The World Cup Shouldn’t Be Trump’s Toy
FIFA’s newly announced peace prize for Donald Trump is a craven act of stroking his ego. The 2026 World Cup is shaping up to be among the worst cases yet of sports bending to politics.
Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw 2026 World Cup matches from cities with hostile Democratic mayors. Rather than push back, FIFA has just awarded him a specially created peace prize. (Hector Vivas / FIFA via Getty Images)
There’s a lot to dislike about the 2026 FIFA World Cup. A bloated forty-eight-team tournament spanning all of North America would be tough to pull off in the best of conditions. FIFA openly ripping off fans and charging thousands for tickets ensures that it’ll be, at base, an ugly cash grab. But there are also ills facing fans such as the United States’ immigration regime, roaming National Guard deployments throughout the country’s urban landscapes, and disconcertingly persistent threats to move match venues at President Donald Trump’s whim. The world’s biggest sporting event will have one of its most authoritarian backdrops yet.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino has responded to concerning developments in the cohost country the same way he responds to despots the world over — shameless groveling. Trump’s designated “king of soccer” has cozied up so closely to the US president that he might as well try to squeeze into Trump’s ill-fitting jacket with him. Infantino has capped off their budding bromance by awarding Trump the “FIFA Peace Prize” — a totally legitimate marker of statesmanship and definitely not an award made up to appease Trump for missing out on a Nobel Peace Prize.
What could be unserious about an award presented “on behalf of the billions of people who love this game and want peace” and honoring a “dynamic leader creating opportunities for dialogue, deescalation, and stability” that goes to Donald Trump? The president was so jazzed about “one of the great honors of his life” that he even stayed awake long enough to graciously accept it. The bizarre ceremony, crowbarred into the World Cup draw, provided a bit of levity to an otherwise depressing run-up to the tournament.
Despite widespread rumination on both Trump’s authoritarian lurches and FIFA’s sycophancy, there’s been little pushback to the rapidly approaching tournament. There’s certainly been nothing approaching the protests that accompanied the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Faced with all this, fans need to exert their power before a terrible World Cup renders the game fully unrecognizable.
Trump, the Latest Offender
When the United States was awarded the World Cup alongside neighboring Canada and Mexico back in 2018, Trump and Infantino predicted the “best World Cup ever.” A lot has changed since then. Trump’s second reign has fewer of the amusingly bumbling characteristics of his first term. The wholesale takeover of the Republican Party by some of the most reactionary forces in the country, combined with the weakness of institutional resistance, has ushered in bleakly authoritarian prospects that make the United States a fitting follow-up to the last two hosts, Russia and Qatar.
Those tournaments, textbook cases of sportswashing, faced significantly more criticism than the upcoming tournament has. As has Saudi Arabia’s multipronged takeover of nearly all aspects of sport, which will culminate in its hosting the 2034 World Cup. Instead of actual pushback, there’s simply an increasingly bemused “can you believe this sh-t” vibe surrounding the tournament. Trump’s proximity to Infantino makes it feel like he totally owns the World Cup. And despite global anti-Trump sentiment, it’s hard to imagine soccer bars in Germany refusing to show next year’s matches the way they did in 2022.
The United States is not Qatar, where thousands of guest workers died building the infrastructure needed for the petrostate’s gleaming sporting monument. Nor is the United States Russia, which annexed Crimea in the immediate wake of hosting the 2014 Sochi Olympics and was allowed to host the 2018 World Cup despite its expansionist foreign policy and rapidly eroding democratic and political rights at home. But the Trump administration’s record — extrajudicial killing abroad and something of a whiff of fascism in America itself — is hardly spotless. And if Trump were at all worried about being compared to Saudi’s sportswashing mastermind Mohammed bin Salman, he probably wouldn’t be giggling with the crown prince in the White House about murdering journalists.
