MADRID (AP) — Spain will host the final of the 2030 World Cup the president of the Spanish soccer federation said Monday.
FIFA has not yet said where it plans to stage the decisive match of a tournament that will be co-hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco. But Rafael Louzán told reporters at a media event that the title match will be in Spain, although he did not specify in which city or venue it would be played.
“Spain will lead the World Cup and the final will be held here,” Louzán said Monday, without elaborating.
Real Madrid's recently renovated Santiago Bernabeu Stadium has been long touted by Spanish media as the venue for the final, but recently there had been reports that Morocco could end up hosting the match.
Morocco was hoping to host the final at the under-construction Hassan II Stadium, set to be the largest soccer arena in the world with a capacity of 115,000 after its planned completion in 2028. But a chaotic final of the Africa Cup of Nations this month reflected badly on Morocco and it may have cost the country a chance to stage the World Cup final.
Barcelona also renovated its Camp Nou stadium and it could also bid for the final.
The 2030 World Cup will also see Latin American countries Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay each host a match as part of the celebration of the tournament's centennial.
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Real Madrid's Kylian Mbappe scores his side's second goal during the Champions League opening phase soccer match between Real Madrid and Monaco in Madrid on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Breton)
Real Madrid's Franco Mastantuono celebrates his side's third goal during the Champions League opening phase soccer match between Real Madrid and Monaco in Madrid on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Breton)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Candles flickered at dawn Tuesday at the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on Nazi Germany's murder of millions of people and its attempt to completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.
At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in a part of southern Poland which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces murdered thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day Poland's President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, most of them Jews, but Poles, Roma and others were also killed there.
Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945, were taking place across Europe.
Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany's remorse.
In the Czech Republic, a candlelight march is planned for the evening in Terezin at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. Thousands of Jews died there or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps.
On Sunday, the Netherlands marked its National Holocaust Memorial day with a silent march through Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter to a memorial to Auschwitz victims. “Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz — they are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema told hundreds at the somber event.
Israel marks its Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which stresses Jewish resistance to the Nazi terror.
As they look back, many leaders also reflected on the hatred in today's world.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, warned that the world is seeing the highest levels of anti-Semitism since the Holocaust and that some of the threats are now “taking new and disturbing forms.”
Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, underlined the misuse “of AI-generated content to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth, and undermine our collective memory.”
Czech President Petr Pavel said the day is "a call to reflect on the past and the responsibility we have as a society, but especially as individuals, in the contemporary world. Unfortunately, even today there are people who trivialize the hateful Nazi ideology, or even sympathize with it.”
There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive globally, down from the 220,000 survivors estimated to be alive a year earlier, according to information published last week by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Nearly all of them — some 97% — are “child survivors” who were born 1928 and later, the group said.
Though the world's community of survivors shrinks with time, some are still telling their stories for the first time after all these years.
An annual gathering took place at the upper house of Czech Parliament with Holocaust survivors. Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old survivor from the city of Liberec — a Czech city with a prewar Jewish population of 1,350 — said he was now the last living of the 37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.
Jelinek told those gathered that his motto has been: “The whole world is one narrow bridge, and what matters is not to be afraid at all.”
Associated Press writers Karel Janicek in Prague, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
Holocaust survivors lay flowers at the death wall in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski walks in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
A man walks through the snow covered Holocaust memorial on the International Holocaust Memorial Day in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
A Jewish man attends a ceremony commemorating the extermination of the Jewish people and their deportation to Nazi concentration camps on Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Monumental Cemetery, in Turin, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (Fabio Ferrari/LaPresse via AP)
Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski walks along a wall in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
Candles placed in front of a concrete slab of the Holocaust memorial to mark the International Holocaust Memorial Day in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
