In less than 50 days, the world’s biggest sporting event will come to American soil. It will arrive with a fair share of complications. The host nation — or rather, one of three — has instigated a vastly unpopular conflict with one of the participants. Haiti qualified for the first time in 50 years, and their fans can’t get into the country to watch. Hotel prices in host cities have dropped by a third. Somewhere within all this, Gianni Infantino is smiling — or trying to stop fecal matter from falling down his leg, or maybe something in between.
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter resigned in disgrace after a corruption scandal in 2015. If you were worried that no one could ever fill that particular void of disappointment, Gianni Infantino is doing very well to prove you wrong. As President Donald Trump’s tumultuous second term has only grown more divisive, Infantino has strangely decided that now is the time to draw himself closer to geopolitics than ever before. On Inauguration Day, Infantino released a video promising that together, the two men would “make not only America great again, but also the entire world.” He followed up in December by awarding Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize — a ludicrous consolation prize for a man who has spent years fuming over his inability to win the real Nobel Prize.
Is ego alone the driver of all this brown-nosing? It’s hard to tell, but regardless, it’s clear that the FIFA boss has put all his eggs in the United States government’s basket, and he will be forced to bear the consequences. To be clear, this is not the first time the tournament has been tainted — the 1934 edition was Mussolini’s personal vehicle for fascist propaganda — but the political affiliation this time around is especially puzzling. Receiving an award in September 2025, Infantino — who called himself a “simple football person” amongst world leaders — clearly defined FIFA’s goal: “We want to unite the world and we want peace.” Rather unfortunately for him, it’s Trump with the power over the big red button. Considering the present military conflict and the continued travel bans against several participating countries — Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, Senegal — it’s clear that the implications that Trump’s decisions hold for the tournament are the antithesis of the peace Infantino claims to seek.
Perhaps, then, Infantino is actually concerned with bringing soccer to the political stage as a means of heightening his own power. He inherited an organization still reeking of Blatter’s corruption, and his solution has been an unusual one: forging ties with governments and heads of state, accumulating political capital in the name of cleaning up the sport until the line between FIFA's interests and his own became impossible to draw.
It remains to be seen how fruitful this ladder-climbing exercise will be. Infantino awarded Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup despite widespread condemnation over the country’s human rights record, a move that echoed the Qatar 2022 controversy and will likely come back to haunt him should this year’s tournament provide its expected political drama.
But that was back in October 2024. This past Wednesday, Trump requested that FIFA replace Iran with Italy at this summer’s World Cup, a two-handed move that looks to repair fractured ties with the Italian government and earn some semblance of a victory in the latest edition of America’s never-ending two-week wars. We’ll see how much Infantino is willing to bend on that.
Previously, the World Cup was one of the few entities that actually belonged to the world. But over the last decade, the once magical event has become indirectly ruled by whichever government Infantino is looking to appease, and in this case he has made a grave judgment error.
