6 hours ago
3
Well, that was awful, wasn’t it? Donald Trump’s heroic victory over a field of one to claim the inaugural Fifa peace prize, on-stage banter so dead it was already fossilized, Gianni Infantino doing crowd work, and Wayne Gretzky struggling through the pronunciation of “Macedonia” and “Curaçao” in the draw’s linguistic group of death: even with the benefit of a few days’ distance it’s impossible to overstate how impressively bad the draw for the 2026 World Cup, held last Friday at the Trump-purged Kennedy Center in Washington DC, was.
“This is America, so we have to put on a show!” roared Fifa president Infantino, resembling a Sphinx cat in a borrowed suit, at the beginning of the ceremony. And put on a show Fifa did – just not one that anyone wanted to watch, least of all a desperately bored-looking Trump, who sat through Andrea Bocelli’s Nessun Dorma with the granitic joylessness that has become his default expression at each of the sporting events he’s ruined with his presence this year. Just let the man get back to the White House; he’s the president of the United States, for god’s sake, he has bathrooms to redesign.
If this was a preview of next summer, the 23rd Mundial is on course for catastrophe. Danny Ramirez and Rio Ferdinand, in particular, seemed to generate some kind of purely negative chemistry that could make a useful contribution to science. The US president may have been the headliner but Infantino stole the show: he led the American, Canadian, and Mexican segments of the audience in a series of chants that pointlessly chewed up 10 minutes on the clock, then got properly frothing – the real work of the Fifa president at an event such as this – as he welcomed the host nations’ leaders on stage to begin the draw. “Which team – will be drawn – by Mr Mark Carney?” he devilishly asked, with all the charisma of a middle-aged magician doing card tricks for small change at a weekend farmer’s market.
Infantino genuinely seems to believe he’s some kind of comedian, but all the laughs he raised from the audience on Friday sounded coerced – like the laughter you might offer a wisecracking dentist as you’re in the treatment chair about to undergo an extraction. It takes a rare talent to make football fans nostalgic for Sepp Blatter, but Fifa’s presiding gollum is so insistently unpleasant, such a strange, damp little man, that he makes his famously venal predecessor look positively dapper and twinkle-eyed in comparison. The last World Cup draw held on US soil, in which Robin Williams monkeyed about on stage calling Blatter “Mr Bladder”, was a minor comic miracle. Instead of Robin Williams, this launch got Robbie Williams, a devastating drop in off-field quality that also showed how much football’s ambitions in America have changed over the past 30 years. Rather than conquering America in a blaze of ambition and comedy, as the World Cup aimed to in 1994, this tournament is all about the consolidation of football as a tepid global lifestyle product, combining the worst of American sport’s commercialism, European football’s extractivism, and the moral turpitude of the Washington-to-Riyadh illiberal axis.
“We love soccer! We rock!” the chorus echoed as Williams moped about the Kennedy Center stage on Friday, grayly delivering his rendition of the new official Fifa anthem, Desire. But is it soccer, or football? Well, unfortunately the World Cup draw had a lot to say about that too, in a series of “fun” segments debating what to call the sport in America (who cares?) that briefly threatened to kill anyone with an IQ over 50. Over on the set of host broadcaster Fox, new network talent Thierry Henry, holding on for dear life in the blast zone of Alexi Lalas’s jingoism, looked almost immediately regretful about his decision to accept the assignment as American TV’s token big tournament Euro. Giorgio Chiellini and others have taken on this task in previous years and made it to the end looking like they’ve lived through centuries Why, Titi, why?
Predictably, all the emotional meat of Friday’s ceremony was in the theatre of a Fifa president groveling before America’s would-be king. Over the past few months, as Trump has overseen the destruction of the East Wing, begun work on his cherished ballroom, and set about transforming the White House into a Live Laugh Love-themed suburban wedding reception center, it’s been reasonable to wonder where exactly they’ll put Infantino’s bedroom. A closet with a camp bed off the ballroom kitchen, perhaps? A tent illuminated by the light of Trump’s iPad on the new Rose Garden patio? Now we have the answer: Infantino does not need a room in the presidential home because he’s taken up residence directly in Trump’s pocket. Through all the trials and setbacks of power, it must be reassuring for Trump to wake every morning and slip straight into his Gianni slacks, safe in the knowledge that the head of the world’s biggest sport – hairless dome crowning from the hip pocket – will gas him up no matter how many US citizens he sends to the gulag in El Salvador or blameless fishermen he blasts out of the Caribbean. Would that we could all have a Gianni in our lives, though preferably not in our pants.
