Friday, June 12. In the hours before the first FIFA World Cup game in “Los Angeles,” aka the City of Inglewood, Inglewood’s Market Street was closed to car traffic so that locals (and a trickle of fans who took Metro and then walked to the stadium) could enjoy the Wood Cup. The Wood Cup was a small festival featuring vendors, resource tables set up by government officials and agencies, one creepy robot demo, and a stage for musical performances and salsa lessons.
On the street, kids played soccer on a patch of artificial turf in an intersection. Up above, on the roof of a business, a man in military fatigues sat in a folding chair in front of a sniper rifle pointing out at the street. Further along the rooftop, at least one other rifle was mounted on a tripod, aimed down at the street. At least four men were on this rooftop. Across the street, at least another two men in black surveilled the scene below. High up on a tall apartment building next to the Metro station, more men and more rifle-shaped apparatuses. These buildings were roughly a mile from SoFi Stadium, reflecting how cities often militarize not only the immediate stadium environs but broader swaths of the urban area when they host mega-events.
Across the street from the World Cup venue itself, security agents peered through binoculars at the scene below from high up on top of the Inglewood Forum arena. On the ground, security patrols on foot and on bike ran the gamut from Inglewood Police (IPD) and California Highway Patrol (CHP) to private security officers from CSC and Apex and on to agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Apparently, this grim alphabet soup of a security force decided 13 agents were necessary to compel one man to move along from outside the perimeter fence, when that man was armed with a cardboard sign asking for money for a train ticket.
Increased surveillance was one of several concerns highlighted by members of the Black Alliance for Peace Southern California, as they distributed flyers and engaged Inglewood residents in conversation at the Wood Cup. (BAP-SoCal is part of the NOlympics LA coalition.) “The world cup is here, can you still afford to be?” the flyers asked. The flyers contrasted the rosy promises stadium boosters made to Inglewood residents with less rosy realities: rising rents, closed schools, sham “community input” processes, and “drones and 98 license plate readers feeding your movements to the police.” BAP and the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition also have called for a boycott of the World Cup and the United States: as the flyers stated, “participation in the games normalizes genocide, domestic repression, militarism, and death.”
Over at the Memorial Coliseum in South Central LA, the official FIFA Fan Festival was underway. While soccer fans can find ways to have fun in almost any environment, this environment was a hot, unshaded, $7-for-a-water-bottle, corporatized landscape of giant banner ads and “activations.” Official “Los Angeles World Cup 2026 Host City Supporter” Archer Aviation was there with a model aircraft, notably not mentioning that they partner with Palantir and Anduril, tech companies that power border surveillance, kidnappings and deportation, drone bombing, and other forms of US violence around the globe. During the USA-Paraguay game, members of the NOlympics LA coalition revealed two banners: “FIFA BRINGS ICE” and “RED CARD 4 US EMPIRE.” Participants held the banners in front of the large audience seated in the Coliseum’s stands for over two minutes before security agents escorted them out.
On the way out, one CSC agent manhandled a NOlympics member while trying to steal one of the banners, screaming “Fuck you” until his colleague restrained him. Another security agent yanked the other banner so hard that a NOlympics member was pulled into the bodies of other security officials. Alongside images of this action, on social media we posted some of the words we shared the previous weekend, at an “ICE Out of the Cup” protest in Inglewood:
“The World Cup, the Super Bowl, and The Olympics ALL invite federal security forces, not just near the stadiums to threaten workers inside and out, but at the fan zones, on transit, and throughout our communities.
These events are always used as an excuse to remove poor people. Our public spaces are corporatized, privatized, and militarized in the name of counter-terrorism and presenting a clean city to tourists.
FIFA is normalizing the violence our nation is deploying around the world, whether that’s genocide in Occupied Palestine, the brutal bombing of 168 young girls in Minab, Iran, the kidnapping of world leaders, or threats to invade Cuba. We must not allow FIFA to wash the reputation of US imperialism and colonialism, like the 1936 Olympics did in Berlin.
They want us to believe there is no alternative, but nothing is inevitable.
It is our duty to take the only moral position possible. We must oppose this sports washing and tell FIFA and the world Los Angeles is not a hospitable city for spectacle entangled with fascism.
You cannot reform these events. You cannot negotiate or plan away the ICE presence. The only thing that will stop these events from bringing ICE is to stop bringing these events.”