The 2026 World Cup will not only be a test of scale. It will also be a test of how far football’s lawmakers can regulate behavior that occurs in plain sight but is difficult to prove.
At a special meeting in Vancouver, IFAB approved two FIFA-backed amendments for the tournament. Players could be sent off if they cover their mouths while confronting opponents. Players could also be shown red if they leave the field in direct protest of a referee’s decision. Team officials who encourage a walk-off can also be punished, and a team that causes a match to be abandoned could be penalized by forfeiting.
This is not a total ban on covering the mouth, sure. It is not an automatic red card every time a hand, shirt, or wrist comes near a player’s face. The new sanction is aimed at confrontational exchanges with opponents, where the gesture can prevent officials, cameras, and later review from establishing what was said.
Football already had tools for much of this. The Laws of the Game allow red cards for offensive, insulting, or abusive language and actions. They also allow cautions for dissent and for deliberately leaving the field without the referee’s permission. The new approach sharpens those existing powers by naming two behaviors that have become harder for referees to manage in modern matches.
Mouth-covering sits in an unusual place. Players have long used it when speaking privately on camera. It can be harmless, tactical, or habitual. In a confrontation, though, the same gesture carries a different risk. It can turn the central question from what was said to why it was hidden.
A rule for hidden words
The clearest recent case involved Vinícius Junior and Benfica winger Gianluca Prestianni during a Champions League match against Real Madrid. Vinícius reported abuse after an exchange in which Prestianni covered his mouth with his shirt. The match was stopped under UEFA’s anti-discrimination process, and UEFA later suspended Prestianni for discriminatory conduct deemed homophobic.
That case also shows why precision is important. Prestianni denied racially insulting Vinícius. UEFA’s punishment was not a finding that he had committed racist abuse. The sanction was for discriminatory conduct, specifically homophobic conduct. The distinction does not soften the seriousness of the case, but it does keep the reporting anchored to the decision that was actually made.
The second amendment comes from a different kind of confrontation. During the Africa Cup of Nations final between Senegal and Morocco, Senegal’s players left the field in protest after a late penalty decision. They returned, the match continued, and Senegal won 1-0 on the field. CAF’s Appeal Board later ruled that Senegal had forfeited and recorded the result as a 3-0 win for Morocco. Senegal has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Together, the two amendments draw a harder line around conduct that threatens match control. One deals with words that may be hidden. The other deals with protest that can stop the game itself. Both put more responsibility on referees at the moment when a match is already unstable.
The most difficult scenario is not a player protesting a bad call. It is a player leaving the field because he believes abuse has not been handled. FIFA already has a “No Racism” gesture: crossed wrists alert the referee and trigger a three-step process that can stop, suspend, or ultimately abandon a match. The new protest rule will need to sit beside that framework without punishing players who are trying to report abuse through the proper channel.
That balance will be tested in a tournament with 48 teams, 104 matches, and more disciplinary pressure than any World Cup before it. FIFA has also adjusted yellow-card accumulation so single bookings are wiped after the group stage and again after the quarterfinals. The goal is to fit discipline to a longer tournament. The risk is that more matches bring more edge cases.
A covered mouth does not prove discrimination. A walk-off does not always mean the same thing. The 2026 World Cup will ask referees to distinguish concealment from privacy, dissent from protection, and protest from abandonment in real time. That may be the hardest part of the new rulebook. It is not just about showing red. It is about deciding what the gesture means before the match loses control.