Infantino introduced Trump on stage and presented him with three mementoes to mark the inaugural Fifa peace prize: a trophy, modeled seemingly on a UN sculpture in Geneva but echoing in its form the cover of a racist novel of the 1970s that has inspired the modern American far right; a medal; and a signed certificate. (Presumably these will have to make way on the Oval Office mantelpiece next year for whatever Fifa gives Trump for winning the second annual Fifa peace prize.) Amid all this debasement the one redeeming note was that Infantino, rather humiliatingly, made Trump put the medal around his own neck, which the president duly did with all the grace of a tapeworm exiting the cloaca. “This is your prize, this is your peace prize!” Infantino yelped.
The whole thing was so overblown, so grotesquely obsequious, that even Trump seemed to find it a little offputting. Whether any of this – the embarrassment of Infantino’s lickspittle performance at the draw, the storm of mockery that greeted the decision to placate America’s toddler-in-chief with a made-up peace prize in the first place, the unpardonable tackiness of the entire spectacle – will stop Fifa from making 2026 all about Trump seems unlikely.
On the one hand, Trumpian nativism is an inherently awkward fit for the World Cup, which even in the moral quicksands of Qatar still made a basic effort to advance its boilerplate clichés about openness to the world, inclusivity (“Today I feel, ah… gay”), and global friendship. On the other, next year’s tournament won’t be the first time that sport and authoritarian theatrics have come together on the global stage; we know from the 1936 Berlin Olympics that international sport and fascism mix easily, that they’re a match made in high-camp heaven. Fifa’s customary blather about equal rights and an end to racism has been swiftly forgotten amid the urgent task of getting on good terms with America’s reigning fascist. The organization that tied itself in ethical knots over recent years to keep politics out of sport – who remembers the debacle over the OneLove armband? – seems determined to remake itself as Maga’s external affairs department. Perhaps we can all hope for a resurrection of the Fifa boss who declared, in Qatar, that Europeans should spend 3,000 years apologizing for the suffering they’ve inflicted on the world, but that seems like a message unlikely to endear him to the white supremacists and Great Replacement freaks who run America today.
So enthusiastic is Infantino’s tonguing of the Trumpian boot that it’s fair to wonder how much worse things will be once the tournament proper begins, how much tighter Fifa’s embrace of Trumpworld will grow. Will we see walk-on roles before the opening match for Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and other lackeys of the Nerd Reich? Could the tournament create a special part for Pete Hegseth as a half-time on-field insult comedian? Might there be a special live stream of the Trump administration’s latest extrajudicial killing to spice things up during the heat breaks in Côte d’Ivoire v Curaçao? These sound insane but we’re already at the point where insanity can’t be ruled out. Nothing about Infantino’s management of the tricky relationship between his three co-hosts suggests a change in course from the cold-sweated sycophancy we’ve seen to date. We can and should expect the worst; Fifa is now the Federation Invested in American Fascism.
But Fifa also wants to squeeze the World Cup for everything it’s worth, and so far that’s translated into a determination to inject this whole soccer thing with a good old-fashioned dose of American garbage. Fifa trialed US-inspired game “improvements” – NBA-style players’ entrances and the like – during last summer’s Club World Cup and wants more next summer: recent reports suggest that these will include half-time interviews for head coaches and players and a lavish, Super Bowl-style half-time show during the final. No fans want this – least of all in the US itself, which Fifa continues to misunderstand as a land of footballing neanderthals in need of sugary treats to maintain engagement through the mind-bendingly complicated exercise that is watching a 90-minute sporting contest.
It would be tempting to say that we’re witnessing the infantilization of world football, but the goal is open and the pun is right there: the hellish coupling of Magafifa is producing, before our eyes, the full-scale Infantinolization of the World Cup, in which unnecessary in-tournament gimmicks, scheduling “innovations”, and scammy ticketing procedures mix with crass commercialization, a cheap approximation of Hollywood glamor, and the craven coddling of the pea that passes for Trump’s heart. The tournament that is taking shape promises to be hostile and patronizing to fans, unaffordable, excessively long and morally repugnant all at once. If that’s not worthy of some kind of award, then I guess I’ll have to find another use for these special Gianni-engraved commemorative cufflinks I just had made for Fifa’s numero uno. A World Cup that, off the field at least, everyone will hate: this is your prize, Mr Infantino!
