Ahead of the World Cup this summer the relationship between President Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino, the boss of FIFA, has been under the spotlight. Alan Tomlinson describes how together the two men despoiled the beautiful game.
Permission to reproduce article from LSE European Politics.
In recent years Gianni Infantino, the most senior official at the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), and Donald Trump have been hogging international sporting, and political, headlines.
The latest came on Thursday 19 February when FIFA announced an initiative to assist Mr Trump’s Board of Peace rebuild Gaza using sport. Mr Infantino’s declaration to “foster investment into football for the purpose of helping the recovery process in post conflict areas” was made at the Trump Peace HQ.
With the men’s football World Cup this summer, expect a relentless Gianni and Donny show. As with all of Mr Trump’s antics, people who are impressed are matched by those who are appalled. Which should you be? I argue that the forms of deal-making between the two men undermine – at unprecedented levels – the principles and practices that are central to the credibility of both FIFA’s global profile and Mr Trump’s position as president.
The politics of sport
On Friday 5 December 2025 Mr Trump and Mr Infantino held a “celebration” of the final draw (where qualifying teams were split into groups) for the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup. At Mr Trump’s behest the draw event was staged in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, DC. (Weeks later it was renamed the “Trump-Kennedy Center”.) Similarly Mr Trump has made himself chair of the “Taskforce” organising the World Cup, conveniently headquartered in Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Overflowing with Trumpian hyperbole Mr Infantino welcomed the draw as a prelude to “…the greatest FIFA World Cup ever, much more than just a sporting event, it’s simply the greatest event that humanity…has ever seen, and will ever see.”
The event had the air of an exhibition match held only to showcase (and flatter) a team’s veteran star player. After Mr Trump was initially passed over for a Nobel peace prize (although he has since managed to procure one), Mr Infantino saw an opportunity. FIFA had its own prize on offer, no committee to bother with and few (if any) other nominees. Mr Trump, the self-proclaimed “president of peace” accepted the award willingly. (Although he would soon abduct the president of Venezuela and threaten to invade Greenland.) Mr Infantino nodded his endless appreciation of his fellow president, lauding him as wholly deserving of such a unique award “for his tireless efforts to promote peace”. Human Rights Watch, an NGO, wrote to FIFA to ask for more details about the prize, its process and the judges. They got no reply.
Mr Infantino called the event “spectacular”; Mr Trump claimed that the “2026 World Cup will be the largest, most complex set of events in sports history.” Split, for the first time, between three countries and with 16 more teams than usual, there is some truth to that claim, although the Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028 Olympics might rival it. How though did such a deal come about?
Picking the dream team together
In 2015 multiple scandals revealed corrupt leadership across FIFA and several of its continental confederations. Senior FIFA personnel, including the president, Sepp Blatter, left. Mr Infantino, a lawyer and sports administrator who served on the FIFA reform committee, slid out of his role as general secretary of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), after his boss, French football superstar Michel Platini, withdrew his planned bid for the FIFA presidency amid yet more scandal.
As soon as Mr Platini was out of the picture, Mr Infantino acted. Few knew much about him. But he emerged as the new broom – ready to make FIFA great again. His pitch to the Congress that voted him in was simple. In paternalistic and preacherly style he addressed the delegates as not only a leader but a man for all seasons who would work to expand the briefs of FIFA’s partner continental confederations, and, critically, those delegates representing the 207 National Football Associations (NFAs) eligible to vote. His message was clear: the stables should be cleansed; and the monies that flowed into FIFA should be redistributed to the NFAs. He romped home in the second round. Mr Infantino was now the leader of the world’s biggest single sport organisation. Soon he was buddying up with the world’s most powerful leader, Donald Trump.
Mr Infantino took office in February 2016. In January 2017 Mr Trump entered the White House. In June 2018, at the 66th FIFA Congress in Moscow, Mr Infantino announced the outcome of the bidding process for the 2026 men’s World Cup. Morocco lost out to the “United Bid” between America’s 13 host cities along with Canada (with two host cities) and Mexico (with three).
Mr Infantino had flattered Mr Trump into committing himself to the successful United Bid. The New York Times has revealed that before the Moscow announcement Mr Trump had been writing letters to Mr Infantino supporting the United Bid “in the spirit of continental partnership” and promising not to allow his beloved travel bans or visa restrictions to disrupt the fun. The letters seem to have been written in the spirit of secretive lobbying and deal-making, in favour explicitly of US-FIFA connections.
Two years into FIFA’s reform programme the Trump-Infantino duet could celebrate a shared FIFA victory that, in effect, was in violation of FIFA’s principles and rules. Articles 15 and 23 of FIFA’s Statutes state that both member associations and confederations must “be neutral in matters of politics and religion” and be “independent and avoid any form of political interference”.
This did not stop Mr Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, from working with the chairman of the United Bid and engaging in lobbying efforts, reported to have cost $6 million, that funded bid leaders to meet with 150 of FIFA’s 211 federation presidents; undeniably “a form of political influence” affecting the outcome of the bidding process. An article in the New Republic outlines a series of unusual relationships between former and current FIFA executives, and Mr Trump’s administration, and suggests that it could be the “most corrupt” World Cup ever. The two presidents embody entirely flawed forms of leadership, with FIFA’s in particular showing even less accountability than could have been imagined.
When Donald and Gianni take to the pitch the winner is always going to be the former: older, bolder, the deal-maker par excellence. Gianni is in the background of the marionette, second fiddle to a main protagonist never slow to grab a trophy or to make the sporting spectacle a money-making heist. Estimates suggest that the 2026 World Cup could be the most profitable ever. At the first meeting of the Taskforce in May 2025 Mr Infantino announced that the event is expected to provide a boost to the American economy of nearly $50 billion of investment income, as well as close to 300,000 jobs.
Mr Infantino has the presence of a dependable acolyte. He is not unused to mixing with the big boys. Vladimir Putin awarded him Russia’s Order of Friendship in 2019 and Qatari and Saudi political leaders welcomed him – the patterns of patronage clear as day. Primarily, though, it is Mr Trump who leads, imposing his inevitable character, rewriting the playbook of political populists, taking centre stage not just for what he hails as the “biggest, safest and most extraordinary soccer tournament in history”, but in his expanding range of threats built into his record number of presidential “executive orders” and his disregard for international law.
In Trump: The Art of the Deal, Mr Trump’s ghost-written autobiography, published in 1987, writer Tony Schwarz labelled the young entrepreneur’s “loose relationship with the truth” as “truthful hyperbole”. The term is revealing, allowing Mr Trump to indulge in playful rhetoric with his puppet partner Mr Infantino. He gets away with it at FIFA, playing Mr Infantino along. And the FIFA chief continues to defend his buddy, insisting in an interview on Sky News, that Mr Trump was “instrumental in resolving conflicts and saving thousands of lives’’; thereby, in relation to Mr Trump’s FIFA peace prize, Mr Infantino claims that “objectively, he deserves it”.
Mr Trump’s ethically questionable control over world football seems mild in comparison with command of violent ICE agents or his takeover of Venezuela. But as always with Mr Trump, he has managed to gatecrash and despoil much of what he touches; in this case, the world’s beautiful game.
This blog post is based on the author’s recent study (Mis)Governing World Football? Agency and (Non)Accountability in FIFA in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Vol. 45, Issue 1, Spring 2025, pp. 108-137 (co-authored with E. A. Brett)
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
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