Andrew Giuliani has a new job. It's a high stakes position in a global arena.

Politico

7 hours ago

Mounting the world's largest sporting event is never easy. But the task of planning the FIFA World Cup in the United States next summer has grown more complicated by President Donald Trump's border crackdown and contentious relationship with co-hosts Canada and Mexico.
The job of coordinating the federal government's role has fallen to Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor and one-time Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. As a special assistant to the president, Andrew Giuliani served as a sports liaison during the first Trump administration and helped facilitate the reopening of U.S. professional sports leagues following the COVID-19 shutdown.
But as head of the White House's FIFA World Cup 2026 Task Force, Andrew Giuliani — who returned to the Trump administration after a failed bid to be New York's governor in 2022 — now has a much larger challenge. Immediately ahead of him is the Club World Cup, another FIFA-run tournament that will kick off next weekend and which soccer's international governing body is using as a test run for the much larger, more logistically complicated World Cup. It will be followed by other high-profile sporting competitions on American soil, including the summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028 and the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2031, which Mexico will also co-host.
'If these are safe and secure games,' the 39-year-old former pro golfer said in an interview this week, 'then they're going to be successful games.'
But even straightforward logistical questions that Giuliani faces, like how to expedite visa applications for players, fans and media, are fraught with geopolitical complexity: the first non-host country to qualify a team for next summer's tournament is Iran. (The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.)
What do you say to those abroad wondering if they can or should travel to the United States given what they see from the administration's border policy?
I would simply say: You're welcome here. If you apply early for your visa, if you qualify, then we want to have you here for the World Cup. President Trump has made it very clear that if you're going to come here to celebrate a great event like the World Cup, or America 250, we want you to come. If you're going to come here to cause trouble, then you're not welcome here. What I can tell you is we're going to be working hard on the back end to make sure that you have the opportunity to enjoy these games in person.
What does that entail?
The State Department has already seen a major reduction in times at some of these countries that were considered problem countries at the end of the Biden presidency. So I think you're going to see a real reduction in visa times. While we're not going to sacrifice our national security, we're going to make sure that the State Department has the resources that they need to process the visas to make the World Cup truly great from an American perspective — an America welcoming-the-world perspective.
That language seems hard to reconcile with what this administration is actually doing immigration and trade.
In my understanding of it, the President's America First mentality has never been America Only.
So what exactly is the role of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Task Force?
First and foremost, we're not recreating any federal agency. You look at our task force members, and whether it's the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, FBI, DOJ, whoever it may be, we're not recreating their department here. What we're doing — to use a different football reference — is we're going to be lead blockers for them to make sure that we end up allowing them to coordinate to the point where we can maximize their strengths and to make sure we're efficient in getting through many of the roadblocks that exist in government.
This task force should have been started three years ago, and we're playing catch-up. And that's right, there's a whole lot of work between now and really the Club World Cup, which was written into the executive order as a responsibility, but certainly with the World Cup in 2026, as well.
Why do you think you were picked to run it?
In 2020 a couple weeks into the shutdown — as we were getting into the great reopening of America — the President wanted to make sure that we could get our sports leagues open. And he tasked me, along with White House counsel and the State Department, to create a system to get our athletes and personnel in. And we were able to get nearly 15,000 athletes and support staff in at a time when it was very difficult. This will be more like 350,000 credentialed personnel — and you have ticket holders, and then we have potential fans here. But I can tell you already, we've set up a working group between FIFA, the State Department and the White House task force that works daily on recent issues for this Club World Cup.
Soccer is known for its notoriously rowdy and sometimes violent fans. The last European final, in 2021, was marred by hundreds of ticketless fans storming Wembley Stadium in London. What can you do to prepare for that scenario?
I'll give you a more recent example — 2024 in Copa América in Miami. This was a week after [the attempted assassination of Trump in] Butler. It was right at the end of the Republican convention. You had ticketless fans that basically stormed the gates at Hard Rock Stadium, and it took everything to get them off the field. So there have been security breakdowns as recently as last year. That's why for us, the focus is on making these games as safe and secure as humanly possible. That's where we've been focusing our energy. We've put together working groups with DHS, DOD, with our state and local partners. Already, we've done security briefs with nine of the 11 host cities for the Club World Cup games — we're going to be scheduling those other two — to look at their external security posture, their pitch protection, where we're looking at the pyrotechnics, and trying to make sure that the laws are enforced here.
Are you prepared for the Club World Cup this year from a security standpoint?
There is a different security posture with the Club World Cup versus the World Cup. For the Club World Cup — SEAR (Special Event Assessment Rating) level three and four events — there is no federal coordination team, the responsibility is on the state and locals and on the security of the stadiums for that. With that being said, we still are looking at the security posture, trying to see if there are holes that we can plug, of which we've done a few already and which we're continuing to do. Next year, that is when you will have the SEAR level one and level two events where you'll have federal coordination teams. Perimeters will be pushed out. You'll see some of that being tested already, which FIFA and some of the stadiums have agreed to for the Club World Cup.
There will likely be fans crossing the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada to see matches. Are you coordinating with law enforcement in those countries?
We're going to get to that with Canada and Mexico. We had some engagement with them, as well. I think right now my five meter target, if you will, is the Club World Cup, making sure those go off safely and securely. Then I think we start to look kind of more at our engagements with Canada and Mexico after the Club World Cup ends in the middle of July,
The 11 American cities that will host matches are counting on federal money to support their security needs around next year's tournament. There's $600 million for that in the reconciliation bill. Are you concerned about whether that money will reach host cities in time?
Look, anybody who has a fiscal ask wants their money yesterday, right? I certainly think it works fine.
The only other time the United States hosted the men's tournament was in 1994. Do you have any memory of that?
I remember going with my father and mother. I think it was my father's first year in office. I remember how hot it was. America is my team, but being part Italian, my second team is Italy, and I got the opportunity to go to an Italy-Ireland game in which Ireland upset Italy. It was a big thing in New York, as you can imagine, with so many Italian and Irish Americans that live in the greater New York area. So that was an incredible moment. And I remember going to the semifinal game where Italy ended up winning and advancing to the final.
Obviously the U.S. had an amazing run to get to the knockout stage, which really put U.S. soccer on the map and was the start of the creation of Major League Soccer. And then obviously the women winning in 1999 — the first opportunity here for U.S. soccer to take off. And that's how I kind of look at 2026 and 2031 here — as that next opportunity to launch U.S. soccer even further globally.