Statement regarding the Participation of New Age at WUCC 2026

To the attention of the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) and the Ultimate community. 

Our team will not be publishing a statement because of fear of unfair punishment, therefore we opt to publish a statement as individual players and anonymously.

We’d like to express our opposition to the participation of New Age under Israeli flag. 

It is not the first time that this conflict comes up in the Ultimate Community. However, to our knowledge, it is the first time that teams have started to discuss and publish well ahead of the tournament and we strongly support the statements released by a growing number of teams and individuals. We’d like to pay tribute to Ranelagh’s statement for starting the discussion also in our team and to Bristol for their extensive statement.  

We share the conviction that sport cannot be separated from politics. Examples range from the recent scandals around FIFA and football worldcups to historical events like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Ultimate is not separate from this, as Bristol’s statement details, with the Israel Flying Disc Association not only not distancing themselves from the conflict, but also including teams from illegal settlements and taking part in a fundraiser related to the conflict. 

A central point of criticism of ours targets the WFDF, who have not just shown complete lack of response to the voices in the community, but also seemingly wish to kill the subject with silence. Be it by not openly communicating (at least to our knowledge) about the bans that took place at WJUC this summer against members of the Irish team, but also with the imposed Social Expression Policy, containing the explicit prohibition of anything remotely political at any point of the tournament. 

This censorship of expression of opinion - an opinion which appears to be shared by a substantial fraction of teams at WUCC 2026 considering the number of statements released in the past few days - is a troubling sign of WFDF not responding to voices in the community and we hope it will be a topic at the WFDF congress tomorrow. Calling for treatment of the Israeli Federation equivalent to how the Russian and Belarusian Federations have been (and so far remain) banned from international competition is only fair in our view. 

We are deeply disappointed by the inaction of WFDF, which is putting a lot of teams in a place where they have to decide between competing at WUCC or acting according to their moral conviction.