17JUN

FIFA brings back Spanish after backlash

2 min read

10:21UTC

FIFA added Spanish as a permanent press-conference language after refusing Morocco captain Achraf Hakimi a Spanish-language answer, having excluded the tongue of a co-host nation.

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Key takeaway

FIFA reinstated Spanish at press conferences only after refusing Hakimi and absorbing the public backlash.

FIFA added Spanish as a permanent fourth press-conference language on or around Monday 15 June, reversing a policy under which Achraf Hakimi had been refused permission to answer a Mexican outlet's question in Spanish at the Morocco-Brazil fixture ¹. Hakimi is Morocco's captain and a fluent Spanish speaker, having spent most of his career in Spain. The original restriction had excluded the language of a co-host from press conferences at a tournament Mexico is staging.

The reversal followed a social-media backlash rather than any internal review. FIFA had set English, French and Arabic as the official press-conference languages and left Spanish off the list, then enforced that omission against a player answering a Spanish-language outlet. The contradiction was visible from the moment the policy met a co-host nation's media, yet it took public pressure to undo.

The episode fits a wider pattern this week. In the same period FIFA withheld the VAR (video assistant referee) graphic during the Qatar fixture and offered only a brief technical-outage line, drawing a governance row rather than an explanation . A language policy reversed under pressure and a refereeing decision left unexplained share the same shape: FIFA addresses what becomes embarrassing and leaves the rest to settle on its own.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

FIFA had a rule that press conferences at the World Cup could only be held in four languages: Arabic, English, French, and German. This was the same list used at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, where Arabic was the local language. But the 2026 World Cup is co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Spanish is the official language of Mexico and is spoken by hundreds of millions of people across Latin America. Morocco's captain Achraf Hakimi was born in Madrid and speaks Spanish natively. When a Mexican journalist asked him a question in Spanish, he was told he could not answer in that language. The video of him being stopped from speaking Spanish went viral on social media. FIFA then reversed the policy and added Spanish as a permanent fourth press-conference language within 24 hours.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

FIFA's press-conference language policy has no published rulebook chapter. The four-language template (Arabic, English, French, German) reflects the linguistic distribution of FIFA's founding European and Arab member federations and was last formally reviewed before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, when Spanish was not a commercially significant broadcast language for FIFA's primary television markets.

The co-hosting structure of 2026 created a novel condition: two of the three sovereign hosts use Spanish as their primary language, and Mexico's media infrastructure is built around Spanish-language broadcast.

The Hakimi incident crystallised the policy's absurdity without requiring FIFA to acknowledge the bureaucratic root cause. Achraf Hakimi, born in Madrid to Moroccan parents, speaks Spanish as a first language. A Moroccan captain unable to answer a Mexican journalist in Spanish, at a match in New Jersey, with Mexico as a co-host, produced a self-evident governance failure that FIFA could correct in 24 hours without admitting the underlying institutional problem.

What could happen next?

Precedent
FIFA's governance-by-embarrassment pattern, reversing policy only after viral incidents, sets a template for media advocacy: public exposure is a more reliable enforcement mechanism than formal complaint channels.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford published a 2025 analysis of multilingual press access at major international sporting events, finding that exclusion of the host nation's primary language from media protocols was among the most reliable predictors of press-freedom criticism from the host country's political class.

Mexico is a co-host of the 2026 World Cup; Spanish is spoken by an estimated 580 million people globally and is the first language of two of the three co-host nations. FIFA's original policy, which listed Arabic, English, French, and German as press-conference languages, excluded both Spanish and Portuguese, omitting the primary languages of South America's two largest football nations.

Counter-view: German sports governance academic Professor Markus Heinze at the University of Cologne argued in a SportsPro column that FIFA's language policy was not a policy at all but a bureaucratic default: media operations staff applied the standard four-language template inherited from Qatar 2022, where Arabic replaced Spanish. The backlash was a correction of operational inertia, not a defeat of a deliberate political position.

Key tension: Whether FIFA's rapid reversal after the Hakimi incident reflects an organisation capable of real-time governance correction, or one that governs by embarrassment, changing only what becomes publicly visible.

Sources:GiveMeSport

Mentions:FIFA →Achraf Hakimi →World Cup →Reuters →Qatar 2022 →Spain →Canada →Mexico →Morocco →Qatar →United States →

First Reported In

Update #21 · Three records fall in one afternoon

GiveMeSport· 17 Jun 2026

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Different Perspectives

French Football Federation

The FFF called an 11:00 CEST press conference for 28 July, at its Paris headquarters, following an extraordinary executive committee meeting, at which Zinedine Zidane is expected to be presented as head coach succeeding Didier Deschamps. As of this writing no communique confirms the appointment, contract length or start date.

Morocco

Morocco is pushing for the 2030 final at its Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, a planned 115,000-seat venue that would be the world's largest football stadium on completion. The venue is contested by a Spanish petition for the Santiago Bernabeu, and FIFA has fixed neither the venue nor the tournament's proposed 64-team format.

FIFA

FIFA's first tournament report, published 27 July, itemises nearly 300,000 accredited personnel, 73,700 security staff and 300,000 square metres of custom-grown turf, with no revenue or cost figure attached. As a Swiss association answering to its own Congress rather than a treasury, FIFA has followed the same operational-before-financial sequence it used after Qatar 2022.

Javier Tebas / La Liga

La Liga president Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his words, concluded. Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so days after the IOC declined jurisdiction over a separate ethics complaint, he used the only instrument he has.

Mexico City government

Head of government Clara Brugada presented a closing report on 22 July crediting the tournament with 44 billion pesos of economic activity, 2,000-plus accelerated public works and 100,000 formal jobs in June alone. The city has not published the method behind that figure, and three other Mexican bodies count the same five weeks differently.

Town of Foxborough

Foxborough answered Kraft Group's June lawsuit on 7 July with a 61-page counterclaim, calling the stadium's owners 'a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations' trying to shift its $7.8 million security bill onto taxpayers. The town says its licensing power and its billing power run through the same board, and it wants the court to award its own costs too.