This was supposed to be different.
When this year’s World Cup was awarded to the United States, Mexico and Canada back in the summer of 2018, world leaders and soccer officials alike stressed an overarching theme: unity.
“It’s an opportunity to bring the world together and highlight how well things work between Canada, Mexico and the United States,” said Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister at the time.
“Canada, the United States and Mexico are profoundly united,” said Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president.
President Trump, then in his first term, agreed: “The U.S., together with Mexico and Canada, just got the World Cup. Congratulations — a great deal of hard work!”
Fast forward to Thursday, when this first-ever three-country World Cup is scheduled to begin in Mexico.
The Mexican national team will face off against South Africa in the first of the tournament’s 104 games spread all over the continent, from Vancouver and Toronto to New York and Kansas City to Monterrey and Guadalajara.
It is a historic tournament, with a record number of teams competing (48). And it is an event that the world celebrates every four years, one of the few touchstones to resonate throughout almost every corner of the globe, bridging national, religious, ideological and countless other divides.
But aside from the fever for the game, unity has not been the prevailing sentiment of late among the three host countries, and the execution of this neighboring-allies World Cup has not been seamless.
Since beginning his second term last year, Mr. Trump has repeatedly targeted Mexico and Canada with verbal attacks, vows of military action and tariffs. His administration has enacted a strict immigration policy that has turned away some World Cup participants, journalists and fans.
And just a day before the tournament was set to begin, Mr. Trump took another economic swing at his co-hosts, threatening to let the nearly $2-trillion free trade pact between the three countries expire.
“We don’t need anything that Canada has, we don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office, adding: “We don’t need their cars, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need anything that they have.”
Beyond that, there has been widespread criticism of the prices for a tournament that was billed as being inclusive. For the first time, FIFA, soccer’s governing body, has used dynamic pricing, pushing tickets to eye-popping levels, when they can be secured at all.
Of course, this is hardly the first World Cup to take place in the shadow of politics, and the discord has often been far more heated. Mussolini hosted the 1934 World Cup in Italy and used it to bolster his fascist rule. Argentina held the tournament in 1978 during its brutal military dictatorship. Just four years ago, Russia was barred from qualifying for the competition for invading Ukraine.
For many fans around the world, the politics hanging over the tournament often recede once the games begin and the cheers for their national teams start.
But in both Mexico and Canada, there is a feeling that their nations will serve only complementary roles in this event.
They each get to hold 13 games, in three Mexican and two Canadian cities. By contrast, the United States — a bigger country, with larger stadiums — is holding 78 games across 11 cities, including the quarterfinals, semifinals and the final.
To many in Mexico and Canada, it is clear that FIFA was mainly targeting the United States, the largest economy in the world.
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, has spent years wooing Mr. Trump, including awarding him a first-of-its-kind FIFA Peace Prize — all of which has raised concerns within the soccer community about what is supposed to be a politically neutral position as the sport’s leader.
In Mexico, where soccer is the national sport, holding the World Cup again has been a large point of pride. No other country in the world — not Brazil, with its record five titles, nor any of the European powers — has held the event as many times as Mexico (1970, 1986 and now).
Mexico City’s iconic stadium, colloquially known as Estadio Azteca, will host the opener for a record third time. It first opened in 1966 and underwent a near $200 million makeover for this World Cup, increasing its capacity to 87,500 seats. But not all have been happy, including residents upset by what they say is gentrification accelerated by the World Cup.
Protests have already snarled Mexico City’s dense traffic and more are planned — from the national teachers’ union to mothers searching for missing loved ones in a country where disappearances are a crisis — to converge around the opening game.
On the diplomatic front, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has tried to tread carefully with Mr. Trump, but the relationship between the countries has been strained, particularly this year.
Under pressure, her government has ramped up collaboration with American authorities, capturing or killing several top cartel leaders. Her country has become the United States’ top trading partner for both imports and exports, and it imposed tariffs on China that align with Mr. Trump’s policies.
But Ms. Sheinbaum has routinely insisted on protecting Mexican sovereignty and rejected Mr. Trump’s threats of military strikes on the cartels in Mexico. The cross-border relations were then significantly strained in April, when the Trump administration unsealed an indictment accusing a Mexican governor and nine other current and former Mexican officials of helping a powerful Mexican cartel in exchange for bribes and votes.
Ms. Sheinbaum has refused to arrest the governor, a member of her political party; criticized U.S. officials for not providing sufficient evidence; and repeatedly framed the accusations against him as a potential affront to Mexican sovereignty.
Breaking from the longstanding tradition of world leaders, Ms. Sheinbaum said she will not attend the World Cup opener — or any game. She has given away her V.I.P. ticket to the first game to an Indigenous 21-year-old woman who is an amateur soccer player. She said she instead planned to watch it with the general public on the giant screen in Mexico City’s main square.
Her Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Mark Carney, is in his own standoff with Mr. Trump.
The relationship between the United States and Canada, once a near-familial bond built on economic and cultural integration, is today at a historic low. Mr. Trump has cast Canada as a weak, extractive nuisance, sending Canadians into an unusual patriotic fervor and recasting the country’s political fortunes.
While trade is at the heart of the current souring of relations, the rift in the relationship runs deeper. His statements that Canada should become the 51st state have struck a chord in Canada, which last year elected Mr. Carney, a seasoned financier, as prime minister to steady the country through the tumult of the Trump era.
Mr. Carney has set out to build new alliances around the world for Canada and has championed opening up new markets to break his country’s overwhelming dependence on business with the United States. He has even opened a door to more trade with China, breaking with years of foreign and trade policy in which Canada was fully aligned with the United States. Mexican and Canadian officials have also been talking separately about the future of their trilateral trade deal with the United States.
On Friday, Canada will host its first World Cup game (its national team will play Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto), and Mr. Carney is likely to miss it. His office announced that he is flying to Europe on Thursday for diplomatic meetings and a Group of 7 summit because Canada is “diversifying our partnerships abroad.”
The United States will hold its first game on Friday as well (its national team against Paraguay in Los Angeles), and it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will attend. He, too, has criticized the high cost of tickets.
“I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump told The New York Post in a telephone interview last month.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Tariq Panja and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting
