Culture
Concerns over fans' U.S. visa wait times for 2026 World Cup: 'Your window might already be closed'
Concerns have been raised with the United States government, including an official meeting in the White House, over fears supporters may be deterred from the 2026 men’s World Cup owing to excessive wait times to process visa applications to visit the country.
The tournament begins in 777 days and it will be at least another 18 months before many countries will be assured of qualification, yet the wait times for U.S. visa interviews in two Mexican cities are already in excess of 800 days, while it is 685 days in the Colombian capital of Bogota.
In a statement to The Athletic, the U.S. Department of State (which oversees international relations) insisted it is determined to reduce wait times but also encouraged supporters in affected countries to start applying for visas now, over two years out from the tournament and with the line-up still unknown.
The 2026 edition of world football’s governing body FIFA’s flagship tournament will include 48 nations for the first time and will be held in 16 cities in the U.S, Canada and Mexico.
It will also be the first World Cup without an overarching local organising committee, which means FIFA is tasked with pulling everything together, in conjunction with the many layers of stakeholders and bureaucracy across three nations and 16 host cities, each of which have differing levels of private and taxpayer support.
The three host countries also have differing entry criteria for visitors, which has the potential to create visa confusion for fans seeking to follow their team deep into the tournament across multiple borders.
Several host cities, including the location for the final — New York/New Jersey — are also concerned about the wait times for visas, and the potential impact on income from tourism during the tournament, but the cities are currently allowing FIFA and the travel industry to lead the conversations with the government. Some of those who have spoken to The Athletic wished to remain anonymous, owing either to sensitivity around discussions or to protect working relationships.
Travis Murphy is the founder of Jetr Global Sports + Entertainment and a former American diplomat who also once ran international government affairs for the NBA.
“My concern is this could be a disaster (in 2026),” he said. “The concerns are absolutely there on the city level. The cities are thinking, ‘They are FIFA, so they must have it under control.’ But when you realise how FIFA worked in the past with previous hosts in Qatar and Russia, it doesn’t necessarily work in the United States.
“We’re just a completely different animal in terms of how our government operates and how we communicate. And frankly, the emphasis that we place on soccer as a sport in our country.
“If this was the Super Bowl, the World Series or the NBA finals, we’d be having a different conversation. Soccer is not the biggest sport in our country. And I think that’s a fundamental lack of understanding by FIFA, perhaps just taking it for granted that it is the case everywhere in the world. But it’s not yet in the United States.”
In recent months, U.S. travel industry representatives and FIFA have raised concerns with the U.S. Department of State and the White House as the respective groups seek to organise how millions of tourists will enter the U.S. during the five-week tournament in June and July 2026. In January 2024, FIFA strengthened its staff in D.C. when it hired Alex Sopko, the former chief of staff for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House, to be its new Director of Government Relations.
In a statement to The Athletic, a FIFA spokesperson said the organisation is working closely with U.S. Government in the planning and preparation for the World Cup, including regular discussions on critical topics such as immigration and visas, and adding it recognises “the urgency of these matters.”
The visa delays ahead of the World Cup were raised in a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, April 17, with senior administration officials in conversation with the United States Travel Association (U.S. Travel).
Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of U.S. Travel, was present in the meeting. He describes visa wait times as a “massive issue” but added: “We came away confident that the White House recognises the significance of the 2026 World Cup and will take concrete steps to streamline aspects of the travel experience for the more than eight million anticipated visitors.”
Freely available data on the website of the Department of Consular affairs details the lengthy wait times currently impacting visitor visas from markets that may be highly relevant during the World Cup, which begins in 778 days.
Forty-one countries, including much of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia, are part of a visa waiver programme — ESTA — to enter the United States, which means citizens of these countries can travel without obtaining a visa, so as long as their trip for tourism or business does not exceed 90 days.