Ironically, despite all the parallels to some of the most lecherous heads of state meddling in the sports world, Trump doesn’t actually seem to care about laundering his (or his country’s) reputation through sports. While most authoritarian regimes intentionally host sporting events to help whitewash their international reputations and make a point of being on their best behavior while under the global spotlight, Trump doesn’t seem particularly concerned with how he comes across leading into the tournament. And though it still seems unlikely that he’d do anything too disruptive once things kick off, deploying federal troops to occupy Democrat-run cities and threatening to move host venues away from cities “run by radical left lunatics who don’t know what they’re doing” doesn’t exactly instill confidence. Nor does US vice president J. D. Vance’s assertion that he wants foreign fans to visit, but after the tournament “they’ll have to go home, otherwise they’ll have to talk to [Homeland Security] Secretary Kristi Noem.”
Trump and Vance’s rigorous anti-immigrant regime and a near nonstop stream of masked ICE agents deporting people aren’t particularly welcoming, either. Many fans around the world won’t even have the luxury of weighing whether they want to visit an increasingly brutal and authoritarian United States. Iran and Haiti are in the tournament but are both on the list of nations whose citizens are banned from entering the country. And though Haiti has achieved its first World Cup qualification since 1974, the Trump administration has already made clear that its fans aren’t welcome on US soil: maybe not much of a surprise, as dehumanizing Haitians in the United States was a cornerstone of his election campaign. Even the president of Iran’s football federation was refused a visa to attend the Washington, DC–based World Cup draw, despite assurances that staff and players from all participating countries would have no visa issues.
If FIFA Won’t Push Back, Will Fans?
FIFA has done nothing to try to mitigate or even steer attention away from any of this. Infantino has decided that unbridled adoration is the best way to maintain stability and has gone above and beyond his usual gross fawning. “I’m really lucky. I have a great relationship with President Trump, where I consider him a really close friend,” driveled Infantino in a recent speech before lauding the president’s policy accomplishments. One can assume it was their deep friendship that inspired FIFA to book Trump favorites the Village People as World Cup draw “entertainment.”
Their friendship goes beyond a relationship that happens to make lining FIFA’s pockets as easy and effective as possible. Infantino is apparently a vital policy thinker in his own right, attending Gaza peace talks in Egypt with Trump. The FIFA president spent most of the year leading up to the Qatar World Cup trying to deflect from well-documented human rights abuses in the country and paint a positive picture for a skeptical global press. Now he’s dropped the front and is happy to fully endorse whatever horsesh-t Trump happens to come up with, including walking back any initial skepticism around Trump’s unprecedented proposal to shift host cities based on personal beefs incredibly close to the tournament’s kickoff.
Even if no one involved in this mess cares about using the power of the game to improve their reputations, it should still garner the same disdain as more straightforward sportswashing endeavors. If this doesn’t come from sporting and human rights institutions, then it’s going to have to come from fans. And even if those considering attending the World Cup are unbothered by Trump’s brutish politics and the United States’ ongoing democratic backsliding, they should at least be motivated by the fact that Trump and Infantino’s collaboration has completely morphed the tournament into a weeks-long scam aimed at screwing them at every opportunity.
Many fans won’t be able to attend due to Trump’s travel bans or the United States’ slow, restrictive visa policies. For those who do make it, they’ll have to keep their fingers crossed that Democratic mayors and governors don’t annoy Trump enough that he moves World Cup games to Southern college football stadiums (as it’s unclear where else he’ll find massive venues in Republican-led cities). Any seasoned fans used to crisscrossing World Cup host countries via high-speed rail will be in for a treat when they need to rent a car and pay more to park than match tickets cost at previous tournaments. Most sportswashing projects at least include a bit of public infrastructure development to project the guise of modernity and public benefit. The United States isn’t even bothering.
Though it’s likely too late, it’s time for fans — as well as players, who can truly grind this whole grim carnival to a halt — to begin a movement to boycott the games to at least mitigate some of the ugliest elements of Trump’s regime — like barring fans from participating countries from even attending the tournament. If FIFA were remotely serious, it’d be stripping the United States of matches rather than giving Trump a prize. If we’re seriously entertaining moving venues six months out, we might as well move all of them to Canada and Mexico, who deserve a lot more than having their cohosted World Cup entirely dominated by Trumpian belligerence. It’s either that, or we hope that Zohran Mamdani can step up his anti-FIFA offensive and build a wave of support for affordable tickets that make the people’s game actually accessible to working people.