Uefa and Fifa’s failure to sanction the Israel Football Association is a moral and political failure.
By Nick McGeehan and Antoine Duval
After weeks of speculation that Uefa was on the verge of suspending the Israel Football Association (IFA) from competition, European football’s governing body suddenly announced via another anonymous briefing that those plans had been shelved in response to Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza.
There are progressive figures within Uefa’s executive committee who have been genuinely supportive of a ban, but the volte-face increasingly looks like the last act of a piece of political theatre that allowed Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin to publicly signal Uefa’s support for the people of Gaza, while avoiding taking any concrete action against the IFA. Remarkably, there has been very little criticism of these machinations, and little to no commentary on the fact that Uefa – like Fifa – is completely ignoring the rules that are supposed to guide its actions and protect it from taking politically partial decisions.
Uefa’s treatment of the Russian Football Union (RFU), whom Uefa (and Fifa) suspended in February 2022 shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provides an illuminating point of comparison. In the press release announcing the immediate suspension of Russian teams from competition, neither Uefa nor Fifa provided any reasoning for the decision, and since their statement included lines like “football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine”, it would have been reasonable to infer that the decision was a form of condemnation for the actions of the Russian state. But when the RFU challenged Uefa and Fifa in separate cases at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), both Uefa and Fifa argued that they had responded practically to a geopolitical crisis that was threatening the integrity of their competitions. The RFU was not, they said, the subject of any disciplinary action, but the victim of actual and potential threats of boycott by national football associations and unrest from the part of the general public. CAS sided with both Uefa and Fifa
However, Uefa’s senior leadership have since made statements that suggest its stance on Russia was profoundly political. In September 2023, 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.
When examining Uefa and Fifa’s different responses to Russia and Israel, it appears clear that what guides their decision making is not the gravity of the international crimes being committed, but rather the level of outrage that these cause within their membership and the broader football community. There is an overarching structural reason for this, in the sense that Uefa and Fifa’s statutes do not provide them with any guidance on how to respond to serious violations of international law. This made sense when those statutes were originally drafted, but football in the modern era is simply too political for national associations and clubs to be unaffected when their national states violate the most fundamental rules and principles of international law, and the glaring double standard in the treatment of Russia and Israel underscores the need for rules that reflect this reality.
However, in the case of Uefa and Fifa’s failure to sanction the Israel Football Association, what we are also seeing is a moral and political failure to enforce the rules that do exist.
Uefa and Fifa both have clear statutory grounds to suspend the IFA and these pre-date October 7. 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. The Palestine Football Association has been complaining to Fifa about this since 2013. Last week, Amnesty International, 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 in November 2024 singing “Let the IDF win and 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”. There is, however, no evidence of Uefa carrying out any investigation. Had they done so, they would have uncovered compelling evidence of the IFA’s failure over many years to address systematic racial discrimination among Israeli supporters groups, including the notorious supporters of Beitar Jerusalem. Article 7 of Uefa’s statutes is crystal clear on the need for member associations to have effective policies, including strong sanctions, to tackle the type of racism that is widespread in Israeli football stadiums, and which spilled onto the streets of Amsterdam last November.
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 their statute books, and these are rules that the IFA has been violating for years. In that sense, it is irrelevant whether or not Israel’s international crimes in Gaza stop after Donald Trump’s so-called peace-plan, although it is notable that the plan, and Uefa’s egregious instrumentalisation of it, has been savagely criticised by some of the world’s most eminent international lawyers.
In a letter to Uefa of 2 October, more than 30 experts in international human rights law wrote that “while the plan purports to offer a pathway to peace, in reality it undermines international law, Palestinian sovereignty, and the principles of self-determination” and said that “a Uefa ban on the IFA remains necessary and urgent.”
The fact that such a large number of renowned jurists took the time to write to Uefa suggests that, however duplicitous Čeferin’s apparent support for a ban was, the very fact that Uefa publicly signalled that it was open to suspending the IFA has only served to generate momentum around that call. Further evidence that UEFA will be under increasing pressure to act emerged the day before when football clubs in Ireland – spearheaded by the efforts of Bohemian FC and Irish Sport for Palestine – successfully called for an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Football Association for Ireland (FAI), in which they hope to win a vote that would require the FAI to to request their Israeli counterparts be suspended from Uefa. And just as the international lawyers rooted their calls in principles of international law, so did the Irish clubs root their call in the statutes of international football. Rules matter, and the Israel Football Association is where these two sets of rules find their nexus. The case for Israel’s immediate suspension from international football could not be clearer or more obvious.
