed into the United States to watch the World Cup in 2026. So far the Trump administration is saying that Iran, the players and coaching staff themself will. But there’s a lot of open questions there.
ANDIE
Finally, Jules, you come from a world of soccer. This played a huge role in your life. You’re a former professional player. How do you feel about how it has been, in so many ways, corrupted and used in terms of the sports washing aspect of this?
JULES
Well, sports has always been political and anybody who tells you otherwise is not your friend. And I’ve known that even when I was younger and playing in, in the ways that you described. But I’ve also always believed that Nelson Mandela was right when he said that sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire and it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. And I’ve seen that with my own two eyes. So soccer’s become this monstrous capitalist juggernaut that spits out players as if they were just part of the surplus population. But on the other hand, the sport has become a real platform for fight back. And so I think we can hold both of those things in our palm at the same time. And I’m going to choose to really highlight the latter and try to use any kind of platform that I might be able to have to try to amplify the voices of those that are standing up for justice and using sports to do so. And I think that’s still a possibility in this country, and I’m looking forward to seeing how all that plays out, not just this summer at the FIFA Club World Cup, but also next summer in 2026 at the FIFA Men’s World Cup.
ANDIE
Jules, it’s always so great to talk with you. Thank you so much for your time and your insight on this.
JULES
My pleasure. Great to talk to you too, Andie.
ANDIE
That’s it for this first bonus episode of State of Play.
We’ll be back later this month when we head to Paris to tell you about one of the world’s leading soccer clubs riding high on Qatari money
PSG FAN
When the Qatari came to Paris to purchase PSG they invested a lot of money. When you start winning titles, when you have a strong team, everyone is talking about you, it makes PSG a really attractive club.
ANDIE
That’s coming next time on State of Play.
Thanks for listening.
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