I Won't Be Buying Tickets to Guadalajara
My nephew is thirteen years old and he lives and breathes soccer. Watches every Premier League match, knows every stat, sleeps under a Messi poster. When the World Cup was announced for North America — matches in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — he was so excited he cried. Actual tears. Happy ones. Talked about it for weeks.
When I told him we weren't going to any of the Mexico matches, he couldn't understand why. He's thirteen. He doesn't read the news reports about how cartel sicarios decapitated eight people in Sinaloa two weekends ago. He doesn't know that four American medical tourists were kidnapped in Tamaulipas in 2023, two of them murdered, and that the men who did it belong to an organization that still operates freely in the region. He hasn't read about the journalists in Mexico City who've been killed simply for reporting on cartel activity — 14 journalists murdered in Mexico in 2022 alone, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world for press freedom.
He just wants to see soccer. And I genuinely wish the answer could be yes.
FIFA and Mexico's Government Are Playing Pretend
FIFA awarded Mexico matches for the 2026 World Cup — three venues including Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City — against a backdrop of State Department travel advisories that warn Americans to avoid entire Mexican states that contain those very cities. Jalisco state, home of Guadalajara, has a Level 3 advisory: "Reconsider Travel." Nuevo León, home of Monterrey, has been at elevated advisory status due to cartel activity. These aren't fringe warnings. The U.S. State Department issues Level 4 "Do Not Travel" advisories for several Mexican states bordering the tournament venues.
FIFA's response to all of this has been exactly what you'd expect from an organization whose primary relationship with governance has historically involved envelopes of cash: cheerful assurances that security arrangements will be robust, that Mexico has hosted successful tournaments before, that everything will be fine.
Mexico's government is in a complicated position. President Claudia Sheinbaum inherited the security catastrophe of the AMLO years, during which the previous administration effectively negotiated coexistence with cartels rather than confronting them. The result is a security environment where federal forces and cartel organizations occupy the same territory under an unacknowledged ceasefire. Bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists — many of them American, which makes them high-value targets for kidnapping — into this environment and hoping the cartels honor a temporary goodwill arrangement is not a security strategy. It's a prayer.
The American Fan Is Not a Protected Species in Northern Mexico
American tourists have been targeted, kidnapped, and killed in Mexico with enough regularity that it stopped being news years ago. That normalization is its own horror. When a family from Ohio gets robbed at gunpoint in Puerto Vallarta and we shrug because it happens so often, something has gone badly wrong with how we're calibrating risk.
World Cup tourism is different in character from resort tourism. Fans gather in public spaces, drink heavily, wear the colors of their national team, and behave with the kind of visible exuberance that marks them clearly as wealthy foreign targets. In a normal host country, this is festive. In Guadalajara in 2026, it's a targeting matrix.
I'm not trying to catastrophize. I love Mexico. I've been there many times. The Mexican people are warm, the culture is extraordinary, the food is — there's nothing like it. This isn't an indictment of Mexico or Mexicans. It's an indictment of a specific security situation that the Mexican government has not solved and that FIFA has decided isn't its problem.
The people who will pay for that decision, if the worst happens, won't be FIFA executives. They'll be American families who bought tickets to a sporting event and trusted that the adults in charge had done their homework.
What Should Have Happened
Canada and the United States together have more than enough venue capacity to host a complete World Cup without Mexican venues. Canada has stadiums in Vancouver, Toronto, and Edmonton. The United States has sixteen host cities ranging from Los Angeles to Boston. The security infrastructure, the transportation, the hospitality capacity — all there. No cartel problem. No State Department travel advisory. No risk calculation beyond whether it'll rain in Seattle.
FIFA chose to include Mexico for commercial reasons. Mexican market. Sponsorship relationships. Political considerations within the FIFA structure. None of those reasons has anything to do with the safety of the American families who will show up in Guadalajara in the summer of 2026 with their jerseys and their hope and their thirteen-year-old soccer fans.
My nephew will watch the Mexico matches from our living room, where I know he's safe. That's the right call. I just wish the people with actual power over these decisions had made theirs with the same priorities.
