Somali international referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan waves to supporters while draped in the Somali flag as he is welcomed ahead of a solidarity football match after returning to Somalia in Mogadishu on June 10. Artan, who in 2025 was named men's referee of the year by the Confederation of African Football (CAF), was barred from entering the US on Saturday.
Image: AFP
Every four years, dozens of earnest sports anchors look directly into the camera and say: "Football is the universal language."
We’ve all heard this one. It’s the ultimate working-class fairy tale. A kid in a township in Soweto, a lad on a council estate in Liverpool, and some billionaire’s kid in Monaco, all speaking the same beautiful dialect of kicking a piece of leather into a net. No translators. No borders. Just pure, undivided human connection.
It’s lovely. It’s heartwarming. It’s also total bullshit.
Exhibit A – the guy running this entire circus: Gianni Infantino. His name sounds like a brand of expensive nappies for mafiosi babies. He looks like an enormous, bald dildo who just discovered tax havens. He walks around like he’s the Secretary-General of the UN, but with better watches, and more power.
Forget everything you thought you knew about football. We’ve been wrong about it all this time. We just assumed that football was a game of two halves. Infantino has made it a game of four quarters, with a capitalism break halfway to halftime. When in Rome, do as the emperor says you must do.
But the moment the Emperor-In-Chief Donald Trump barks? This massive sovereign football empire folds like a Kaizer Chiefs defence in the 89th minute.
Take Omar Artan. Best referee in Africa. The man is selected to ref at the World Cup. He lands at Miami International Airport with his official visa, his FIFA credentials, his shiny whistle.
And what do the Americans do? They lock him in a room for four hours and deport him back to Somalia.
Why? It’s classified. Trust me bro.
And what did FIFA and Emperor Infantino do? Did they threaten to pull the tournament? Did they stand up for their guy?
Nah. They deleted his name from the website, pretended they’d never heard of him, and mumbled some kak about "host governments determining admissibility." FIFA will happily extort host cities for billions in tax exemptions, but the moment an immigration officer in Florida has a panic attack over a Somali passport, FIFA’s imperial sovereignty evaporates faster than a long-term rental lease when the landlord discovers how much a digital nomad will pay per night on Airbnb.
And Poor Hugo Broos. Please tell him to not look at his mentions. His day job is to deal with the inefficiencies of Bafana Bafana’s defence. His contract with SAFA probably doesn’t carry the fineprint that he might have to be an expert on the myth of white genocide. The US has a prior history of ambushing South African representatives in this way.
Just ask the nation’s number one Ankole farmer and part time furniture upholstery aficionado about his meeting with Trump.
Many elderly Belgian men know plenty about genocide, but Broos probably doesn’t, and in any case it wasn’t the time and place. Yet somehow, Bafana still survives on a wing and a prayer. Beat South Korea, and miracles may happen.
Miracles do happen, as anyone who watched Cabo Verde’s keeper Vozinha’s performance, blocking the powerful Spanish onslaught like Cyril Ramaphosa blocks impeachment processes. By any means necessary, comrades.
Who knows, maybe South Africa can win the FIFA World Cup. Maybe Ronwen Williams and President Ramaphosa will create the iconic image that will unite this country.
Hopefully Argentina don’t defend their crown for geopolitical imaging reasons. We’re already bracing ourselves for the gross image of Trump making the trophy lift all about himself. We don’t need Javier Milei also elbowing Leo Messi off the stage to hijack the moment.
That’s the “universal language” now. It’s not the Football. It’s the ego. It’s not the language of joy, or unity, or "bringing people together." It’s the jackboot of division and discrimination.
It’s the universal language of the corporate boardroom. It’s the language of tax write-offs, border militarism, and people when they become an inconvenient PR problem for Donald Trump.
The next time some pundit tells you football unites the world, just picture Omar Artan sitting in a holding cell in Miami like a common criminal, while Gianni Infantino counts his offshore millions and tries to figure out if Liechtenstein has a stadium big enough for his next tax shelter.
The universal language isn't "Goaaal!"
It’s the sound of a customs officer’s stamp hitting your passport and saying: "Go back to where you came from. Next."
But hey, every cloud has a silver lining. Sometimes, not always, but SOMETIMES, for every Omar Artan, unjustly persecuted, unfairly dismissed, completely overlooked, there’s a Peet Viljoen, sitting in a jail cell, with nothing but 400 charges and a head full of nonsense to keep him company.
* The Bureau of Cynicism is a weekly satirical dispatch from the frontlines of politics, media and public life. Armed with equal parts skepticism, sarcasm and common sense, it investigates hypocrisy, interrogates fashionable narratives and keeps a watchful eye on the ever-shifting goalposts of public discourse.