Former FIFA President Joseph Blatter called on Monday for football fans not to travel to the United States during the 2026 World Cup for security reasons.
In a social media post, the former Swiss sports administrator and executive referenced an interview conducted by the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger with lawyer Mark Pieth, who specializes in corruption cases and was tasked by Blatter himself, between 2011 and 2014, with creating a plan to combat corruption within FIFA.
“For fans, there’s only one piece of advice: stay away from the United States! I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup,” wrote the former FIFA president on his Twitter account. Blatter resigned in 2015 after being accused of fraud. However, both Blatter and the then-UEFA president, Michel Platini, were definitively acquitted in 2015 by the Swiss courts.
For his part, Pieth stated last Thursday regarding the current situation in the US that “what we are seeing domestically—the marginalization of political opponents, abuses by immigration services, etc.—hardly encourages fans to go there.”