However, many people, estimated by U.S. Travel to represent 45 per cent of those who visit the States, do require visas for entry. These documents, called a B1/B2 visa, also require in-person appointments at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate to take digital photographs and fingerprints, as well as an interview, in which the candidate must state their intention to return to their home countries and explain their reasons for visiting the United States.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino announces the 2026 match schedule in February (Brennan Asplen/FIFA via Getty Images)
Wait times for a visa interview at a U.S. consulate in the Mexican cities of Mexico City and Guadalajara are currently 878 days and 820 days respectively, so an application made today may not be approved before the World Cup begins. In the Colombian capital of Bogota, the current wait time is 685 days, while Panama City is 477 days and Quito in Ecuador is 420.
The 2026 World Cup is guaranteed to include the U.S, Mexico and Canada as hosts but five more nations may yet qualify from North and Central America, while up to seven may enter from the South American Football Confederation. Wait times are also dramatic in the Turkish city of Istanbul, where it takes 553 days for an appointment, as well as in Morocco, semi-finalists at the World Cup in 2022, where the wait time is 225 days.
In a statement to The Athletic, the state department said: “We encourage prospective FIFA World Cup visitors who will need U.S. visas to apply now – there is no requirement to have purchased event tickets, made hotel reservations, or reserved airline tickets to qualify for a visitor visa.”
Freeman attributes the current visa delays to the shutdown of consular offices during the coronavirus pandemic but also outlines long-standing issues.
“The U.S. is the world’s most desired nation to visit, but our market share is slipping and it’s in a large part due to long visa wait times,” he said. “If you are Colombian and want to come and bring your kids in 2026, your window might already be closed.”
A World Cup is further complicated because many supporters may wait until their nations have secured qualification to organise their trip. For the Americas, this will largely be in winter 2025 — the play-offs may be as late as March 2026 — while nations will only know the cities in which their teams will be competing following the draw, which is usually held eight months out from the tournament.
During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, visitors were able to expedite their entry into the country by applying for a Hayya card, effectively a fan pass for World Cup ticket holders that acted as a visa for the tournament. A repeat pass is not expected to be approved by the U.S, particularly at a time of global tensions both in the Middle East and following Russia’s invasion of and continued war against Ukraine.
Freeman warned: “The U.S. is not going to change its visa policies in the short term to frankly cater to FIFA. I think where you may see the U.S. adjust some of its approach is in cooperation with Mexico and Canada. So once teams have qualified within the tournament, how do we streamline their ability to cross borders and attend games in other markets later in the tournament? I believe that’s where there will be greater cooperation and some of those discussions are already taking place.”
The answer may simply be additional staff and investment, such as deploying more consular officers at embassies, a method which has helped significantly reduce wait times from Brazil and India over the past year. Congress set aside $50million for the U.S. State Department to “reduce passport backlogs and reduce visa wait times” in a bill signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden in March but it was not specified how and where the money will be invested.
There is a precedent for visa issues causing delays at major international sporting events in the United States. Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala, who set the African 100metres record of 9.77 seconds in 2021, only received his visa documentation the day before the men’s 100 metres heats began at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon in 2022.
After securing his visa in Kenya, he took a five-hour flight to Qatar, endured a six-hour layover, then a 14-hour flight to Seattle, another three-hour layover and last of all, a one-hour flight to Oregon. He landed at 4.15 pm and immediately went to the track, where the heats commenced at 6.50pm.
Omanyala competes in the men’s 100m heats on July 15, 2022 (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
The sprinter said: “If you are hosting a championship, you need to waive (visa requirements) for athletes. It’s a lesson for the host country in the future, and the U.S. is hosting the Olympics in 2028 (in Los Angeles), so they need to learn from this and do better next time.”
Murphy added: “There were hundreds of athletes who were unable to travel. The World Athletics Championships was was a relatively small event compared to the magnitude of what we’re talking about with the 48-team World Cup and the millions and millions of people involved, in terms of what needs to happen.”
