For half a century, FIFA’s leaders have dished out bribes and raked them in as they’ve cozied up—and handed the World Cup—to despots and murderous regimes all over the globe, from Argentina in 1978 to Russia in 2018. Even the generational scandal that led, in 2015, to multiple arrests on charges of racketeering and wire fraud couldn’t reform FIFA, which simply replaced its old way of doing business (cash slipped into pockets or slid across the table in unmarked envelopes) with a new approach, which one former member of its governance board has described as “legal bribery.”
Last year, even by its own debauched standards, FIFA outdid itself when it produced one of recent history’s most innovative sweeteners: a fake peace prize that it invented to curry favor with Donald Trump, who was still furious about missing out on the real one. The FIFA Peace Prize is not exactly the Nobel, to put it mildly. It is an obvious farce, a preposterously stupid award that carried no meaning, let alone prestige. It would be absurd even if it hadn’t been invented to mollify the erratic and belligerent Trump; the fact that it had only made it more ridiculous. But what rendered the FIFA Peace Prize really funny was that Trump seemed genuinely moved when he accepted it.
“This is truly one of the great honors of my life,” a visibly touched Trump said shortly after accepting the prize from Gianni Infantino, the slick operator who has led FIFA since 2016. “Beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this, we saved millions and millions of lives,” he continued, before rattling off a preposterous list of the wars and conflicts he claims to have ended. Desperate to be recognized as a great statesman, Trump was not just unbothered by the fact that the prize he had just been given was invented solely for the purpose of puffery; he was seemingly the only person in the world for whom it carried any meaning whatsoever.
More than three months after it was awarded, people are still making fun of the FIFA Peace Prize. Perhaps the defining joke of Trump’s second term, it has real staying power. When Trump dies, we can expect a flood of sarcastic tweets mourning the passing of a FIFA Peace Prize winner. But Infantino, the prize’s creator, is not concerned with the opinion of the masses—a sentiment that increasingly shapes FIFA’s approach to soccer in general. For over a year, his primary concern has been the opinion of just one man, Donald Trump. If the cost of winning Trump’s favor is self-debasement, humiliation, and a made-up prize—so be it.
America’s relationships with both of its World Cup co-hosts, Canada and Mexico, were not great on the occasion of the prize, but they have only deteriorated since; Europe’s soccer confederacy has mulled pulling out of the tournament if Trump were to follow through on his threat to invade Greenland; the State Department stopped processing visas from 75 countries—15 of which have qualified for the World Cup—and federal agents killed two civilians during a monthslong operation in Minnesota. Trump, meanwhile, is more erratic and impulsive than ever.
And then there is the war in Iran, which, come June, may very well still be ongoing—and may involve U.S. ground troops. Iran has qualified for the tournament, though its participation is currently in doubt. Soccer officials in the country have threatened to withdraw from the tournament if the U.S-Israeli military campaign continues. Since the U.S.-Israeli campaign began, Iran has bombed three World Cup qualifying nations—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar—and one that is in the playoff: Iraq. Trump, for his part, has said he “really doesn’t care” if Iran plays or not. (FIFA certainly does care and has threatened Iran with a substantial fine and lengthy ban if they pull out of the tournament.)
Meanwhile, there are other signs that the tournament itself will be chaotic and poorly managed. Host cities across the country still haven’t received hundreds of millions of dollars in allocated funding for security, which has led several to scrap planned “fan fests”—public gathering spaces to watch the World Cup. Foxborough, a Boston suburb and host city, is currently threatening to withhold key permits if an $8 million funding gap isn’t covered by FIFA. As for FIFA, it just quietly slashed its budget for the tournament by $100 million.
As the tournament draws closer, chaos seems increasingly inevitable. And yet there is no indication Infantino even cares. Trump certainly doesn’t.
One could reasonably conclude that Infantino has gained remarkably little in exchange for his dignity. But he is playing a longer game. For the Swiss sports technocrat, his relationship with Trump is the key to a successful World Cup—but he’s hardly thinking of the contest itself. Instead, he’s focused on the fantastic amount of tax-free money that it will generate, income he will then use to further enhance his standing as FIFA president. He has long viewed his relationship with Trump, forged during his first term, as being integral to the “success” of the tournament. Indeed, Infantino’s numerous acts of degrading public fealty have paid off: While FIFA charges exorbitant fees for nosebleed tickets and stadium parking, Trump has more or less looked the other way.
Infantino’s efforts will pay off regardless of whether catastrophe strikes: Even if tens of thousands of fans stay home in protest of either the increasingly lawless Trump administration or the rapacious FIFA cartel, the 2026 World Cup will, in all likelihood, still be the most lucrative in history. But as the tournament draws closer, the possibility of mayhem—disruptions, diplomatic incidents, even violence—continues to grow. There are few signs that those ostensibly in charge of the World Cup are prepared to handle it when it arrives.
Trump never seemed to care much for soccer—until he met Gianni Infantino. A regular presence in Washington during Trump’s first term, Infantino began his tenure as FIFA chairman in 2016. Almost from the moment he met Trump, he understood how to appeal to him. In 2018, at an Oval Office meeting, he handed Trump a souvenir pair of red and yellow cards—and suggested he could use them to penalize the reporters crowding around them.
