I’ve been chasing this game since 2010. I’ve stood in stadiums where the air trembles, where strangers become brothers for 90 minutes, where a single goal erases your name, your tribe, your passport.
France 2016—I was there. French, Portuguese, Welsh, Ugandan—different flags, one heartbeat in Marseille. Nobody frisked my soul at the gate. France knows how to host. Smooth organization, respect for fans, and after the final whistle, I climbed the Eiffel Tower at night and felt like the whole world was mine. That’s how you welcome people.
Germany 1988—I was there too. Didn’t stay a minute over. Didn’t need to. The welcome was louder than the whistle. German precision, German order, German beer. I sat in Berlin with a tumbler of cold German beer, surrounded by fans from 20 countries, and nobody asked where I was from. They asked, “Who’s your team?” That’s football.
Russia 2018—cold outside, warm inside. Moscow treated fans like guests, not suspects. I ate steamed lamb neck in a small place near Red Square, swapped stories with Mexicans, Egyptians, and Nigerians. The metro ran all night, the volunteers smiled, the stadiums were full. Russia showed you can organize a World Cup without making people feel like criminals.
South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014, Qatar 2022—different skies, different languages, one law: if your heart beats for football, the gates open. That was the world breathing together.
Then comes USA and Canada 2026. A football nightmare. A cold shoulder in a warm game.
Canada rejected me. Know why?
“Too much money in your account.”
“No family in Canada.”
So I’m guilty of being financially stable and independent? What flimsy reasons are these? The devil himself set these conditions.
They tell me I can’t ask for only six days. Like I’m a threat with a return ticket.
I’ve been to Quebec, Toronto, and Ottawa in my 30s. I didn’t stay a minute over. I came, I saw, I left.
And now, at almost 60, with my farm, my name, my peace—you think I’ll abandon all that to stay behind and clean your restrooms? To sweep cold ice off your roads in January?
NEVER. Not men of our class. We don’t run from our homes to scrub yours.
I have it written in my red book—one of the things I’ll carry to God’s gate: I was denied a visa when my hands were clean, my heart was clean, and my only crime was loving the game too much. I wasn’t carrying Ebola. I was carrying hope. I was carrying dollars I saved for four years. I was carrying the dream of a Ugandan who wanted to see Messi, Mbappé, and Saka play live before his legs give out.
And I’m not alone. Fifty-four African countries. Millions of fans. Locked out by fear, by headlines written 10,000 miles away, by policy made by men who’ve never heard 80,000 voices sing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and “Tulumbe Tulumbe” in unison.
When it’s time to fight Al-Shabaab in Somalia, suddenly America remembers the UPDF.
When Mozambique’s gas needs protection, suddenly Rwanda’s army is welcome.
Africa is good enough to bleed for your interests. Good enough to die in your wars. But not good enough to sit in your stadiums and cry when the ball hits the net.
They say it’s security. They say it’s Ebola. They say it’s “migrants.”
No. It’s control. It’s the old wound that whispers: Africans are too poor to come as guests. They only come to sweep and scrub.
Cry, the beloved continent. We were targeted. Ebola became a word they used to lock the gate. Misinformation became a visa policy.
But here’s what love and football demand:
If you’re scared, isolate us for seven days. Monitor us. Test us. Let FIFA send testing kits to Accra, Kampala, Lagos, and Cairo. Let fans who can afford it pay for the process. Don’t punish a continent because you fear what you don’t know. Don’t kill the dream because you can’t see past your border.
But no. Infantino and FIFA are dining with division, tail between their legs, smiling for cameras while half the world is locked outside. Organizing a beauty contest for the ugly.
And the African Union? Sleeping with the devil while our youth watch the World Cup on cracked phone screens in darkness.
Football was born to break borders, not reinforce them.
It’s supposed to be the one place where a Ugandan farmer, a Brazilian kid from the favela, a Japanese student, and a Canadian truck driver all scream the same word: GOOOOAL.
Instead, this tournament is becoming a monument to division, to political games, to travel bans, to administrative cowardice.
If the World Cup can’t welcome the world, then it’s not the World Cup.
It’s a private club with a ball. A concert with the band playing to an empty hall.
And to the organizers: you can deny us visas.
You can stamp “REFUSED” on our passports.
But you cannot deny this truth—without Africa, without our players, our drums, our noise, our tears, your tournament is half empty and half dead.
You’ll have the stadium.
But you won’t have the soul.
And without the soul, it’s just grass and noise.