Playing rosters are usually only approved in the final months before a tournament, but the U.S. is expected to expedite processing to ensure players and support staff from federations are able to arrive in time for the World Cup.
The U.S. Department of State attributes the issues at World Athletics to the pressures felt by consular officers coming out of the pandemic and told The Athletic that wait times for “P-visas”, generally used by members of professional sports teams coming to participate in athletic competitions, are “low worldwide”.
Murphy said the National Security Council has established a working committee on the matter for the White House but caveated his optimism with a reminder that more instant priorities are Israel, Gaza and Ukraine. He said: “This is not a priority beyond the host cities, FIFA itself and the members of Congress who represent those host cities. But in terms of there being a broad approach that is all-encompassing and has a wide swath of support in Congress, there’s just nothing there. There’s no bills or initiatives in Congress that are focused on this.”
He added: “The conversations that needed to have started a year plus ago are not at a point where they need to be. And when you’re talking about the U.S. Government, it is essentially at a state of standstill in terms of any major movement that needs to happen from now until November of this year (when there is a Presidential election).”
The Department of State insisted it is “committed to facilitating legitimate travel to the United States while maintaining high national security standards.”
Its statement continued: “We are pleased to be an active participant in a working group with FIFA and other stakeholders on plans for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The Bureau of Consular Affairs recognizes the importance of international inbound tourism, including for mega sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup, and is working tirelessly to facilitate secure travel to the United States. We have significantly reduced visa wait times over the past two years.”
One of the peculiarities of the U.S. political system is that there is no sports ministry to facilitate such discussions. In its absence, Murphy calls for a special envoy to be appointed, with the World Cup likely to be followed by the women’s edition in 2027 before the Olympics in LA in 2028.
He said: “There has to be somebody centralised to organise those conversations. That’s relatively easy to do. If it’s somebody that has the respect and attention of the cabinet agencies, they can have a conversation with Capitol Hill and that’s going to go a long way to getting things done.”
(Top photo: Patrick Smith/FIFA via Getty Images)
WHEN THE FOREST BREATHES: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, by Suzanne Simard
It’s the summer of 2023 and the Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard is sitting tucked in the knobby embrace of an Amazonian tree trunk, imagining that she too is a tree as she “reached out with leaves unfurling to greet the sun.” She can feel the rat-a-tat of woodpeckers on her bark, the stretch of her roots in the soil below. She draws strength from a sense of family: “The trees were in my blood. They were my kin.”
But in Simard’s new book, “When the Forest Breathes,” trees are not just supportive relatives. They are teachers and healers, capable of communication and perception, a woodland congregation in which young trees grow “in halos” around their elders. Back in Canada, she describes a forest visit that further amplifies that sense of magic, a moment in which she stands beneath aged cedars, “the supernatural trees, the grandmothers,” listening as they whisper wisdom on the breeze.
All of which brings a heady, inspirational quality to her writing as she urges readers to hear the forest as she does. “Nature is waiting for us to listen,” she writes, “and to learn.” The siren quality of her message is almost tangible, as is the allure of gaining knowledge from the Zen master inhabitants of the ancient forests.
And yet. I find myself considering the message in my annoyingly cautious, science-writerly way. Would I find it inspiring to be pecked by a woodpecker? Probably not. Have I ever thought of myself as a tree? Probably never. Is this the measured language we hear from most scientists? Not even close. Simard emphasizes this point in the book: her growing sense of alienation from the methodologies of Western science, its tendency to obsess over small details and, as she sees it, miss the forest for the trees. “I found myself longing to push back against these rigid boundaries,” she writes, and to find “other ways of seeing and knowing the natural world.”
This longing derives in part from her collaborations with Indigenous scientists on Canadian forest management, which led her to deeply admire their more holistic approach to nature. She cites studies showing that “Indigenous-held land,” including forests, “contained some of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich ecosystems in the world.” Amid perilous global climate change, Simard is drawn to their loving attitude to nature as her “philosophical and spiritual home.”
