12 June 2026 By MPA
YANGON, Myanmar — International football governing body FIFA has faced fierce criticism from human rights monitors after awarding the official 2026 World Cup broadcasting rights in Myanmar to Mytel, a telecommunications firm directly owned and controlled by the country’s ruling military junta.
Justice For Myanmar (JFM), a prominent covert activist group tracking the military’s economic networks, released a scathing indictment on Friday, accusing FIFA of institutional negligence and directly profit-sharing with an illegal regime heavily implicated in ongoing war crimes.
Mytel functions as a primary revenue generator and digital surveillance pipeline for the Myanmar military high command. The operator is co-owned and structurally managed by the Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC), a massive, military-run conglomerate that has already been blacklisted by major Western democratic governments.
“By transferring World Cup broadcast licenses to Mytel, FIFA has demonstrated a catastrophic failure of basic human rights due diligence,” JFM stated in its structural report. “This unacceptable commercial partnership effectively enables a multi-million dollar sportswashing operation, helping to construct a peaceful facade for a corrupt, blood-stained military council that routinely massacres its own civilian population.”
Mytel is currently facing severe trade restrictions issued by the US Department of Commerce due to its role in supplying dual-use surveillance technologies and financial infrastructure to the junta’s intelligence divisions. Furthermore, its parent entity, MEC, is subject to sweeping, direct economic sanctions enforced by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, and Australia.
This is not the first time the global football organization has drawn intense public ire regarding its administrative decisions in Myanmar. Critics noted that the World Cup deal follows FIFA’s highly controversial appointment of Zaw Zaw—a notorious military tycoon and owner of the Max Myanmar conglomerate—as the chairman of its social responsibility committee.
JFM and allied regional human rights networks have issued an urgent demand to the Zurich-based sports authority, calling for an immediate termination of all corporate contracts involving the Myanmar military council and its network of business cronies.
Activists insist that FIFA must align its commercial operations with its own publicly stated statutes regarding human rights and corporate social responsibility, warning that failure to do so directly implicates international sporting institutions in the protracted humanitarian tragedy hollowing out Southeast Asia.
