The image is simple, yet striking. At the end of a corridor made by parallel fences sits a blue and white football trophy cradled in what is made to look like a pair of hands made out of bent goalposts. The fences appear to be netting, but a closer look reveals that they’re strung together with barbed wire. “No football between the concentration camps,” the banner reads, in French. “Against the dictatorship in Argentina. Boycott the 1978 World Cup.” Below it is a name: Collectif pour le boycott de l’organisation de la coupe du monde de football (Collective for the Boycott of the Organization by Argentina of the World Cup).
COBA, as this movement came to call itself, was the brainchild of French leftist, organizer and bookpublisher François Gèze. In just a short period of time, the citizens’ collective organized one of the most impressive, and lasting, World Cup protests of all time—uniting nearly 200 domestic boycott groups, spinning off 20 international committees, and producing powerful propaganda that in some ways overshadowed the world cup itself. Google “1978 World Cup banner” today, and several of the first images to show up are not the official logo from that year, but COBA’s unofficial one.
Nearly 50 years later, the group’s slogan remains relevant for another reason. History is, at least in part, repeating itself. While less severe, the presence of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and ICE at games and in host cities across the country invites comparisons to the bloody Argentine dictatorship, which disappeared, tortured, and killed political dissidents right next to stadiums.
In the first half of 2026 alone, at least 20 people, many of them immigrants from Latin America, have died in ICE custody. Over the course of five days in late June, more than 10,000 people were detained by ICE, and on July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant was shot dead in Houston—not far from NRG Stadium, where seven World Cup games have been held. Immigrants are detained in sprawling prison-like facilities, far from public scrutiny, and have reported inhumane conditions, including inadequate health conditions for women and children.
If the human rights conditions of the 2026 World Cup are similar to those of 1978, so too has been the citizen response. As with COBA in 1978, today’s World Cup has several movements that have pushed for a boycott of the event. Though the games have gone ahead as scheduled, the counterprogramming of these organizations have denounced state violence and sought to rescue the grassroots nature of soccer from FIFA’s elite grasp.
An Unlikely Activist
COBA founder François Gèze was an unlikely leader of a movement against Argentina’s dictatorship. While he had experience with radical politics during France’s May 1968 student uprising, his path first intersected with Argentina at the age of 25, when he took up work at the French Embassy in Buenos Aires—a result of his decision to exchange his mandatory military service for a civilian role. He arrived in 1973, a tumultuous time in Argentine history.
In the effervescence of that moment, which coincided with a growing movement against first the Peronist regime and later the military dictatorship, Gèze got involved with progressive circles. He even moonlighted as a pseudonymous journalist for the leftist newspaper Politique Hebdo, calling himself Juan Carlos Russo.
Gèze returned to France in 1975, where in Paris, he continued his activism for the Argentinian cause. Along with a handful of other French people with ties to Argentina, he helped found a precursor group to COBA, the Comité de soutien aux luttes du peuple argentin (Committee in support for the struggle of the Argentinian people, CSLPA).
The group was already quite active when on March 24, 1976, a military junta seized power in Argentina, shutting down the radio waves and replacing them with military hymns.
“Sportswashing” A Bloody Dictatorship
The early days of the Argentinian military dictatorship did not mobilize public opinion abroad to the same extent as the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. The military clamped down on information, while simultaneously producing its own set of facts. Internationally, the junta pushed out a PR campaign that painted the Montoneros—the leading left-wing guerrilla group—as terrorists. Out of the Argentinian embassy in Paris, dictator Jorge Videla even ran a network of spies called the Centro Piloto whose goal was to monitor dissent abroad.
Videla invited foreigners to attend the World Cup, cleaning out prisons in order to organize sanitized tours for international reporters and dignitaries.
FIFA was not phased by the dictatorship’s activities as it set out to organize its 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires. As is typical in major sporting events, the host country had been announced a dozen years earlier, during the FIFA Congress held in London in 1966. Once in power, the Videla regime saw the tournament as an opportunity to whitewash its image. Videla invited foreigners to attend the World Cup, cleaning out prisons in order to organize sanitized tours for international reporters and dignitaries.
The United States actively helped the dictatorship clean its image, with Henry Kissinger even paying a visit to Argentina during the tournament, Jules Boykoff—a political science professor, former U.S. Olympic soccer player and the author of a recent book on the 2026 World Cup and FIFA’s “sportswashing”—explains. Kissinger “was running interference for Jorge Rafael Videla and other members of the Junta,” Boykoff said.
Sensing an opportunity in the opposite direction, Gèze started to organize CSLPA into COBA to counteract the official narrative.
The Birth of a Movement
At first, COBA was a ragtag group, according to Liliana Andreone, one of the few still living organizers. “There was a group of people our age—an Argentine comrade, a French comrade who married an Argentine and worked enormously hard. And the rest were mostly French people,” Andreone says. Gèze, she adds, was at the heart of the movement.
