Four years after world sport rushed to ban Russia for invading Ukraine, the leading governing bodies are reacting guardedly to the U.S.-led attack on Iran, raising accusations of double standards.
Both wars broke out immediately after the end of a Winter Olympics, and before the start of the subsequent Paralympics and ahead of a summer World Cup.
Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine four days after the closing ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. U.S. and Israeli bombs started falling on Iran six days after the flags came down on the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.
In 2022, it took four days for football's World and European governing bodies, FIFA and UEFA, with the support of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), to expel all Russian and Belarusian teams.
The IOC condemned "the violation of the Olympic Truce by the Russian government and by the Belarusian government that supports it."
This time, the IOC merely called for guarantees of "the safety of athletes" traveling to the Paralympics in Italy, particularly "those likely to be affected by the most recent conflicts."
FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom said his body was "monitoring the situation."
"Some observers have noted how Russia was banned from FIFA competitions following its invasion of Ukraine, though no discussions appear to have taken place about similar action being taken against the U.S.," said Simon Chadwick, a specialist in sports geopolitics at EMLyon business school.
While it would be hard to stage this summer's 48-team World Cup without the United States, one of the hosts, expelling Russia in 2022, ahead of a European qualifying playoff game against Poland, solved a problem.
Russia, the host of the 2018 World Cup finals, started European qualification but was then banned from the 2022 finals in Qatar as part of a long-running investigation into state sponsored doping. Expelling Russia allowed FIFA to avoid potential embarrassment.
This time, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, normally highly visible on social media, has refrained from comment.
"This is blatant avoidance," Pim Verschuuren, a specialist in sports management and geopolitics at the University of Rennes II in France, told AFP.
He said Infantino, and IOC chief Kirsty Coventry, were showing "pragmatism" in the face of political reality.
"In 2022, the political pressure was so intense that the IOC was forced to exclude the Russians," he said. "Today it can't afford to single out and antagonize the United States."
In addition to hosting the World Cup, the U.S. will also host the next Olympics, in Los Angeles in 2028.
"There is a form of power monopoly in sports governance," Verschuuren said. "Sport is in the hands of the United States, with funding from its Gulf allies."
While the IOC is trying to maintain a distance from Washington, Infantino is nurturing a close relationship with the U.S. administration, creating a special "FIFA Peace Prize" for Donald Trump.
"This is beyond ridiculous," a source close to football's governing bodies told AFP. "But it's quite rational, because he wants his World Cup to go well."
Verschuuren said the sports bodies are caught in the same trap as many countries and international organizations in the face of Trump's refusal to seek consensus.
"The very idea of multilateralism is collapsing, and sport is one dimension of this collapse. The IOC is completely out of touch, just as a U.N. agency would be," said Verschuuren.
