The Beautiful Game’s Genocidal Silence

In the hallowed halls of FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, where the dreams of footballers from Soweto to São Paulo are supposedly nurtured with equal reverence, a profound silence echoes through corridors lined with rhetoric about unity, equality, and fair play. This silence, however, is not empty—it is pregnant with complicity, heavy with the weight of deliberate inaction, and steeped in the familiar patterns of colonial governance that have long shaped how international institutions respond to the suffering of the colonized. When the Palestinian Football Association submitted their proposal to the FIFA Congress in May 2024, calling for Israel to be held accountable for systematic violations of Palestinian sports rights and expelled from the organization, they were not merely filing a complaint about sporting irregularities—they were challenging the very architecture of imperial power that has transformed football’s governing body into an instrument of genocidal enablement.

The Palestinian proposal landed on FIFA’s desks with the force of accumulated grievances: over 582 Palestinian athletes killed, including 270 football players; 286 sports facilities destroyed across Gaza and the West Bank; six Israeli settlement clubs competing illegally on Palestinian territory in violation of Article 65 of FIFA Statutes. Yet FIFA’s response revealed not the swift justice one might expect from an organization that claims to champion human rights, but rather the calculated choreography of colonial administration—that peculiar dance of bureaucratic delay, procedural obstruction, and moral abdication that has long characterized how imperial institutions manage the inconvenient demands of the colonized. The organization’s immediate rejection of a direct vote, citing the need for “independent legal assessment,” marked the beginning of what can only be understood as administrative violence disguised as due process.

From July 2024 to October 2024, and now May 2025 Congress in Paraguay with still no resolution, FIFA has perfected what scholars of colonial governance recognize as the art of indefinite deferral. This is not bureaucratic inefficiency—it is colonial technique, refined through centuries of practice in managing the inconvenient moral claims of subjugated populations. The establishment of multiple investigative committees, the demand for successive reports, the endless cycle of assessments and reviews—all serve the same function they have always served in colonial contexts: exhausting resistance while maintaining the façade of legitimate process. Each postponement becomes a small death, each delay a miniature act of erasure, each procedural requirement another stone in the wall of institutional indifference.

The irony deepens when one considers FIFA’s own regulatory framework, particularly Article 65, which explicitly prohibits clubs from operating outside their national territories without proper authorization. The six Israeli settlement clubs competing in Israeli leagues on Palestinian territory represent not merely technical violations but flagrant contempt for international law, sporting regulations, and Palestinian sovereignty. These clubs, rooted in stolen land and nourished by colonial violence, should have faced immediate suspension under any consistent application of FIFA’s own statutes. Yet they continue to play, their very existence normalized through FIFA’s silence, their participation legitimized through the organization’s refusal to act. This normalization of settler colonial expansion through sporting governance mirrors historical patterns where colonial authorities used cultural and social institutions to make territorial theft appear natural and inevitable.

The Palestinian Football Association’s letter to UEFA President Alexander Ceferin crystallizes this absurdity with surgical precision: “It is not just that these territories do not belong to the country of Israel in international law—they also do not belong to Israel FA under European or global football regulations. Israel FA never received an authorization from UEFA, Palestine FA, AFC and FIFA, all of which are required under Art 65 of the FIFA Statutes to incorporate clubs located on the Palestinian territory into Israeli leagues.” Here lies the naked reality of FIFA’s selective blindness—violations so clear, so documented, so egregious that they would typically result in immediate sanctions, yet met with studied indifference when the violator enjoys imperial patronage.

This selective application of justice becomes particularly obscene when contrasted with FIFA’s rapid responses to violations by nations outside the Western imperial sphere. The organization that can move with lightning speed to punish infractions by Global South nations suddenly develops procedural paralysis when confronted with Israeli violations. This is not inconsistency—it is the racialized application of international law in action, the systematic privileging of imperial interests over colonized lives that has long characterized how international institutions navigate questions of justice and accountability.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s courtship of the Trump administration illuminates the material interests underlying this institutional paralysis. Trump’s explicit boasting about being the most pro-Israel U.S. president in history, combined with Infantino’s documented efforts to curry favor with this administration, reveals how sporting institutions become integrated into imperial power structures. The promise of restored FIFA credibility under Infantino’s leadership—his 2016 pledge that “everyone in the world will applaud us”—has instead produced what can only be characterized as the organization’s transformation from a corrupt institution into a dangerous one, where sporting governance becomes subordinated to geopolitical calculation and moral principles become negotiable commodities.

This transformation reflects broader patterns of neoliberal institutional capture, where organizations supposedly dedicated to universal values become vehicles for advancing particular imperial interests. FIFA’s extensive rhetoric about democracy, equality, and human rights becomes exposed as performative when confronted with situations requiring actual moral courage. The organization’s failure to condemn the destruction of Palestinian sporting infrastructure, its silence regarding the systematic killing of Palestinian athletes, its refusal to address clear violations of its own statutes—all reveal an institution paralyzed not by legal complexity but by its own subordination to imperial power.

Historian Ilan Pappé’s concept of “moral panic” provides crucial insight into this institutional behavior. Moral panic, as Pappé describes it, occurs when individuals or institutions fail to act on their stated moral convictions due to fear of consequences. FIFA’s behavior exemplifies this phenomenon on an institutional scale, where the organization becomes paralyzed by the recognition that acting on its stated principles would require challenging the very power structures from which it derives legitimacy and protection. The result is moral abdication disguised as procedural propriety, cowardice masquerading as neutrality, complicity presented as impartiality.

