Nairobi, on a humid Wednesday in late May, is three time zones ahead of Washington, D.C., and the news arrived here the way most American policy announcements reach the world: through a scrolling notification on a phone screen, between a report on the Kenyan Premier League and an advertisement for a mobile money transfer service. The Trump administration, ESPN FC reported, is suspending a requirement that foreign visitors from certain countries pay bonds of as much as $15,000 to obtain a United States visa, provided they hold confirmed tickets for the 2026 World Cup.T2, ESPN FC
The bond programme, which has applied to nationals of countries deemed high-risk for visa overstays, was one of several financial and bureaucratic obstacles that, had it remained in place for the tournament, would have made the 2026 World Cup the most expensive to attend for supporters from large parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. A family of four from Lagos, Nairobi, or Dhaka, applying for visas to watch group-stage matches in Dallas or Philadelphia, would have faced bond deposits totalling $60,000, on top of flights, accommodation, and ticket prices that already place a World Cup trip beyond the reach of most working supporters. The suspension, for ticket-holders, removes that specific wall.
The timing is not incidental. FIFA and the United States organising committee have spent two years watching ticket sales for the North American tournament track below the internal projections that were set when the 48-team expanded format was announced. The reasons are structural and cultural. The United States is a country whose domestic football culture, despite the growth of Major League Soccer, does not generate the kind of automatic mass-travelling support that Germany produced in 2006 or Brazil in 2014. Mexico and Canada, the co-hosts, will contribute substantial numbers of supporters, but the bulk of international travelling fans for a World Cup hosted in North America were always going to come from Europe, South America, and, increasingly, from West and East Africa, where football’s relationship to national identity is among the most intense on earth.
England’s supporters are, by volume, the single largest national travelling contingent to World Cups. In Qatar in 2022, the English Football Association estimated that more than 30,000 England-registered fans attended matches across the group stage and knock-out rounds, a figure that did not include the thousands of British passport-holders of dual nationality who registered under other FIFA allocations. The expectation in Kansas City, where England will play their opening group-stage match, and in the other tournament cities, is that England fans will again form the largest single-nation support base at the tournament.
The visa bond suspension does not, however, affect England’s supporters directly. British passport-holders do not require visas to enter the United States for stays of 90 days or fewer, a privilege of the Visa Waiver Programme that applies to citizens of 41 countries, almost all of them in Western Europe, East Asia, and Australasia. The supporters most affected by the bond requirement, and most relieved by its suspension, are the supporters who have historically been priced out of North American travel by the same bureaucratic machinery that the World Cup is now temporarily overriding: Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cameroonians, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, and others whose passport colour determines, in ways that the travelling-football world rarely examines, who gets to be present at the game and who does not.
The structural question is worth pausing on. A World Cup is, in its host nation, a month-long exercise in soft power, and the composition of the crowd is itself a political statement. When South Africa hosted in 2010, the organising committee made a deliberate decision to subsidise ticket prices for domestic buyers, filling Soccer City with South African supporters whose presence told the watching world something specific about who the tournament was for. Qatar in 2022 took the opposite approach, pricing most working-class supporters from outside the Gulf states out of attendance, and the resulting crowd, heavily male, heavily expatriate, heavily corporate, told its own story about whom that tournament served.
The United States, in 2026, is caught between those models. The bond suspension is a concession to the idea that a World Cup should be attended by the people who care about it most, regardless of the passport they hold. It is also, plainly, a commercial decision: FIFA needs full stadiums, and full stadiums, in a country where football does not occupy the cultural centre, require international visitors who will pay international prices.
For England’s campaign, the practical effect is indirect but real. A World Cup with more diverse travelling support produces a different kind of atmosphere than one attended primarily by corporate guests and national federations. The noise in the stadiums changes. The sense of occasion, the feeling inside a ground that the match matters to someone other than the two teams on the pitch, is something that experienced tournament players and managers recognise and that young players, making their first World Cup appearances, are shaped by. Gareth Southgate spoke about this in Qatar, the way the England supporters inside the Al Bayt Stadium, in the knock-out rounds, gave his players a sensory anchor that friendlies and qualifiers do not provide. Thomas Tuchel, the current England manager, will know the same from his time managing at Champions League finals in Istanbul and London, where the composition of the crowd is not background noise but a tactical factor.
The larger story, though, is not about England. It is about the sixty million Nigerians and the hundred and seventy million Bangladeshis and the thirty million Ghanaians for whom a World Cup in North America was, until this week, a theoretical possibility separated from an actual one by a $15,000 bond and a consular interview that might last three minutes. The suspension of the bond does not solve visa access. It does not address the wait times, the refusal rates, the specific humiliations that the consular system imposes on applicants from the Global South. What it does is remove a single, unusually visible barrier, in the narrow context of a sporting event, and in doing so it tells us something about the relationship between football and the state: that even a government that has made restriction of movement a central policy will, for the right event, open a door.
What the door opens onto, for those who can walk through it, is a World Cup that, for the first time, will be hosted across three countries and eleven time zones. The scale of the tournament is unprecedented. The logistical challenge of attending it, for a supporter flying from Accra to New York to Kansas City for a group-stage match, is enormous. The removal of the bond makes one part of that journey cheaper and more straightforward. It does not make it fair. Fairness, in the global architecture of who gets to watch football and who does not, remains a longer project than any single World Cup can solve.
