Politics

Bastille Day party turns sour in Brussels

Published

2 hours ago

July 14, 2026

The great and good of the Brussels bubble has gathered tonight to watch the France-Spain match in a cavernous art gallery rented out by the French embassy.

Ostensibly to mark the country’s Bastille Day, the reception quickly became a watch party for the semifinal, with peoples loading up plates of cheese, bread and canapés.

Attendees include France’s EU ambassador Philippe Léglise-Costa, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, sweltering in the heat of the un-air-conditioned building.

But the mood quickly turned from one of jubilation to worry and even despondency after Spain scored its opener. A palpable gasp went up, first from one side of the hall and then the other, thanks to the slight delay between the two projectors.

A second Spanish goal after half time sets this up to be a potentially bitter end to a day of patriotism.

Politics

How to keep a soccer team alive in exile

Published

25 minutes ago

July 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Farkhunda Muhtaj has spent years fighting to keep the Afghanistan women’s national soccer team alive after the Taliban banned women from sport following President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of American forces from the country. That campaign reached a breakthrough this year when FIFA agreed to establish an official Afghan women’s national team.

The 28-year-old Afghan-Canadian, born to refugee parents from Kabul before her family settled in Toronto, helped lead the evacuation of Afghan soccer players after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Since then, she has lobbied FIFA, organized a team in exile and worked to ensure Afghan players are ready to compete again — while playing as a midfielder for Calgary Wild of the Northern Super League in Canada.

The captain of the Afghanistan women’s soccer team, Muhtaj spoke with Blue Light News from her home in Calgary.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The World Cup is sometimes described as one of the few genuinely global events left in a world that is being shaped by war, polarization and rising nationalism. Do we ask too much of sport to solve society’s problems?

Sport can still drive social change in a positive way, but when we look at the World Cup and competitions on a global scale, we often think that it’s going to solve geopolitical tension — and it doesn’t, unfortunately. But what I can say is fans that watch the World Cup definitely have a different perception compared to what they have learned in the past about certain regions. That’s a huge positive because you are able to come to conclusions on your own around what different cultures look like and you are able to understand that you have some biases toward certain communities that are not true. So, from a fan perspective, it definitely has the power to unite.

You helped lead the evacuation of Afghan soccer players from the country when the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Did that experience teach you anything about international solidarity — or a lack of international solidarity?

I’ve had incredibly positive experiences with American citizens that were able to help me with this evacuation. Whereas if we look at the government, perhaps I wouldn’t have received the same level of support or care from that perspective, just because unfortunately it was a failure from the U.S. government, what happened in Afghanistan.

It’s important to understand that you can’t underestimate your impact. You have to take things one step at a time and doors will open up, but you need to remain persistent. Throughout the whole journey hopefully things will end up the way you imagined, which in that case was helping evacuate these young girls and their family members.

What’s the set-up for the Afghan women’s football team right now?

Since 2021, unfortunately, the Taliban has banned women’s sport participation, which meant that the Afghanistan Football Federation also could not continue supporting the national women’s team. And so it no longer existed in 2021. During that time, when I helped evacuate the Afghan youth national team players to Portugal, I actually created the official Afghan youth national team as a result and the goal was really to make sure that we were in a state that we could continue to train and compete, albeit without any funding from FIFA or the Football Federation.

At the FIFA Congress in Vancouver this year, President [Gianni] Infantino actually announced that we were going to start the official national team. So they adjusted their governance just so that we could be a national team. That refugee pilot project was until June 30, which just passed, which means moving forward the goal is to make sure that they can build a sustainable program for this official national team program.

Do you feel like FIFA, national governments and other stakeholders are doing a good job to make sure people in your situation and your team are not forgotten about?

It’s difficult to say because it’s taken them many years to finally be able to recognize us when this is something that we had advocated for right from the beginning in 2021. So I am grateful that we have this opportunity now and we do have an independent national team and can rebuild. But I also feel like the longer we wait, the more difficult the situation gets. From a national team perspective, we haven’t been active for five years.

We really need to catch up and we’re not going to be on international standards right away, but it is a process and we are going to get there and I do truly believe in this group and the tenacity of Afghan women. But it would have been fantastic had this happened sooner and from a governmental perspective, unfortunately, the way geopolitics works, there’s always going to be something else that everyone focuses on.

How have events of the last few years changed what it means to represent your country?

Growing up, for me, football has always been bigger than just sport. My dad was introduced to football through being a refugee and he passed that on to us as well. As I came to Canada when I was two years old and my family were immigrants here, football is something that really united us, helped us integrate into society, built confidence and transferable life skills that definitely benefit us to this day.

And we give back through the game as well. We have a nonprofit organization called Scarborough Simbas that I’ve co-founded, which uses sports to help ease the settlement and journey of refugees and newcomers to Canada through the power of football.

If there’s a young girl out there watching the World Cup today, growing up in a country that’s affected by conflict or repression, what would you want her to know about the role sport can play?

I would go back to my speech at One Young World, which is a platform that unites the world and has people coming together, sharing each other’s stories, to discuss what’s happening around the world. I would argue the World Cup is like that, where it gives people different perceptions. You hear different stories about players, the challenges that they went through and it really humanizes the experience of those players, because, at times, I think we can feel so distant from a professional footballer.

