“What should have been a celebration of the beautiful game at the FIFA World Cup draw instead curdled into a tawdry display of political fawning over Donald Trump”
What should have been a celebration of the beautiful game at the World Cup draw instead descended into a grim display of one man’s political sycophancy.
As MAGA fanboy, FIFA president Gianni Infantino finally got to hand his seeming idol, Donald Trump, his newly invented “Peace Prize”, the world of football was appalled. Staged just a mile from the White House, the draw at the Kennedy Centre – now chaired by the US president – had already been steeped in political theatre.
But few expected it to become the backdrop for such a naked act of adulation for a US President who, at the very moment he was being honoured for “peace”, is actively bombing boats off Venezuela while wishing to hand Vladimir Putin parts of Ukraine in reward for his murderous invasion.
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A glossy montage rolled across giant screens, dedicated entirely to Trump. Then a vast trophy was wheeled on stage – his name already engraved. Infantino reappeared to applause and formally welcomed “the first winner of the FIFA Peace Prize: Mr Donald Trump”.
A gold medal was placed in the US leader’s hands. He promptly hung it around his own neck. A certificate followed. One wondered what else they might have produced – a crown, perhaps.
It was sickening theatre.
Football’s governing body, once scarred by corruption scandals and desperate to restore credibility, had instead reduced itself to a global PR arm for one of the world’s most divisive leaders.
Infantino, fawning and uncritical, beamed beside a president whose foreign policy currently involves military strikes and rising global instability.
Trump duly offered a few triumphant words from the stage, basking in the spectacle as though it were his long-craved Nobel Peace Prize rather than a hastily minted trophy from the boss of world football.
Not a word was said about bombs falling, civilians fleeing or the grotesque contradiction of honouring “peace” amid active attacks.
Infantino then shamelessly posed for a grinning selfie with Trump, as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada’s Mark Carney conspicuously kept their distance, clearly unwilling to be tainted by the grotesque display of mutual admiration.
For years, Infantino has insisted that FIFA is politically neutral. Those claims now look beyond hollow.
The relationship between FIFA’s president and Trump has shifted from uncomfortable to grotesque. What unfolded at the draw was not diplomacy: it was worship.
This was not about football, unity or sport’s power to bridge divides. It was about ego, power and mutual back-scratching between two men who see the world – and the game – as stages for their own ambition.
In that moment, under the spotlights and amid the staged applause, the beautiful game became ugly. And it is football’s global supporters who are left to watch helplessly as its soul is traded for spectacle.
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