In 2020, Infantino stood by Trump’s side as he signed the Abraham Accords. It was an early example of what Infantino’s role would become later, during Trump’s second term: a kind of de facto member of Trump’s foreign policy team. In May, he accompanied the president on a state visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In February, he sat in on a meeting of the president’s farcical “Board of Peace,” where he committed to spending up to $75 million to build soccer stadiums in Gaza, and donned a red, Trump-branded “USA” hat.
The Board of Peace is just one example of how Infantino’s ties to Trump extend beyond his status as an informal adviser. In December 2024, Ivanka Trump opened the draw for FIFA’s inaugural Club World Cup, which the United States hosted the following summer. Infantino attended Trump’s inauguration and has been a regular guest at Mar-a-Lago. In July, FIFA opened an office in New York’s Trump Tower.
Infantino is going to such great lengths to placate Trump because the success of the 2026 World Cup is an existential imperative for FIFA—and Infantino. Milking every last cent from each tournament is essential, because they occur only every four years. This World Cup is especially important because it is being held in the United States, an enormous and fantastically wealthy country whose dogmatic adherence to free-market principles has normalized charging gargantuan sums for sporting events. The tournament is expected to raise $3 billion from ticket sales and hospitality revenue alone—parking for the final in New Jersey starts at $175—a figure that is more than three times higher than the figure generated in Qatar in 2022. Overall, the 2026 World Cup should generate nearly $11 billion in revenue, a third more than the last World Cup and more than double the amount generated in Russia in 2018.
Infantino’s power is dependent on that money. “The money of FIFA is your money,” he told the organization’s delegates back in 2016. He distributes FIFA’s revenues to its 211 delegations—representatives of the nations that participate in its tournaments—in multimillion-dollar installments that come with few strings. Because Infantino’s power is contingent on his ability to dole out cash, stipends, and other favors, his tenure as FIFA president has been defined by a rapacious search for new revenue streams—and a host of questionable alliances with wealthy authoritarian nations and their autocratic leaders.
His relationship with Trump is one such alliance. Trump offers Infantino something a Democratic president almost certainly wouldn’t: the ability to run the World Cup the way he wants, without criticism, restraint, or any real attempt at oversight. This is not to say that Infantino is wholly unconcerned with the operation of the tournament itself or Trump’s potential to disrupt it. Thus far, Infantino’s combination of public displays of fealty with private lobbying has proved effective at swaying Trump to grant exceptions to FIFA on issues like visa processing. In November, amid growing fear about visa waiting times in some countries—500 days in Colombia, for instance—he convinced Trump to allow ticket holders access to special appointments on an expedited timeline, though they would still face the administration’s stringent screening process. (It was at the press conference announcing this plan that Trump threatened, while Infantino fidgeted behind him, to bomb Mexican cartels.)
But Infantino will step in only when Trump administration policy directly affects the World Cup. And his steadfast refusal to acknowledge, let alone reckon with, any of the numerous policies, directives, and statements that indirectly affect the tournament increasingly looks like a form of grave negligence. After all, Trump’s mere presence in the White House makes dysfunction at the World Cup significantly more likely. Even if you dispense with the fuzzy bromides about celebrating global diversity and togetherness, hosting the World Cup still demands doing something this administration seems both incapable of and fundamentally opposed to: welcoming dozens of foreign teams and millions of fans—a projected six million—into the country.
It’s also possible that Infantino’s relationship with Trump could rupture during the games. Their bond is the result of an aggressive and shameless flattery campaign that may be unsustainable when the contest begins. Take the ceremony to award the FIFA Peace Prize, for example. It was the centerpiece of an event—the draw that assigns the order of the opening stage of the tournament—that had been deliberately curated to pander to Trump. Held at the “Trump” Kennedy Center, it even featured a performance by the Village People—or what’s left of them—who sang “Y.M.C.A.,” the gay anthem that the president has improbably made his signature song.
The event captured precisely what Trump wants the World Cup to be: a massive celebration of the greatness of Donald Trump. That’s easy to pull off at a private, scripted party where every moment has been engineered by FIFA. It will be impossible to engineer in the middle of a frenetic international soccer match. Trump is massively unpopular at home and abroad. If he attends a match, he will be booed. There will be anti-Trump chants. It will likely be humiliating. If Infantino has played the lead-up to the tournament to near perfection, he will enter a new world once it kicks off.
Not only that, but he may find it impossible to avoid politics. Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s homeland security adviser Stephen Miller have both threatened to deploy ICE agents to World Cup stadiums, an act that would likely generate considerable backlash, if not protest, violence, and mass arrests. How will Infantino respond if ICE detains, brutalizes, or even kills a foreign citizen who traveled to the United States to watch the World Cup? The likelihood of an international incident is high, even if Trump doesn’t do anything drastic in, say, Greenland or Cuba during the tournament.
If the FIFA Peace Prize is already a near-perfect encapsulation of this World Cup, capturing both Infantino’s monumental hubris and Trump’s extraordinary vanity, it could also easily become a metaphor for the tournament’s failure. Intended to cement the relationship between FIFA and Trump, it may ultimately represent the delusions of the leaders who spent the run-up to the tournament prematurely celebrating themselves when they should have been preparing.
Of course, it is possible that everything will turn out fine. Maybe, in spite of it all, the 2026 World Cup will go off without a hitch. The tournaments often do, after all. Only one thing is really certain. No matter what happens, come mid-July, the FIFA Peace Prize will still be a joke.
