FIFA Goes Looking for Discrimination in the Wrong Place

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the controversy over a FIFA official’s hand gesture at a World Cup game, and we cover more media misses.

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FIFA’s ‘Discrimination Monitor’ Gets Creative

This week, the world discovered FIFA partners with a discrimination monitor that does the crucial work of ensuring no one dares give an “OK” hand sign at soccer’s biggest games.

The little-known discrimination monitor for soccer’s governing body — which has previously hosted its World Cup in countries with known human rights abuses including Russia and Qatar, with Saudi Arabia set to host in 2034 — is now calling for the removal of an Australian video assistant referee (VAR) who made an “OK” symbol in front of his leg while on camera during the official broadcast of the Germany vs. Curaçao game on Sunday. The gesture, the monitor argues, is connected with white supremacy.

“Advice from our experts is that the gesture used clearly resembles an upside down ‘OK’ hand symbol used as a ‘white power’ symbol in global far-right circles,” said the Fare network in a statement. FIFA and the European football governing body UEFA rely on Fare as a partner to monitor racist and discriminatory chants, flags, and symbols at international games. The network describes itself as “an umbrella organisation that brings together individuals, informal groups, and organisations driven to combat inequality in football.”

As for the ongoing controversy, Fare says, “Clearly this official should have no further role to play in this World Cup.” The group decried the gesture as “neo-Nazi.”

The hand signal was first designated as a hate symbol by the left-leaning anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism in 2019. However, the group acknowledged at the time that context is important in determining whether an “OK” symbol is hateful or harmless. Several media outlets have noted that the symbol can also be used in the “circle game,” where someone flashes an upside-down “OK” sign below their waist and punches in the shoulder anyone who looks at it.

While FIFA has not yet made a public statement on the controversy, the governing agency also has its own office of Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination, which exists to ensure “that football upholds and respects the rights of every individual, while actively working to eliminate all forms of discrimination — on the pitch and in the stands.”

FIFA relies on the “U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” which is a “global standard for preventing, addressing, and remedying human rights abuses in business operations.”

“FIFA’s work in this field is vast, and includes efforts to ensure accessibility for persons with disabilities, advance workers’ rights, safeguard vulnerable individuals, promote equality, and address discrimination based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other characteristics protected by [article] 4 of the FIFA Statutes – at every level of the game,” the governing body says on its website.

The governing body lays out several ways it works to address racism and discrimination, including the use of anti-discrimination announcements in stadiums, a three-step match interruption procedure for discriminatory incidents, and fan content monitoring using a dedicated app and triage teams. Meanwhile, the “No Racism Gesture gives players, coaches and other team officials agency to signal that they are faced or witnessed racist abuse leading to the initiation of the three-step procedure.”

“Anti-discrimination observers will monitor matches, and tailored training will be provided to referees, security, teams, and staff,” the site adds.

The webpage goes on to offer links to teach fans how to “challenge your biases,” how to “become an ally,” and “how to speak to your children about discrimination.”

The Fare network, for its part, warns in its Global Guide that in the U.S. in particular, “anti-migrant chants have been noted in stadiums by way of anti-Mexican/anti-Latino sentiment at grassroots level in football and in other sports, but have not been recorded in professional football. Nevertheless, existing tensions have to be closely monitored as having potential to be manifested at football competitions.”

And yet despite all of the apparent concern over discrimination and human rights, a World Cup journalist for beIN SPORTS with a history of sharing pro-Hamas views on social media has nonetheless been permitted to cover the games.

The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that calls itself the “legal arm of the Jewish community,” has asked the U.S. State Department to revoke the visa of London-based sports journalist Ibrahim Khadra, who said Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel was “far more exciting than football.”

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While it was not immediately clear whether Khadra had received a media credential through FIFA to cover any World Cup games, photos posted to Instagram show he had traveled from London to Kansas City, where he was credentialed to cover FIFA’s Fan Festival event ahead of KC’s first game on Tuesday. FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NR.

“Apologies to the Premier League matches — regardless of the excitement or results — but today’s ‘Super Saturday’ is brought to you by #Gaza,” Khadra wrote in post to his 230k followers that he later deleted. “It scored goals that pierced the enemy’s nets, breached their borders and lines of soldiers, and caught them off guard from where they least expected.”

“May God protect our people in proud Gaza and across all of #Palestine . . . God is Great, and praise be to God #Flood_of_Jerusalem #AlAqsa_Flood,” he added.

He went on to laud former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a “righteous martyr” in 2024, and celebrated Iran’s missile strikes on Israel in 2025.

“This is an individual who would not have qualified to be given a visa based on his activities including his espousal of support for foreign terrorist organizations, and even though the visa appears to have been granted, and he appears to be in the U.S., that is something that he can absolutely have his visa revoked for, and he can be removed from the country,” Lawfare Project attorney Gerard Filitti told the California Post.

It was not immediately clear if the State Department planned to take action against Khadra. The State Department and the Lawfare Project did not respond to requests for comment from National Review.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Conversation is looking to answer the question on exactly no one’s mind: “Should you feel guilty about rooting against the U.S. in the World Cup?”

“What do you do when you don’t see your country as the ‘good guys’?” the article from the nonprofit news outlet adds.

Adam Kadlac, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, writes that “political tensions are high in the U.S.” and that the Trump administration is “historically unpopular.”

Critics of the administration, he adds “are already concerned about sportswashing: when governments use the spectacle of athletic competition to burnish their image and distract the public.”

The author eventually comes around to stating the obvious: “Rooting for your country’s national soccer team doesn’t mean that you endorse everything your country does, any more than wanting a friend to get a promotion at work requires you to support all of their behavior.”

Media Misses
• When Nicholas Kristof returned to the New York Times as a columnist in 2021 after mounting a failed gubernatorial bid in Oregon, the paper said he would disclose financial ties when writing about his former campaign donors. However, Semafor recently discovered Kristof failed to do so on at least a dozen occasions, leading the Times to open a review of his columns in search of additional violations.

• The Athletic is offended that several San Francisco Giants players wrote Bible verses on their ball caps for the team’s LGBT Pride Night. Grant Brisbee, a senior writer who covers the team for the site, writes that the Bible verses show the players “missed the point” of the pride event, adding it was a “tone-deaf response to what should have been a moment for community unity.” “They made the night about ‘us versus them.’ That’s the only thing they could see,” he added.

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