UEFA, not national team managers, must decide whether Israel plays

Key takeaways

• Under UEFA's rules, a national association that refuses to play a scheduled match usually takes the sporting and disciplinary consequences itself.
• Only UEFA, acting with FIFA, has the power to suspend a member association, so only UEFA can settle the question for every team at once.
• When Russia was suspended, the governing bodies acted only after member associations had publicly said they would not take the field.
• The best case against suspension is that UEFA has no consistent test for political exclusion, and choosing one under pressure risks arbitrary decisions.

The argument: the burden belongs with the governing body

A thread on the soccer forum of Reddit attributes the remark to the Republic of Ireland manager, Heimir Hallgrímsson: asked about playing Israel in the future, he said they should not, and that UEFA needs to step in and do something. The source gives no further context. It does not say what question he was answering, whether a fixture between the two sides is actually scheduled, or whether he said anything else. Those details are not known here, and this article does not assume them.

The comment is still worth taking seriously, because the second half of it makes a structural point that holds whatever one thinks of the first half. A national team manager has no power to decide who his side plays. Neither, in practice, does a national federation. Fixtures in UEFA competitions come from draws, and a draw binds every association that enters. If a federation decides on moral grounds not to play, it does not remove the opponent from the competition. It removes itself, or at least exposes itself to sanctions, while every other team in the group carries on as before.

So the argument here is not that Israel must be suspended. It is narrower, and I think it is harder to dispute: whether Israel should take part in European football is a question that only UEFA can answer coherently, and UEFA should answer it openly rather than leaving managers, players and individual federations to absorb the pressure one fixture at a time. Hallgrímsson's call for UEFA to "step in" is, at minimum, a correct description of where the authority sits.

The rules make a lone refusal self-defeating

The first piece of evidence is how competition regulations work. UEFA's regulations for its national team competitions assume every scheduled match will be played. A team that fails to turn up, or refuses to play, is normally treated as having forfeited. The match is recorded as a defeat by a set margin, and the case can go to UEFA's disciplinary bodies, which can impose fines or further measures. The exact sanction in any particular case depends on the regulations for that competition and on how the disciplinary bodies read them. It is not something that can be predicted here.

The mechanism matters because of where it puts the cost. A federation that refuses a fixture on principle loses points in a group whose results can decide qualification, seeding and, in the Nations League, promotion and relegation. Its players bear the consequences of a decision they may or may not support. Its opponent, whose participation is the actual issue, is unaffected and may even gain from the forfeit. Supporters, sponsors and broadcasters of the refusing side lose out as well.

This is why a lone refusal is a poor tool even for people who believe strongly that the match should not happen. It turns a question about a member association's status into a contest over one team's points. It also invites uneven outcomes: one federation might refuse, another in the same group might play, and the group would then be decided partly by which associations were willing to accept a forfeit. A decision taken at UEFA level would apply to every team equally, which is the minimum a competition needs to keep its results meaningful.

The Russia precedent shows refusals forcing the governing body's hand

The second piece of evidence is the most directly relevant precedent. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several national associations due to face Russia in World Cup qualifying play-offs said publicly that they would not play. Those collective statements came before any ruling from the governing bodies. FIFA and UEFA then suspended Russian national teams and clubs from their competitions.

The order of events is instructive. The governing bodies acted, but only after member associations had made it clear that the fixtures could not go ahead as normal. For a short period, the decision was effectively made by the federations that refused, and the governing bodies then formalised it. That worked in the Russian case partly because the refusals came quickly and from several associations at once, and because there was broad agreement across European football on the underlying issue.

The lesson for the present question is that waiting for pressure to build from below is a poor way to govern. It puts the most exposed participants, the federations drawn against the team in question, in the position of acting first and risking sanctions. It also makes the outcome depend on how many associations are willing to take that risk, rather than on any stated principle. Hallgrímsson's remark reads as a refusal to accept that pattern. If UEFA thinks a case for suspension exists, it should test it. If it thinks none exists, it should say so and explain why, so that federations are not left to improvise.

