The mayor of the sports world – POLITICO

As this newsletter arrives in your inbox, game three of the NBA Finals — the first in New York City in 27 years — is just a few hours away. Already, long-suffering Knicks fans are lining up outside of bars, rushing to secure spots to watch the basketball game on television because of the astronomically high prices to attend the game in person.

The first match of the World Cup is less than three days away. And the first match in East Rutherford, New Jersey — which is just a short train ride from downtown Manhattan — will take place in almost exactly five days. The World Cup final, happening at the same stadium, will take place in less than six weeks.

All of a sudden, New York seems like the center of the sports world. And the city has a mayor who is taking full advantage.

Zohran Mamdani has been an ever present face at Knicks games and at World Cup-related pressers, opining on both sports and often sporting an Arsenal or a Knicks jersey to boot. In doing so, the avowed socialist mayor is modeling for politicians around the world a new version of lefty sports fandom.

His good fortune on this front is undeniable. Mamdani is a hardcore soccer fan and player; his basketball knowledge is somewhat less developed, but he’s able to talk about the Knicks and sound like an authentic supporter. He has avoided pitfalls like the one that tripped up New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul when she recently said she would “ask [President Donald Trump] to name the starting lineup of the 1993 championship team and see how he does.”

(It was an almost unforgivable gaffe — the 1993 Knicks famously lost in heartbreaking fashion to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and failed to reach the NBA Finals.)

“He doesn’t sound like he’s speaking a second language like so many Democrats do when they talk about sports,” said a source close to Mamdani, granted anonymity to candidly discuss Democratic Party messaging strategy. “He’s not putting on — with other Democrats, you run into an issue where they don’t know who [Knicks star] Jalen Brunson is. They don’t know who KAT is. They don’t have Linsanity memories.”

Mamdani laces his World Cup press conferences with soccer references, so much so that Hochul has begun to call him a “super fan.”

In an April event the two pols did together on Staten Island, the mayor recalled going to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and said his fondest memories from that tournament included playing beach soccer in Durban.

At a midtown press conference last week laying out the city’s public transportation plans, Mamdani said the city would not “park the bus,” a joke about a derided defensive strategy that is familiar to soccer fans but that he had to explain to the American press corps.

Today, when Mamdani announced a massive World Cup watch party in Central Park, he did so alongside George Weah, the former Liberian president and soccer star who is also father of American forward Tim Weah.

“When I was a child growing up in East Africa, there were towering figures, and then there was George Weah, the first African player to ever win the Ballon d’Or,” he said. “If you had told seven-year-old me that I would one day go into the same line of work as this man, I would be extremely disappointed to understand that you meant politics.” Then he got in a subtle dig at Weah for playing for Chelsea — a rival to Mamdani’s Arsenal, whose uniform the mayor turned into a custom kurta during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha in May..

But he has also treated his commentary on sports as almost separate from his broader political agenda. While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (still angry about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner moving them to Los Angeles in his youth) calls MLB owners “baseball oligarchs,” Mamdani has assiduously avoided comments on Knicks owner James Dolan’s controversial invite to Trump to watch the finals, aside from noting that he would be in a much cheaper part of Madison Square Garden, with a standing-room-only ticket.

“Engaging with the sphere of sports for politicians can be more politically effective by being less explicitly political,” said Jules Boykoff, a former professional soccer player who is a professor at Pacific University and has written multiple books on sports and politics.

Mamdani’s sports-focused mayoralty hasn’t been all sunshine. After he attended a New York Mets game earlier this year and the baseball team went on a long losing streak, the New York Post dubbed it the “curse of the Mambino.” Any politician who dares to be a public sports fan exposes themselves to the vicissitudes of a game they cannot control — no matter how powerful any lucky jersey is.

But flexing sports fandom can work to advance a political agenda as well. If sports are often a reflection of society, and the World Cup is the globe’s most important sporting event, it stands to reason that a politician who can confidently talk about sports has a chance to benefit. Working with FIFA, which is frequently excoriated by the global left, Mamdani secured 1,000 tickets for just $50 to see World Cup games that are otherwise selling for thousands of dollars. That’s a very public way to advance his democratic socialist agenda.

“I think it could be effective politically, moving through the sport of soccer to make political arguments without actually talking about politics directly,” said Boykoff. “Just getting people tickets, making sure the working class is involved — I do see that as very much a path forward.”

Welcome to POLITICO Forecast. For the next six weeks, Forecast will showcase daily coverage of the World Cup, with a global eye to the players looking to win off-field. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s authors at [email protected] and [email protected] or on X (formerly known as Twitter) @calder_mchugh and @ryrivard.