The movement started small, organizing educational meetings aimed at bringing the story of the Argentinian desaparecidos to the average French person. “Teachers, students and others would invite us to visit different parts of France to talk about what was happening under the dictatorship,” Andreone says.
Propaganda was a key part of the operation. Artist Jean-François Batelier, the cartoonist who had inked the “no football between the concentration camps” banner, came up with other creative representations of the Argentinian dirty war. One cartoon juxtaposed a smiling international photographer shooting a football team with that same team’s shadow morphing into a firing squad executing a bound Argentinian colleague. Another showed a TV screen playing the match, superimposed with the shadow of an executioner and his victim: “As you applaud the French team, your cheers will cover the screams of the tortured,” the text reads.
As the World Cup grew nearer, COBA supercharged their organizing.
COBA began to link up with other international boycott movements in Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland and even in the nascent state of Israel. Moira Cristiá, a sociologist who has studied COBA, writes that while it was never itself a transnational organization, COBA “nucleated the scattered energies of organizations from different countries, structuring a joint solidarity campaign.”
As the World Cup grew nearer, COBA supercharged their organizing. In April, the group organized nationwide protests for “International Boycott Day.” According to organizers, a total of 10,000 people attended the march in Paris, where they chanted “Videla assassin, Gistard d’Estaing (the French president at the time) complicit.” A couple of months later, in Strasbourg, the group staged a football match. Instead of nations battling it out on the pitch, the match featured a “military” team and a team wearing shirts with slogans critical of Videla.
Running a ragtag boycott movement against the FIFA machine was never a fair match. The World Cup went on unabated. On June 25, the Argentinian team faced off against The Netherlands at the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires. In a tense match, la Albiceleste won the match by a score of 3-1.
Andreone doesn’t remember much about the game itself. Rather, looking back, she highlights the “extraordinary solidarity” of the French. “It was a good moment,” she said.
‘No World Cup Under Trump’s Boot’
Earlier this Spring, I received an email from an association called the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). “For Immediate Release: The Anti Fascist Football Coalition Unanimously Joins the Call for a Boycott of the World Cup,” the email read. In the header, an image caught my eye.
On the top right, in green, is the silhouette of a football player; below him, in red, a police officer carrying an AK-47. The gun is aimed towards a man with a megaphone and a raised fist, in black. It reminded me of the COBA protest banners: simple and effective.
Formed in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup, the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition bears some resemblance to its French predecessors
Formed in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup, the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition bears some resemblance to its French predecessors. Austin Cole, one of the coordinators of the project, explains that like COBA, the coalition sprung out of a pre-existing movement called the North-South project, run by the radical, U.S.-based anti-war group Black Alliance for Peace. In the World Cup, organizers united against oppression saw an opportunity for unprecedented unity around seemingly disparate issues.
“These events function as instruments of political legitimation for imperialism that generates spectacle, that normalizes violence, and that provides a moral cover” for host countries, Cole said. The AAFC emerged as a way to “put a stake in the ground, to say: this is U.S. impunity, this is unacceptable. The U.S. is not safe for its own citizens, nor people visiting.”
Like COBA, the AFFC emerged in waves. At first, the goal was to move the games, which are currently taking place across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. To do so, BAP began to network with other anti-imperialist groups, including the Mexico City-based International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement and Black Alliance for Just Immigration. When it was clear that the tournament would go on in the United States, the group moved to messaging around an international boycott.
Other groups have also sprung up. In New York City, the People’s World Cup has organized counter-events to the FIFA tournament, stressing the grassroots nature of the sport—a message championed as well by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Another group, Football Against Fascism, has called for “No World Cup under Trump’s boot” and launched a “chaos tracker” of the event’s controversies, including the unfair treatment of the Iranian team by the U.S.
The (Long) Road Ahead
Anti-World-Cup organizers—then and now—recognize the limits of the exercise. But they know, as well, that the arc of social organizing is long.
Boykoff, the historian and former soccer player, stressed that during any social movement, it can be hard to know where the true goalposts lie. “Social change is not like billiard balls, the crisp click of causation—it’s often more indirect and relational,” he says. “It’s hard to measure the influence.”
Cole, from BAP, agreed, stressing that it can be hard to measure progress in real time. “Boycotts themselves are rarely successful in that they stop the event from happening, because whoever’s putting it on only has to endure for a month,” Cole adds.
But organizers remain undeterred. Many have already set their sites on their next challenge. “Even if they’re not ready to participate now, [people] will maybe be back in two years with the Olympics,” said Cole.
Phineas Rueckert is a Paris-based journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, New Lines Magazine, The Dial and other outlets. He has reported from Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay and Argentina.