World Cup 2026 visa chaos: from referee Omar Artan to Iranian officials – who is affected?

Iran fans wave flags and cheer as their team arrives in Tijuana. Iran have been forced to move its training base across the border to Mexico, despite the team playing their games in the United States. Photograph: Victor Medina/Reuters

For successive men’s World Cup tournaments Fifa has managed to bulldoze its way through costly immigration and entry requirements. In 2014 Brazil passed a law granting free temporary visas to ticket holders, and for Russia and Qatar, the respective autocracies bypassed traditional border friction using Fan IDs and Hayya cards as makeshift visa entry documents that also provided free public transport. Not so in 2026, where Fifa has found its tournament squarely caught up in the second Trump administration’s aggressive border restrictions. Here are some of the people that have been affected.

Omar Artan