In an article written jointly with Antoine Duval of the Asser Law Institute, FairSquare Programme Director Nick McGeehan argues that the difference between UEFA and FIFA’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to Israel’s murderous war in Gaza is not premised on the gravity of the crimes committed, but on the degree of outrage caused within their membership. A version of this article was published in the Norwegian investigative football magazine Josimar.
After weeks of well-sourced speculation that UEFA was on the verge of suspending the Israel Football Association (IFA) from competition, European football’s governing body yesterday announced – via another anonymous briefing – that those plans had been shelved in response to Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza. “There is a belief among leaders in European football now that imposing sporting sanctions on Israel would not be the right move in the middle of peace talks” reported Rob Harris of Sky News.
The volte-face increasingly looks like the last act of a piece of political theatre that allowed UEFA’s senior leadership to signal its support for the people of Gaza, while avoiding taking any action to help them. People should not be fooled by UEFA’s virtue signaling: despite UEFA’s claims to uphold political neutrality, it has ignored the rules that are supposed to guide its actions and in doing so has thrown its weight behind Israel.
UEFA’s treatment of the Russian Football Union, whom UEFA (and FIFA) suspended in February 2022 shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provides an illuminating point of comparison. When challenged by the RFU at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), UEFA and FIFA defended themselves by saying that they were responding practically – not politically – to a geopolitical crisis which was threatening the integrity of their competitions. CAS sided with both UEFA and FIFA and the bans stood. However, UEFA’s senior leadership have since made statements that suggest its stance on Russia was profoundly political.
In September 2023, UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said the suspension of Russian teams reflected UEFA’s “commitment to take a stand against violence and aggression.” In February 2024 UEFA general secretary Theodore Theodoridis abandoned all semblance of political neutrality when asked why Israel was not being treated in the same way as Russia. “There are two completely different situations between the two countries…Don’t forget the start of the war in Russia and Ukraine and the start of what is happening now … in the Middle East.”
At the time of Theoridis’s statements Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack of 7 October had resulted in more than 30,000 deaths, including more than 10,000 children, and the International Court of Justice had just ordered Israel to implement a range of provisional measures to prevent a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an outcome that the ICJ described as “plausible”. Eighteen months later, the official death toll in Gaza has reached 64,656 including more than 18,000 children, and a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry has concluded that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
It is clear that the difference between UEFA and FIFA’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to Israel’s murderous war in Gaza is not premised on the gravity of the crimes committed, but on the degree of outrage caused within their membership.
Unlike in the case of Russia, UEFA and FIFA both have clear, pre-existing statutory grounds to suspend the IFA. The IFA continues in 2025 to incorporate numerous illegal settlement clubs located in the territory of the Palestinian Football Association into its national league, in violation of a rule that prohibits member associations from playing matches on another member association’s territory without their permission. Amnesty International today, for the first time, called on UEFA and FIFA to suspend the IFA on this basis and a similar call made by eight United Nations experts last week urged FIFA to “stop legitimising the situation arising from Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
This is not the only provision of the footballing statutes that the IFA is violating. When Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rampaged through Amsterdam last November singing “Let the IDF win to fuck the Arabs” and other racist songs, UEFA announced it would “examine all official reports, gather available evidence, assess them and evaluate any further appropriate course of action in accordance with its relevant regulatory framework”. Had they done so, they would have found they would have uncovered compelling evidence of the IFA’s failure over many years to address systematic racial discrimination among Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters and other groups of Israeli supporters groups, and cause to act under article 7 of its statutes. There is, however, no evidence of UEFA carrying out any investigation.
The moral case for Israel’s immediate suspension of the IFA is horrendously obvious in the images and stories coming out of Gaza. The rules that should give UEFA and FIFA cause to act are very clearly written down in black and white in the statute books that are supposed to protect these bodies from taking politically impartial decisions. Whether or not Israel’s international crimes in Gaza stop after Donald Trump’s highly questionable intervention is irrelevant in this regard, as the IFA has been violating UEFA and FIFA statutes for years. In the long-term it is long past time for FIFA and UEFA to put in place rules providing for the exclusion of teams when their national states violate the most fundamental rules and principles of international law.
