A British minister has called for FIFA to investigate after Argentina’s players at the World Cup held up a banner reading “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (“The Falklands are Argentinian”) after their 2-1 semifinal victory over England.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Downing Street office backed the calls by Business Minister Peter Kyle on Thursday, a day after the semifinal.
Kyle called the flag waving an “egregious violation” of FIFA rules, which ban political symbols on the field of play.
“The World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.
Argentina invaded the British overseas territory in the South Atlantic in 1982.
But the United Kingdom regained the archipelago in a brief war after then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched a naval force.
Kyle urged football’s global governing body to “thoroughly” investigate the banner incident after Wednesday’s match in Atlanta in the US state of Georgia.
“Politics needs to be separate from football. In fact, the World Cup has one of its central tenets that politics is separate from football,” he told BBC television.
“That is now a matter for FIFA. … We expect FIFA to undertake an investigation into this,” he added.