The President of the United States, Donald Trump, threatened again this Tuesday (14) to change the venue of some matches for next year’s World Cup if he considers the city to be unsafe, and added that this could also happen in the case of Los Angeles with the 2028 Olympic Games.
“If someone is doing a bad job and I see that the conditions are unsafe, I would call Gianni (Infantino), the president of FIFA (…) and say: ‘Let’s move (the game) somewhere else,” said the Republican.
“I could say the same about the Olympic Games, because, as you know, we have events in different places. The Olympic Games are held in Los Angeles. If I think that Los Angeles is not well prepared, I would move to another location,” he added.
Trump could not, by himself, change a venue or the location of a World Cup match, but he maintains a very close relationship with Infantino, who has this power.
Trump’s words this Tuesday were aimed mainly at the city of Boston, whose mayor is Michelle Yu, from the Democratic Party, and which has found itself in recent months in the crosshairs of the federal government for considering it interfering in its policies against illegal immigration.
Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, a city neighboring Boston, is expected to host seven World Cup matches.
These threats are in addition to those that Trump made in September against other cities with mayors affiliated with the Democratic Party, such as Seattle and San Francisco, which he warned that he could remove World Cup matches from them if he considers them unsafe. At the time, Trump also mentioned the possibility of taking similar measures for the Los Angeles Olympic Games.
The United States, which co-organizes the 2026 World Cup along with Mexico and Canada, has 11 venues, most of them in cities governed by Democrats: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston, Boston and Philadelphia.