Increasingly, she feels more anchored in their worldview than in that of her longtime research community. A professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard published her first semi-autobiographical book, “Finding the Mother Tree,” in 2021, and it became an international best seller. In it she wove her central theory about the forest — that trees “talk” to one another through an underground network of connective fungi, fostering an intergenerational system in which older trees protect and help the younger ones — with her own experience of grief and illness, emphasizing the parallels between the lives of trees and those of humans.
Despite the book’s rapturous public reception, the scientific community’s response was often unenthusiastic. Other biologists accused her of exaggerating the evidence for cooperation among organisms at the expense of “the important role of competition in forest dynamics.” They worried she was selling a forest story that might be only partly true. And they disliked her use of anthropomorphizing descriptors like “mother tree,” which suggested these organisms should be valued for their similarities to humans, instead of for their own remarkable biology.
Simard admits to having been hurt and frustrated by these accusations, to which she responded with a point-by-point rebuttal in a scientific journal. She returns to these grievances in the new book, where she expresses resentment for the demeaning accusation of anthropomorphism (“the mere utterance of the word” in Western science “suggests the scientist who makes this blasphemous mistake is not an objective observer, but rather impure, intuitive and subjective, perhaps lacking integrity”), and the resistance to her efforts to do justice to the inherent poetry of the forest.
This book is not, however, a rejection of the insights that good science — including Simard’s own — can bring. She provides examples of experiments showing how the heavy machinery used by loggers destroys the ability of the forest floor to sequester carbon; and how clear-cutting of old-growth forests can turn wooded lands into places that release carbon into the atmosphere rather than absorbing it.
Given the urgency of climate change, Simard’s dissatisfaction with the standard research model is in many ways a dissatisfaction with communication. If we are to protect our endangered forests, she argues, then science needs to be less timid in its messaging. She urges her colleagues to take a lesson from the First Nations people who fight for what they believe. To “stand tall in the wind,” as the Mother Trees do.
WHEN THE FOREST BREATHES: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World | By Suzanne Simard | Knopf | 310 pp. | $30
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment celebrates lines from popular crime novels. (As a hint, the correct books are all “firsts” in one category or another.) In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the novels if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Xia De-hong, who survived persecution and torture as an official in Mao Zedong’s China and was later the central figure in her daughter’s best-selling 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” died on April 15 in Chengdu, China. She was 94.
Ms. Xia’s death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Jung Chang.
Ms. Chang’s memoir, which was banned in China, was a groundbreaking, intimate account of the country’s turbulent 20th century and the iron grip of Mao’s Communist Party, told through the lives of three generations of women: herself, her mother and her grandmother. An epic of imprisonment, suffering and family loyalty, it sold over 15 million copies in 40 languages.
The story of Ms. Chang’s stoic mother holding the family together while battling on behalf of her husband, a functionary who was tortured and imprisoned during Mao’s regime, was the focus of “Wild Swans,” which emerged out of hours of recordings that Ms. Chang made when Ms. Xia visited her in London in 1988.
Ms. Xia was inspired as a teenager to become an ardent Communist revolutionary because of the mistreatment of women in the Republic of China, as well as the corruption of the Kuomintang nationalists in power. (Her own mother had been forced into concubinage at 15 by a powerful warlord.)
In 1947, in Ms. Xia’s home city of Jinzhou, the Communists were waging guerrilla war against the government. She joined the struggle by distributing pamphlets for Mao, rolling them up inside green peppers after they had been smuggled into the city in bundles of sorghum stalks.
Captured by the Kuomintang, she was forced to listen to “the screams of people being tortured in the rooms nearby,” her daughter later wrote. But that only stiffened her resolve.
She married Chang Shou-yu, an up-and-coming Communist civil servant and acolyte of Mao, in 1949.
