LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles City Council members on Monday called for the city and LA28 to have “hard and honest” conversations and come up with a backup plan in the case of a widespread boycott of the 2028 Olympic Games.

The council members’ requests come against the backdrop of mounting calls for a boycott of this summer’s World Cup because of rising international concerns about the Trump administration’s actions regarding Greenland, Venezuela and the recent fatal shootings of citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

Oke Göttlich, vice president of the German Football Association, said in an interview with a German newspaper that the time has come to “seriously consider and discuss” a World Cup boycott.

Sepp Blatter, the controversial former president of FIFA, earlier on Monday said in a social media post that fans should “stay away” from the World Cup.

Council members said during a regularly scheduled meeting of the council’s committee on the Olympic and Paralympic Games on Monday that they expected calls for an Olympic boycott to only increase.

“So we need to have some honest, really hard and honest conversations, folks,” council member Monica Rodriguez told LA28 chief operating officer John Harper. “And I know that’s terrifying, but we could be talking about a lot more irreparable harm, financially, let alone all the other implications of what’s happening, but that was raised eight years ago, and so now that was long before we’ve seen the things that we’re seeing. And so this conversation around FIFA, that’s just a forewarning of what potentially could be coming and affecting us. So I say that we need to have a Plan B, and that is something that we have to do, not just for the protection of taxpayers, but because of the potential implications of what may ensue. And that’s just a real hard conversation that everyone needs to have, because they said this long before, and that was the underlying concern when we were there.

“So let’s not bury our heads in the sand.”

Council president Marqueece L. Harris-Dawson also expressed concern that a boycott could do significant harm to the Olympic movement, reminding his colleague and LA28 officials that the 1984 Games in Los Angeles were also boycotted.

“I would just say to you, like this council has as its charge the well-being of the city of Los Angeles. So we’ll do that piece,” Harris-Dawson said. “But another piece of it that I just offered to use is damage to the Olympic movement overall, which is all of our inheritance, everybody’s in the world, and I certainly don’t want to be the city in the country that is at the center of doing serious damage to that. So that’s in addition to what we have as a council, which we will absolutely do the protection of the city and its taxpayers, but the Olympic movement is very, very important. Again, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before, that we never talk about the boycott of ’84 but there was a significant boycott in 1984, so it doesn’t mean that you can’t figure it out, but it also means we have to face it and face it directly.”

Harper said LA28 has “had no discussions with the IOC, no indications that that’s going to be a concern here. But obviously we’ll continue to work with the IOC and the IPC as they head towards 2028, but all indications are that we’re looking forward to welcoming the world.”

Harper declined to respond to reporters’ questions after the meeting.

City council members, alluding to the Minneapolis ICE shootings and Trump’s threats to deploy federal troops to Los Angeles during the Olympic Games, also continued to push LA28 officials for clarity on which agencies would direct the planning and implementation of security during the Games.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously earlier this month to request that officials for LA28, the Games’ local organizing committee, provide a detailed presentation of the role the federal Olympic task force will have on the planning and implementation of the Games.

Trump signed an executive order in August establishing a federal task force on the Olympics for the Los Angeles Games. Similar task forces have been established for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, as well as for next summer’s World Cup.

But Trump’s repeated threats to move the Games and World Cup matches out of Los Angeles and other blue state cities, as well as threats to deploy military or National Guard troops to the city during the Olympics, have heightened concerns about the role of the task force in the planning and implementation of the Games among state and local officials.

“We’ll do anything necessary to keep the Olympics safe, including using our National Guard or military,” Trump said during the August 5 ceremony.

Concerns about Trump and his allies were further heightened when a number of Trump associates were added to the LA28 board, including Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chair and Trump’s first chief of staff in his first term, Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House, leading Trump donor Diane Hendricks, and Ken Moelis, Trump’s banker in the 1990s.

Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $1 billion in federal funding for security at the 2028 Olympics.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced last year it was allocating $625 million in security funding to the 11 U.S. World Cup host cities.

“We’re going to return to the questions around the security conversation,” Rodriguez told Harper. “This remains pending, and clearly, given the most recent activity, there’s even more heightened concern. And I want to express this to all my colleagues, because I had talked about this issue before in terms of lead agency and law enforcement, we clearly see the egregious abuse of power at the federal level. And the composition of the LA28 (task force), given some of the newer members has only elevated my concerns about what it’s going to look like here in Los Angeles, and so I’m really eager to see and this is not just for you know, there’s not, I don’t know. There’s nothing that you can offer at this juncture in response to this, but we need to have very serious conversations about who’s the lead in what the security looks like here in Los Angeles. And make no mistake, colleagues, we need to really be prepared about having some really hard conversations about what we do going forward, especially when the people of Los Angeles are going to be on the hook for expenditures that perhaps exceed what is raised has been raised and secured as it relates to the production of these games. And so I just look we just got to acknowledge it. We got to talk about it, but we actually serious about this, and stop pretending that they’re not going to overreach their authority.

“And so I need to know that we’re going to be serious about not just calling (expletive) out, but blocking it if necessary, and what that looks like. And that’s a conversation that I think that I’d like us to have.”

Harper said the U.S. Secret Service has led the Olympic security planning. The Olympic task force would be “launched” after the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina next month, Harper said.

Harper said the LA28 has updated its revenue projection for the Games to $7.1 billion from $6.96 billion.

LA28 received more than 1.5 registrations to apply for Olympic tickets this month in the first 24 hours the registrations were available.

“We saw more registrations for the LA28 games in the first day than Tokyo, Paris, Milan combined,” Harper said referring to last two Summer Olympics and next month’s Winter Games.

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