‘EVERY VISA DECISION IS A NATIONAL SECURITY DECISION’: As World Cup teams, officials and support staff begin arriving in the United States for pre-tournament training camps, visa and entry issues are becoming an early flashpoint between an administration that has been unwavering in prioritizing national security and prominent teams and their fans who expect to have all of their talent and off-field resources for the biggest matches of their careers, Sophia Cai writes in.

In recent weeks, Iranian football officials have been denied visas to travel to the United States, Iraq’s striker Aymen Hussein was reportedly detained and questioned for hours upon arrival in Chicago, and a Somali referee who was expected to officiate the tournament was turned away.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection confirmed in a statement that on June 6, a Somali national, a World Cup referee, arrived at Miami International Airport from Istanbul International Airport and following additional inspection “was determined to be inadmissible due to vetting concerns and was denied entry.”

“All travelers seeking entry into the United States, including athletes, coaches, and staff, are subject to CBP inspection and vetting. Admissibility determinations are made on a case-by-case basis,” the CBP spokesperson said.

And the incidents are likely to continue to stack up.

The administration, however, has never suggested that it would relax its vetting for what could be the sporting event in history. For months, officials overseeing preparations for the tournament have emphasized that standard security and immigration procedures would remain in place, even as the United States welcomes millions of visitors.

“We understand that every visa decision is a national security decision,” White House FIFA World Cup 2026 Task Force head Andrew Giuliani told POLITICO in a January interview. “So there is a reason why the President and Secretary Rubio have put out strict guidance on that. Because he wants to make sure that the US homeland is safe and this World Cup is safe, understanding that we want to be as welcoming as possible, also not turning a blind eye to the fact that bad actors can end up coming in from different countries, or you might have huge overstays.”

That posture has largely aligned with FIFA’s approach.

While the soccer governing body has privately worked the back channels to try to resolve high-priority visa issues or remind President Trump that qualified teams must have the opportunity to participate, it has generally avoided publicly challenging a host nation’s immigration policies or individual visa vetting decisions.That leaves fans largely on their own to navigate the Trump administration’s travel bans which impact four countries competing at the World Cup – Haiti, Iran, Senegal and Ivory Coast – and have led to visa rejection rates above 40 percent for 11 of the 48 countries, according to a BBC analysis.

This head of state bid adieu to his national team’s captain — in whose transfer negotiations the president once intervened to keep him from leaving the country — before the squad departed the country last week.

Scroll down for the winning answer.

An exclusive POLITICO analysis of what it will cost New York and New Jersey to host a season of summertime mega-events, the overwhelming majority of the funds directly connected to the World Cup, likely the largest bill for any of North America’s 16 host cities. As Ry Rivard reports from New York, elected officials across the area are beginning to worry that the tournament won’t deliver the economic payback that will justify the public spending.

GUARDING AGAINST EBOLA: Among those suiting up for the World Cup are so-called disease detectives from coast to coast mounting last-minute defenses against the threat of Ebola. The Democratic Republic of Congo, epicenter of the latest outbreak, will play its final pre-tournament warm-up match in Europe tomorrow before heading to face Portugal in Houston next week.

As a five-bylined team effort from POLITICO health-care reporters spread across three World Cup host sites and Washington details, local officials are working to combat the viral threat by using a Covid-era playbook without pandemic-era funding. Among the tactics they are using: Los Angeles is hooking up SoFi Stadium to its wastewater-surveillance system, the first time it has done so with a sporting venue. Before, during and after each match, public-health officials will collect samples and drive them to a lab for genomic sequencing that can detect dozens of pathogens, including Covid and measles.“We’re going to have people from all over the world coming into the city, into the county, for these games, and that’s great,” Anish Mahajan, the deputy health director in Los Angeles County, which is planning to spend $4 million on its World Cup defense, told Rachel Bluth. “But that’s a massive risk for various infections.”

– Al Jazeera, the news organization funded largely by Qatar’s government, reported that a Kansas City shooting and Penn Station stabbing are “raising concerns over the safety and security of fans,” citing statistics from the Gun Violence Archive about the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S.

– “Who are you, Gianni?” the Zurich-based online magazine Republik asks in a profile of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president it labels “the most powerful Swiss person of our time.” The publication boasts that it interviewed 84 people who know Infantino in its quest for an answer.

SPOT THE POL!: That’s French President Emmanuel Macron standing alongside striker Kylian Mbappé on June 2 at the country’s vaunted Clairefontaine training academy. As Victor Goury-Laffont reported last week from Paris, Macron is treating the World Cup in his presidency’s final year as “one final chance to draft off football success in a way he’s so far failed to achieve.”

Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.