Scotland World Cup: How A Visa Row Nearly Ended 2026 Dream

Ministers and government officials had to solve a last-minute visa row to keep alive Scotland’s hopes of reaching their first World Cup in 28 years, HuffPost UK can reveal.

Steve Clarke’s team could have been forced to forfeit a crucial qualifying match against Belarus if a solution had not been found.

That would have seen the result being registered as a 3-0 defeat for Scotland, depriving them of three crucial points.

In the end, the game went ahead at Hampden Park in Glasgow last October, Scotland beat Belarus 2-1 and ended up winning their qualifying group by two points.

They will play their first match of this year’s World Cup against Haiti in Boston in the early hours of Sunday morning.

But it can now be revealed that Scotland came close to not qualifying at all because of government sanctions imposed on Belarus because of the country’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

They included a curb on issuing travel visas to Belarussian nationals inside Belarus itself.

When the eastern European minnows played a Nations League tie in Northern Ireland in November 2024, they agreed to travel to neighbouring countries to be issued with their UK visas.

But as the visit to Scotland in October 2025 loomed, their position changed.

The country’s football association told UEFA, the sport’s European governing body, that unless the UK government issued visas for their players and officials inside Belarus, they would not fly to Glasgow for the game.

Under UEFA’s rules, that would have seen Scotland forfeit the game on the grounds that the UK had prevented them from travelling.

No.10, the Scotland Office, Foreign Office, Home Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had to find a way to make sure the Belarus travelling party were awarded visas.

A source said: “It was made very clear that this Labour government cannot be responsible for Scotland failing to qualify for the World Cup.”

In the first round of qualifying matches, Belarus travelled to Athens, where they were thrashed 5-1 by Greece on September 5.

In a last-ditch bid to solve the visa problem, the then immigration minister Seema Malhotra asked the British visa centre in the Greek capital if they could process the Belarus team’s applications while they were in the country.

They agreed to open their offices specially on Saturday, September 6, so their staff could give them their visas, thereby allowing them to travel to Scotland the following month.

A government source said: “It all succeeded, Scotland won the game, and not one of the 49,346 crowd at Hampden ever knew the role that the government in London had played in making sure that game went ahead, and that Scotland stayed on track for the World Cup.”

Ian Murray, who was Scottish Secretary at the time, was one of those involved in making sure the Belarus players got their UK visas and the game went ahead.

He told HuffPost UK: “Like millions of my fellow Scots, I’m absolutely thrilled and so excited that the Tartan Army made it across the Atlantic for our first World Cup in 28 years.

“The serious Belarus visa issue could have derailed Scotland’s qualifying campaign and with it our World Cup dream, so I’m glad it was sorted.

“When you go into government you know you could take the blame for a lot of things going wrong, but this problem was not of our making and solvable.

“The sheer national joy of Scotland going to the World Cup show how important it was to get the Belarus game on. Now hopefully Steve Clarke’s men can go on to have a brilliant tournament, and do us all proud.”

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