It was then that disillusionment began to set in, according to her daughter. The newlyweds were ordered to travel a thousand miles to Sichuan, her husband’s home province. Because of Mr. Chang’s rank, he was allowed to ride in a jeep, but she had to walk, even though she was pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage as a result.
“She was vomiting all the time,” her daughter wrote. “Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car.”
That was the first of many times that her husband would insist she bow to the rigid dictates of the party, despite the immense suffering it caused.
When she was a party official in the mid-1950s, Ms. Xia was investigated for her “bourgeois” background and imprisoned for months. She received little support from Mr. Chang.
“As my mother was leaving for detention,” Ms. Chang wrote, “my father advised her: ‘Be completely honest with the party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict.’ A wave of aversion swept over her.”
Upon her release in 1957, she told her husband, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband.” Mr. Chang could only nod in agreement.
He became one of the top officials in Sichuan, entitled to a life of privilege. But by the late 1960s, he had become outraged by the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s blood-soaked purge, and was determined to register a formal complaint.
Ms. Xia was in despair; she knew what became of families who spoke out. “Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?” she asked.
Mr. Chang’s career was over, and both he and his wife were subjected to physical abuse and imprisoned. Ms. Xia’s position was lower profile; she was in charge of resolving personal problems, such as housing, transfers and pensions, for people in her district. But that did not save her from brutal treatment.
Ms. Xia was made to kneel on broken glass; paraded through the streets of Chengdu wearing a dunce’s cap and a heavy placard with her name crossed out; and forced to bow to jeering crowds.
Still, she resisted pressure from the party to denounce her husband. And unlike many other women in her position, she refused to divorce him.
Twice she journeyed to Beijing to seek his release, the second time securing a meeting with the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was considered a moderate. Ms. Xia was “one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking,” her daughter wrote in “Wild Swans.”
But Ms. Xia and her husband never criticized the Cultural Revolution in front of their children, checked by the party’s absolute power and the fear it inspired.
“My parents never said anything to me or my siblings,” Ms. Chang wrote. “The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.”
She was held at Xichiang prison camp from 1969 to 1971 as a “class enemy,” made to do heavy labor and endure denunciation meetings.
The camp, though less harsh than her husband’s, was a bitter experience. “She reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion,” her daughter wrote. “She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unbearable.”
Xia De-hong was born on May 4, 1931, in Yixian, the daughter of Yang Yu-fang and Gen. Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the metropolitan police in the nationalist government.
When she was an infant, her mother fled the house of the general, who was dying, and returned to her parents, eventually marrying a rich Manchurian doctor, Xia Rui-tang.
Ms. Xia grew up in Jinzhou, Manchuria, where she attended school before joining the Communist underground.
In the 1950s, when she began to have doubts about the Communist Party, she considered abandoning it and pursuing her dream of studying medicine, her daughter said. But the idea terrified her husband, Ms. Chang said in an interview, because it would have meant disavowing the Communists.
By the late 1950s, during the Mao-induced Great Famine that killed tens of millions, both of her parents had become “totally disillusioned,” Ms. Chang said, and “could no longer find excuses to forgive their party.”
Mr. Chang died in 1975, broken by years of imprisonment and ill treatment. Ms. Xia retired from her government service, as deputy head of the People’s Congress of the Eastern District of Chengdu, in 1983.
Besides Ms. Chang, Ms. Xia is survived by another daughter, Xiao-hong Chang; three sons, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei and Xiao-fang; and two grandchildren.
Jung Chang saw her mother for the last time in 2018. Ms. Chang’s criticism of the regime, in her memoir and a subsequent biography, made returning to China unthinkable. She told the BBC in a recent interview that she never knew whether her mother had read “Wild Swans.”
But the advice her mother gave her and her brother Xiao-hei, a journalist who also lives in London, was firm: “She only wanted us to write truthfully, and accurately.”
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