Mexico will house Iran’s national football team during the 2026 World Cup, President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed on Monday, after FIFA approached the Mexican government in the wake of US objections to hosting the team. Iran will be based in Tijuana, the border city in Baja California, with cross-border travel arrangements being worked out by US, Mexican and FIFA security teams.
Sheinbaum told reporters in Mexico City that the request had come directly from FIFA and that her government “had no reason to deny” the Iranian delegation. “Football is football,” she said. “We have no quarrel with the players or the staff, and the World Cup belongs to all of us.”
US President Donald Trump first signalled in March that Iran’s squad should not be permitted to stay on US soil for security reasons, citing the ongoing conflict in the strait of Hormuz. The Iranian football federation had initially planned to base the team in Arizona, where two of its three group-stage matches are due to be played; that plan collapsed when the State Department made clear it would not be granting visas to the support staff.
Under the current World Cup schedule, Iran will face New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June, Belgium in Los Angeles on 21 June, and Egypt in Seattle on 26 June. The team will commute from Tijuana to the US match cities via charter flight, with FIFA confirming on Monday that all three games remain in their announced US venues.
The arrangement appears to defuse, at least in sporting terms, one of the more awkward subplots of a co-hosted tournament that spans the United States, Mexico and Canada. Senior FIFA officials had spent much of April trying to find a workable basing solution after a similar attempt to secure approvals in Canada also stalled.
Sheinbaum’s announcement is a small but visible diplomatic gesture toward Tehran at a moment when the Mexican government has otherwise tried to maintain low-key relations with the Trump administration on issues from migration to fentanyl. Mexican foreign minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente said the decision did not signal any broader political shift and that it had been coordinated in advance with the State Department’s consular bureau.
In Tijuana, mayor Ismael Burgueño Ruiz said the city was “honoured” and that a hotel and training complex in the eastern part of the city had already been earmarked. Local hoteliers, who had feared a quiet World Cup with most attention focused on Los Angeles and Phoenix, said advance bookings around the Iranian training base had jumped within hours of the announcement.