Ever since the United States won the rights to co-host the 2026 World Cup, Fifa president Gianni Infantino has worked to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump at all costs, supposedly to secure preferential treatment for Fifa from the American government. Predictably, he suffered the same fate as everyone who has made a Faustian bargain with the US president: he learned that cozying up to Trump always backfires, tarnishing the entire sport along the way.
I love soccer because, at its best, it is inclusive, democratic and accessible to everyone. So do billions of other people; the sport’s universal cultural impact truly lends it the potential to be a force for good that “unites the world”, as Fifa loves to say. We saw this force in action at the start of the World Cup when, despite Trump’s hardline anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner policies, the prevailing sentiment showed that visiting teams and fans found most Americans really are warm and welcoming people.
But for years now, Infantino has betrayed those values by aligning Fifa, the organization that represents the people’s game, with Trump, whose political project is openly rooted in division, selfishness and violence. Because Infantino’s actions harm soccer in a way I cannot condone, and especially because he’s doing so by inserting himself in my own country’s domestic politics, I feel compelled to denounce them publicly.
For nearly as long as the World Cup has existed, politicians have co-opted it to legitimize their nationalistic projects on the world stage at Fifa’s expense; in 1934 it was Italy’s Mussolini, and in 1978 it was Argentina’s military junta. But this time, it’s the Fifa president himself who is willingly damaging the sport’s reputation. Last week, it was allowing his personal relationship with Trump to muddle the outcome of USMNT striker Folarin Balogun’s red card suspension; last year, it was single-handedly creating and conferring a “peace prize” to a man who brazenly revels in military intimidation.
Within only a few months of receiving the award conceived specifically for him, Trump set about effectuating a regime change in Venezuela, threatening armed conflict against Nato allies, and launching an unlawful war with Iran, leading to months of uncertainty about their team’s World Cup participation and the compulsory relocation of their base camp to Mexico. With the prize, Infantino put Fifa’s already threadbare reputation on the line by tying himself to Trump’s erratic and belligerent foreign policy. And while the World Cup will go down as a massive commercial success, no amount of revenue will ever erase the moral stain of blessing Trump’s wars in the name of soccer.
Yes, it’s important for Fifa to foster a good working relationship with any host country’s government, but Infantino has repeatedly crossed the line between professionalism and groveling. Beyond frequent White House appearances, Infantino allowed his proximity to Trump to overshadow Chelsea’s championship moment at the Club World Cup, interfere with the agenda at last year’s Fifa Congress, and politicize Fifa in a way that undermines its mission statement through recurring, implicit endorsements of Trump, as detailed in the FairSquare ethics complaint against him. Infantino is even channeling some of Fifa’s wealth, meant to spur development of the sport globally, to Trump’s pocket by renting office space in Trump Tower despite already operating a permanent Fifa office in Miami.
Even those who would defend “all that Trump bootlicking” as a matter of pragmatism need to contend with what Infantino actually got in return: boasts of intervening in Fifa’s disciplinary review process during the World Cup and threats of annexing Canada and launching strikes on Mexico, our co-hosts, in the lead-up. Looking ahead to the 2031 Women’s World Cup, Trump is reportedly holding hostage the governmental guarantees required to confirm the US hosting bid in an attempt to strongarm Fifa into adopting the policies he demands.
And when it comes to Trump’s meddling in the Balogun case, the biggest casualty was soccer’s integrity. Sure, in a narrow sense, US Soccer benefitted from having a star player back from suspension. But in a more meaningful sense, US Soccer was also a victim: our players were swept up in a political firestorm before the most important game of their lives, and our biggest chance to showcase American soccer to the world will now for ever be tainted by accusations of favoritism at best and corruption at worst, unfairly clouding US Soccer’s credibility and reputation around the world. To boot, in return for debasing our sport again and again, Infantino plans to reward Trump with the honor of handing out the World Cup trophy on Sunday.
The fact that Infantino has faced little accountability for dragging soccer through the mud reflects a battle for the soul of the sport – about whether its future will be autocratic and hyper-commercialized, rather than a force for good. I say no: soccer leaders must reject Infantino’s egotistical and transactional view of the beautiful game.
I find growing comfort in the fact that others have started to speak out, and not only as a reaction to Fifa’s Disciplinary Committee decisions. Uefa, the European continental subdivision of Fifa, had already called Infantino’s behavior a pursuit of “private political interests” that “does the game no service,” and the former chair of Fifa’s governance committee called it a “clear violation” of Fifa’s code of ethics. Senior staff at Fifa have pushed back on Infantino’s attempts to pander to Trump; one of Fifa’s vice-presidents did rebuke Trump’s politically motivated threats against certain host cities; and the president of the Norwegian Football Federation called for the abolition of the “peace prize” while supporting an ethics investigation against Infantino. Despite the sizable public backing from Fifa members for Infantino’s reelection, many of them privately vent their frustration about his “level of vanity” to reporters; Uefa may even be looking for a candidate to challenge him.
All of Fifa’s members have a duty to protect the integrity of the sport and save Fifa from itself, even at the risk of retaliation. In the short term, I hope federations around the world find the courage to oppose Infantino’s vision for the sport; in the long term, I urge them to pursue structural governance reforms that take power away from the role of the Fifa president and shift it toward the Council, the Congress, and the Secretary General, so that no single individual can ever act unilaterally to soccer’s detriment again. Perhaps then the greatest legacy of this World Cup will be that it spurred us to speak up for and defend the values that make soccer the people’s game.
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