But what I said in that speech, as well, was the fact that sport is so much more than a game, it was an opportunity. And for me when you are in those situations, it’s an opportunity to change gender norms and perceptions around your country as well, but also to understand that your impact is so much greater than the circumstances that you are in. So I would say to that young girl that gets involved in sport: compete … but give back to the game as well.

I am fully aware that it’s not as easy as what I’m saying. But I hope that they can understand that football and sport will give them so much more than they would have ever imagined.

Politics

Burnham: New law strikes at ‘cover-up culture’ over soccer disaster

Published

3 hours ago

July 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

LONDON — A police cover-up after a 1989 football stadium tragedy was seminal in shaping soon-to-be new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s political outlook.

Upon returning to the House of Commons this evening for the first time as a member of parliament, Burnham used his maiden speech to hail a proposed new Hillsborough law — named after the Sheffield football stadium where 97 Liverpool fans lost their lives in a crush — which imposes a duty of candor on public officials.

Burnham faced raw anger and heckles of “justice” and “truth” in 2009, when he was culture secretary, at a memorial service at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the disaster.

Days before he moves into No. 10 Downing Street, Burnham pledged to end the U.K.’s “cover-up culture” and put “decency back at the heart of the British state.”

Burnham said the law will “change the way this country thinks and works about justice,” as it “truly is a rewiring of the state and a passing of power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people.” MPs approved the legislation Tuesday evening, and it will now go to the House of Lords for further scrutiny.

Politics

The drama spoiling a city’s World Cup moment

Published

4 hours ago

July 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

DALLAS, Texas — The World Cup was supposed to be Dallas’s moment to shine. The city is famously image-conscious, and the powers-that-be trumpeted the fact that more Cup matches were scheduled here than any other host city. It seemed like a coup for a town whose football team (the other kind of football) bills itself as “America’s team.”

But off the pitch, Dallas leaders have spent the spring and summer fighting a series of political fights, many of them centered around sports. It’s a cautionary tale to the many European tourists who have marveled at America’s glittering sporting venues, but are unaware of the complex economic and political forces that have shaped them, for better and for worse.

Before the soccer tournament even started, the city’s pro basketball team had announced it was leaving its downtown arena. Then the hockey team decamped for a new arena in the suburbs.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson was booed when he attended a World Cup Fan Fest. Along the way, the city was forced to furlough non-essential workers because of a budget shortfall, so the public libraries were closed for a day last week.

“There’s a lot of — the only word I can think of is — drama,” City Councilmember Paula Blackmon said.

To be clear, the World Cup matches aren’t being played in Dallas. They’re 15 miles west, in Arlington, Texas. The Texas Rangers play baseball a few blocks away.

But Dallas proper could still stake a claim as a professional sports hub. The Dallas Mavericks (basketball) and the Dallas Stars (hockey) have spent the last 25 years at American Airlines Center, a retro-styled arena just north of the central business district, which is served by its dedicated light rail stop. That arena’s future has been at the heart of the fighting.

Last fall, the city began discussing the idea of tearing down its City Hall to make way for a new sports arena. The building is showing its age — or its neglect — and city officials estimate it’ll take hundreds of millions of dollars to repair it.

Some in Dallas questioned whether the teams need a new arena, since the American Airlines Center — which is 1.6 miles from City Hall — seems to work just fine. Others objected to tearing down the building since its architect, I.M. Pei, is kind of a big deal.

The conflict divided the city council into two factions — the majority in favor of tearing down the building, the minority trying to preserve it. Blackmon and another council member, both of whom favor preserving the old City Hall, sued the city in June trying to block a vote on tearing down the building.

To some extent, the fight has been a proxy for the broader fight over how to preserve downtown Dallas. AT&T, the telecom giant which has had its corporate headquarters in Dallas since 2008, announced this spring it’s moving to the suburbs, citing rising crime, homelessness and government dysfunction. Even the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, the most Dallas of institutions, is closing its downtown store.

Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who got into politics after a career as an investigative reporter, said the fracas over the sports arena is a symptom of the city’s dysfunctional government. Dallas has a weak mayor and its city council has been divided for decades, which gives developers — and sports teams — the upper hand in negotiating with the city.

Miller is famous locally for turning down the Dallas Cowboys when team owner Jerry Jones asked for a publicly-financed stadium inside the city in the early 2000s.

The Cowboys — like the Mavericks and Stars before them — promised to help redevelop neglected parts of the city. Miller argued that the city was better off putting its funds into basic services like public safety and infrastructure — and pointed to a string of broken promises from the sports teams and other big developers.

“It’s kind of Dallas’ Achilles heel, because Dallas will just do anything to quote unquote ‘save the teams,’ even though all the teams are all within a 30-minute drive of all of our homes,” she said.

Dallas’s local organizing committee for the World Cup declined to comment for this story, as did a spokesperson for the Mavericks. A spokesperson for the Stars didn’t respond to requests for comment. Johnson, the Dallas mayor, also declined several interview requests.

Most of the fighting has been invisible to World Cup fans, who will flock to town Tuesday for the region’s final World Cup match, which is the semi-final between France and Spain. But the outcome of the city council fight could affect Dallas for decades to come.