The statutes already contain a question UEFA has not resolved

The third piece of evidence comes from inside the governing bodies' own rules. Israel plays in UEFA competitions rather than in Asia, the result of a long-standing arrangement after its departure from the Asian confederation. Its place in Europe is therefore a matter of UEFA membership and is governed by UEFA's statutes like any other member's.

FIFA's statutes include a principle that a member association should not organise football on the territory of another member without permission. The Palestinian Football Association has for a long time argued before FIFA that clubs based in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank take part in Israeli competitions in breach of that principle. FIFA has looked at the matter more than once, including through internal processes and legal assessments, without reaching a decision that resolves it. The details of those proceedings and their present status are not set out in the source, and this article does not try to summarise them beyond that general outline.

The point for this argument is not that the complaint is proven. It is that a question about compliance with the governing bodies' own rules has been raised through the proper channels and left open. That is a governance failure in its own right. A body that leaves a statutory complaint unresolved should not be surprised when managers and federations start answering the wider question for themselves. Resolving the complaint, in either direction, is the kind of action that falls to the governing bodies, and it is exactly the kind of step that would answer Hallgrímsson's call without anyone needing to prejudge the outcome.

The strongest case against: consistency and the limits of sport

The strongest case against this argument deserves to be put fully.

First, UEFA's statutes commit it to political neutrality, and FIFA's rules forbid government interference in member associations. Those rules exist to stop football being used as a lever by states. A governing body that suspends members because of their government's conduct shifts from running a sport to passing judgement on international politics. Once it does that, it will be asked to rule on every conflict in which a member state is involved, and the list of possible cases is long.

Second, consistency. The Russia precedent involved one European member invading another, and fixtures that could not be staged safely or with any cooperation. Critics of suspending Israel argue that UEFA would need a clear and published test that separates cases, and that without one any decision will look like a response to whichever campaign is loudest. That criticism applies to calls for UEFA to "do something" as much as to calls for suspension itself: an instruction to act, with no criteria, can produce arbitrary results.

Third, the people punished by a suspension are players, coaches and supporters who did not make the decisions being objected to. Some argue that keeping contact through sport has value, and that excluding a whole football community is a blunt tool whose effect on governments is uncertain.

Fourth, there is a practical point. A UEFA ruling would likely be challenged before the Court of Arbitration for Sport. If the ruling were rushed or poorly reasoned, it could be overturned, leaving competitions in a worse state than if UEFA had followed a slower, clearer process.

These are serious objections. But it is worth noticing that every one of them is an argument about how UEFA should decide, not about whether the decision is UEFA's. Neutrality, consistency, fairness to players and legal soundness are all reasons for the governing body to set out criteria and apply them, and none of them can be met by federations refusing fixtures one at a time. The case against suspension is real. It is not a case for silence.

What would change this conclusion

Several kinds of evidence would weaken or change the argument.

If UEFA published criteria for suspending a member and explained, against those criteria, why no action is warranted, the main governance complaint would fall away. Federations might still disagree, but they would be disagreeing with a reasoned decision rather than filling a vacuum.

If FIFA resolved the complaint about settlement clubs through its own processes, that would also matter. A finding that no breach had occurred would weaken one of the strongest rule-based grounds for UEFA to act. A finding that a breach had occurred would make it hard to justify inaction.

If the regulations allowed a team to decline a fixture on stated grounds without sporting penalty, for example through a neutral-venue or exemption mechanism, the argument that lone refusals are self-defeating would lose force. No such general provision is known to this article.

Finally, if it turned out that the manager's remark had a narrower meaning than the reported summary suggests, for instance about security or venues rather than participation, the comment itself would need to be read differently. The underlying point, that the governing body rather than individual teams should settle the question, would still stand.

Sources and further reading

• Reddit, soccer forum: the discussion thread reporting the Ireland manager's remark, which gives no wider context.
• UEFA: published statutes and competition regulations covering member obligations, forfeits and disciplinary procedure.
• FIFA: statutes covering member associations, territorial jurisdiction and government interference.
• Court of Arbitration for Sport: published material on how appeals against governing-body decisions are handled.