Should Spain be banned from the 2026 World Cup? – analysis

Sánchez has created a precedent and a standard by which he, himself, refuses to abide.

By Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum

On June 15, 2026, Spain’s team will kick off its first 2026 FIFA World Cup match against Cabo Verde in Atlanta, Georgia. Should the match proceed, it would represent a travesty for human rights and an endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

Spain’s corruption-plagued, socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has sought to distract Spaniards from his and his wife’s scandals with anti-Israel and anti-American polemic.

That may come straight from the West European progressive playbook, but two things make Sánchez’s actions different.

First, he virtue-signaled against the Iran war by denying U.S. participants access to the Rota Naval Base and the Morón Air Base, portions of which the Pentagon leases, while simultaneously shipping components to Iran’s drone program.

Profiting off state sponsors of terror is not pacifism.

Second, he is a hypocrite on multiple levels. Sánchez led the boycott against Israel’s participation in the annual Eurovision contest, an apolitical celebration of music.

His logic? Israel is an occupying power and committed genocide in Gaza.

Again, this is nonsense on multiple levels. On October 7, 2023, Israel was attacked during a ceasefire by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, ordinary Palestinian citizens, and Associated Press freelance journalists.

Hamas is a terrorist group; European countries that recognize a Palestinian state recognize the Palestinian Authority, not the group that, in 2007, staged a coup against its elected partners.

The Gaza calumny does not pass the smell test: Proportionately, only about 3 percent of Gazans died, most of whom were combatants.

In comparison, the Holocaust killed two-thirds of Europe’s pre-war Jewish population, all of whom were civilian non-combatants.

In 1994, Hutus murdered about 70 percent of Rwanda’s Tutsi population. Sánchez does not stand up to genocide; his political hijacking belittles it.

That said, there has been great physical destruction inside Gaza, though this was not gratuitous.

By donating to Gaza and allowing Hamas to divert and embezzle funds to build a tunnel network and covert missile program across the Strip, Spain is either negligent or a willing state sponsor of terror.

Either way, the terror infrastructure necessitated widespread destruction.

Spain, of course, committed genocide in the New World, wiping out multiple civilizations in a quest for material gain, yet Sánchez does not offer reparations.

And while Spain accuses Israel of occupation, never mind that Jews are indigenous and most of today’s Palestinians migrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century, it continues to occupy Moroccan territory in Melilla and Ceuta across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Spaniards might react with umbrage to such a reality, but their defense essentially boils down to the completeness with which they expelled the local population or the belief that time launders their crimes.

The point is this: Sánchez has created a precedent and a standard by which he, himself, refuses to abide.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have tools to remedy this, however: Revoke the Spanish team’s visas to compete in the FIFA World Cup.

FIFA will complain and bluster, but it is too late to suspend or cancel the 2026 games and, as the 2022 World Cup in Qatar showed, FIFA executives care far more about cash in their pockets than any other principle.

As a genocidal regime that occupies other people’s territories from Ceuta to San Sebastián, moral clarity and consistency require Spain to sit home.

Spaniards love their football, but there will always be other World Cups in which, perhaps, Spain can participate once it abandons its terror sponsorship and colonial-settler mentality. Sometimes, a little tough love goes a long way.