Own Goal
A “Zionist” World Cup conspiracy?
A note before kickoff: I haven’t watched a single game of this World Cup. I don’t really care about sports. And if some emergency ever required me to, I wouldn’t be supporting Egypt. Team USA all the way — if I cared... What follows was gathered entirely from the reactions of people around me, who have spent the week caring enough for all of us.
Egypt led Argentina 2-0 in the World Cup round of 16. They were twelve minutes from the first quarterfinal in the country’s history. Then the defending champions scored three times in thirteen minutes, with the winner arriving in stoppage time. Egypt’s goalkeeping coach was sent off. He had to be physically restrained from approaching the referee, presumably to discuss the laws of the game at close range.
There was a genuine controversy buried in the wreckage, of the ordinary, mortal kind. Video assisted referee (VAR) erased an Egyptian goal for a foul in the buildup. A late penalty shout involving Egyptian hero Mohamed Salah was waved away moments before Argentina's winning move. Pundits who get paid to disagree agreed the officiating looked inconsistent. Egypt’s federation filed a formal complaint accusing the officials of double standards. It demanded that referee François Letexier and his entire crew be removed from the tournament. The manager, Hossam Hassan, declared the match “clearly rigged.” FIFA’s refereeing chief defended every call. So far, so football: a bad night, a formal grievance, a governing body insisting everything is fine. This sport has run that play since the invention of the whistle.
What happened next moved the goalposts roughly six thousand miles east, to Jerusalem.
Hassan had waved a Palestinian flag after Egypt’s previous win, with fans in keffiyehs chanting “free Palestine.” As he walked down the tunnel after this defeat, an Argentina supporter waved an Israeli flag at him. The internet took it from there. An Egyptian YouTuber with 300,000 followers announced the next day that Egypt had “lost to Zionism,” a scoreline FIFA doesn’t currently track. A television analyst assembled a starting eleven of villains. It included FIFA, Israel, the referee, Argentina, and Netanyahu’s son, who had apparently “brought Messi.” That is an impressive piece of squad depth for one match-fixing operation. An American streamer with over a million followers crowned Messi the “Netanyahu of football.” Even New York’s mayor, a noted soccer fan, said Egypt had been “robbed,” though he at least stopped at the referee.
The masterpiece, however, was on Wikipedia. An editor added an “early life” section declaring that Letexier was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Brittany. He then upgraded the fiction with a grandfather who fled Nazi persecution. His citations were a French article that says no such thing and an Al Jazeera piece that never mentions him. As sourcing goes, this is claiming an assist from a player who was never in the stadium. Worth knowing: haters use the “early life” section as an antisemitic meme — a coded way of whispering that a someone is “secretly” (or really) Jewish. The hoax survived eight hours. When editors deleted it, the deletion went viral as evidence of a cover-up. Grok, X's AI chatbot, then “confirmed” the referee was Jewish by reading the vandalized Wikipedia page. The Grok post was promptly cited back into Wikipedia as proof. It was a tidy one-two between two sources passing the same lie back and forth. The same editor vandalized Argentine President Javier Milei’s Wikipedia page with an antisemitic slur before Wikipedia finally waved a red card. Another was banned for death threats before the page was locked entirely. Meanwhile, Letexier deleted his Instagram under the flood of abuse. Of everyone involved in this saga, the man driven off the internet was the one who blew the whistle.
This is good old fashioned antisemitism. Deciding a Breton referee is secretly Jewish, inventing his grandparents, and blaming a two-goal collapse on a global Jewish conspiracy is a blood libel in a soccer jersey.
None of this material was written fresh. In 2016, an Egyptian TV presenter accused Messi of holding “Jewish or Zionist citizenship” over his visit to the Western Wall. The occasion was a controversy about him donating boots to a Cairo charity. That fixture is now deep into extra time. In 2018, Argentina cancelled a friendly in Jerusalem under Palestinian pressure. A Palestinian soccer official was later sanctioned by FIFA for urging fans to burn Messi shirts. Milei, for his part, is genuinely and loudly fond of Israel and has known Jewish ancestry. The theory inflated this into a false claim that he is Netanyahu’s cousin, a family tree that was clearly offside.
The same script was also used earlier in the tournament. After Algeria’s opening loss to Argentina, their federation filed a complaint over Messi escaping a red card for raking his studs down a defender’s calf. That was a defensible grievance. Fans upgraded it into accusations that Messi and a “Jewish” FIFA were in cahoots.
FIFA, to be fair, keeps supplying the raw material. An American player’s red card for a comparable tackle was overturned after Donald Trump intervened. The FIFA president told Argentine TV he had “suffered” watching Argentina, before clarifying he “suffered neutrally.” And all five officials appointed for France against Morocco turned out to be Argentine, a staffing decision that gathered thirty-two million disbelieving views in hours. An organization this gifted at scoring on its own net needs no Elders of Zion to assist.
Then the conspiracy went institutional. An Egyptian FA board member suggested the refereeing was retaliation for Hassan’s Gaza activism. He declared the loss worthwhile as a message of solidarity, thereby converting three conceded goals into a supposed moral victimhood.
Losing makes everyone reach for a villain; the choice of villain is the tell. Italians have been complaining about Korea 2002 for a quarter century. Brazil held an actual parliamentary inquiry into Ronaldo’s 1998 final. Ireland’s government formally requested a replay over a handball. Nobody in Rome, Brasília, or Dublin blamed the Jews, because their mythologies have different villains. In parts of the Muslim public sphere, wounded and watching Gaza, the antisemitism was sitting fully inflated on the touchline, waiting for a whistle. The grief is real. Solidarity with Palestinians is a legitimate moral position. Recruiting a fictional Jewish referee is a shameful counterattack.
Because here is what the theory asks you to believe. A conspiracy spanning FIFA, France, Wikipedia, and the Netanyahu family fixed a match that Argentina won by outscoring Egypt with eleven visible men and one of the all-time greatest players, in front of the entire watching world. That requires a startling amount of blind hate. Egypt played a good World Cup — I’m told — and lost a heartbreaker. The national team earned better mourners than this. The final score was 3-2. Everything after it was an own goal.