Yet this institutional silence cannot be understood merely as passive neglect—it constitutes active complicity in genocidal policies through the withholding of moral authority and international legitimacy. When FIFA refuses to condemn the systematic destruction of Palestinian sporting infrastructure, it effectively sanctions this destruction. When the organization fails to investigate clear violations of Palestinian sporting rights, it enables the continuation of these violations. When FIFA maintains silence regarding the killing of Palestinian athletes, it becomes complicit in their murder through its refusal to mobilize the international solidarity that might flow from sporting community recognition.

The testimonies of Palestinian athletes provide devastating counter-narratives to FIFA’s administrative silence, interrupting the bureaucratic discourse that renders Palestinian suffering invisible. Ghassan Abu Odeh, a 27-year-old footballer for Ittihad Al-Shuja’iyya Club in Gaza City, speaks of experiences that should haunt every FIFA official: “I never imagined digging a grave to bury my friend. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through in my life.” This is not abstract political grievance—this is the material consequence of FIFA’s complicity, the human cost of institutional moral bankruptcy.

Saeb Jundiya, member of the Palestinian Football Association’s selection department, describes the erasure of sporting memory itself: “I left behind some of my most precious memories, the most beautiful days of my life, and the warm memories I held dear, as well as my medals, my club and Palestinian national team shirts, all my belongings, and even my identification cards.” The systematic destruction of Palestinian sporting culture represents more than collateral damage—it constitutes what genocide scholars identify as the deliberate destruction of group identity and future possibilities.

Perhaps most haunting is the testimony of professional player Suleiman Al-Abeed, whose words reveal the surreal horror of surviving genocide while FIFA deliberates: “I never imagined that my feet, with which I kicked the ball on grassy fields and scored goals, would walk on a bridge of human flesh that died in war raids. The occupation made a bridge out of the martyrs’ flesh and organs, and covered it with sand. When my family and I walked, it felt like a Hollywood horror movie.” His sardonic conclusion—”I am still alive”—becomes both triumph and accusation, survival and indictment of FIFA’s institutional cruelty.

These testimonies constitute what decolonial scholars call “testimonio”—first-person narratives that challenge official historical accounts and assert the humanity of colonized subjects. They reveal the deliberate nature of Palestinian suffering, the systematic targeting of sporting infrastructure and athletes that represents not random violence but calculated genocide. FIFA’s silence regarding these testimonies, its refusal to acknowledge the voices of Palestinian athletes, becomes itself a form of violence—the institutional violence of erasure, the bureaucratic violence of indifference, the moral violence of abandonment.

The Palestinian struggle has thus emerged as a global moral litmus test, a benchmark for determining the authentic commitment of institutions to their stated values. FIFA’s failure regarding Palestinian rights reveals the organization’s fundamental subordination to imperial interests, demonstrating how sporting institutions can become vehicles for perpetuating colonial violence rather than instruments of human liberation. The organization’s complicity in contemporary genocide through institutional silence makes clear that football’s governing body has become an instrument of colonial power rather than the unifying force it claims to represent.

This complicity extends beyond mere inaction to active enablement through the normalization of settler colonial expansion. By allowing Israeli settlement clubs to compete internationally while their Palestinian counterparts face systematic destruction, FIFA participates in what settler colonial studies scholars identify as the “logic of elimination”—the systematic erasure of indigenous presence through institutional means. Each match played by settlement clubs becomes a small act of normalization, each goal scored on stolen land another step in the erasure of Palestinian sporting identity.

The broader implications extend far beyond football to the entire architecture of international governance in the colonial present. FIFA’s behavior reveals how supposedly neutral international institutions continue to function as vehicles for imperial control, how procedural legitimacy can be weaponized against colonized populations, how the rhetoric of universalism can mask the reality of racialized exclusion. The organization’s selective enforcement of its own regulations, its privileging of imperial interests over human rights, its transformation of sporting governance into geopolitical calculation—all demonstrate the continued vitality of colonial power structures in contemporary international relations.

As Palestinian athletes continue to resist, survive, and bear witness to genocidal policies, their struggle exposes the hollow rhetoric of international sporting governance while demanding not just FIFA reform but fundamental transformation of how international institutions relate to questions of justice and liberation. Their persistence challenges not only FIFA’s complicity but the entire framework of international governance that enables such complicity to flourish. In their testimonies of loss and survival, in their refusal to disappear despite systematic violence, in their continued assertion of sporting rights despite institutional abandonment, Palestinian athletes embody the possibility of a different kind of international solidarity—one based not on imperial calculation but on genuine human recognition.

The beautiful game’s ugly silence thus becomes more than sporting scandal—it becomes a window into the moral bankruptcy of international governance in the colonial present, a revelation of how institutions supposedly dedicated to human unity can become instruments of genocidal enablement. FIFA’s complicity in Palestinian suffering marks not an aberration but a continuation, not an exception but the rule, not a failure of the system but its successful operation. Until this reality is acknowledged and challenged, the beautiful game will remain stained by the blood of those it refuses to protect, its rhetoric of unity exposed as the cruelest of lies.

#freefilastin #endgenocide