When you attend the court of King Donald, it’s important to genuflect. Unfamiliar foreigners in need of pointers can look to the man who is currently the most assiduous non-American flatterer: FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
It’s only natural that, in the lead-up to this year’s soccer World Cup, the president of the global governing body of the sport should make regular visits to the host nation. Yet Infantino has gone above and beyond. He appears to have spent more time in Donald Trump’s orbit than some of the President’s cabinet secretaries.
Infantino has been a willing accomplice in Trump’s campaign to secure the Nobel Peace Prize
On paper, it would be easy to make the case that Infantino is a textbook globalist. He was born in Switzerland to Italian parents, but recently got Lebanese citizenship. He speaks seven languages. And during Trump’s first presidency, he criticized his travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.
But Infantino quickly recognized the need to ingratiate himself at the dawn of Trump 2.0. He saw Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the Friday before his inauguration – and then attended the ceremony itself, wearing a Trump-esque red tie. “I would like to thank President Trump, with whom I have a great friendship,” he said, “and to assure him that, together, we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world, of course, because football – or soccer – unites the world.”
In the year since, Infantino’s bald head has been spotted at various events across America, not just at the White House for “World Cup Task Force” meetings, but at UFC fights, the Super Bowl and key diplomatic summits. Trump invariably makes a point of acknowledging “Gianni” – perhaps it’s the New Yorker in him that likes having an Italian lackey to hand.
And “Gianni” doesn’t just dress like Trump. He’s started to act like him, too. “There are similarities in the way that Infantino uses numbers. Everything is ‘the biggest,’ ‘the best,’ ‘the boldest,’ ‘the glitziest,’” Adam Crafton, a sports writer for the Athletic, tells me. “There is something very new money about all of that stuff. He’ll say, ‘Billions of people are watching.’ It’s often very difficult to prove the figures. It’s not that he’s lying. But it’s not always easy to demonstrate his truth.”
Infantino has also been a willing accomplice in Trump’s unorthodox campaign to secure himself the Nobel Peace Prize. The pair have between them devised a FIFA-sanctioned version of “peace” – uniting the world through handshakes and photo ops, even as bombs fall in the Middle East. War is peace, as they say in the Ministry of Truth.
“The way the word ‘peace’ is used is very interesting,” says Crafton. “Gianni himself has tried to move FIFA’s whole sloganeering away from anything that actually means anything, toward abstract things like ‘football unites the world’ and ‘unite for peace.’”
Partly, it seems to be sportswashing for arms dealing. Infantino was in Doha last May, when Trump struck billion-dollar deals to sell the Qataris Raytheon counter drone tech and General Atomics unmanned aerial vehicles. Infantino has a house in Qatar and two of his children go to school there. He also uses a Qatari private jet to travel the world. In October, in Sharm-El Sheikh, Infantino was on hand again, posing with Trump after a US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza.
Infantino invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” in order to award it to Trump at December’s World Cup draw at what’s now called the Trump Kennedy Center. He did so without consulting the FIFA Council. Infantino presented Trump with an enormous trophy, a medal and a certificate. “The FIFA Peace Prize is awarded annually,” he said, as if this wasn’t the first time. “This is one of the great honors of my life,” replied Trump.
Infantino often comes bearing gifts. At the announcement of the draw’s location, he brought Trump a supersized ticket to the World Cup final. “Nothing about it was surprising to me,” says Crafton, who was at the draw, because he’d seen before how unctuous Infantino could be around Trump. “What made the draw different was all of a sudden the audience was so much bigger. The world is watching and thinking, ‘That’s a bit odd. Why does he need to do this? Why does a sports organization need to do this?’”
The day before the World Cup draw, Infantino was present for a Trump-hosted event at the (newly renamed) Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, where the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a peace treaty for a deal they had agreed to earlier in the summer. And Infantino was back at the Institute of Peace last month for the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace, giving remarks there nine days before the US President began bombing Iran.
Alas, the war in Iran has complicated the FIFA-branded peace mission™. Iran had qualified for the World Cup, and its national side was meant to play two group-stage matches in Los Angeles and a third in Seattle. But after America and Israel struck, its participation in the tournament was thrown into doubt. Infantino met Trump again in early March to talk about the situation. “During the discussions, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States,” Infantino recounted in an Instagram post. The President apparently had a slightly different recollection of the conversation: “The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” he wrote on Truth Social, as officials pondered the risks of a terrorist attack during the tournament. The Islamic Republic’s sports minister said Iran’s participation was “not possible.”
“There must be a cut-off point where FIFA, from a planning, security and logistics perspective, needs to make a decision on what happens,” says Crafton. “I think their initial approach was, ‘Let’s wait and see and hope it goes away.’ And then it didn’t.”
Perhaps football – or soccer – can’t unite the world, after all.
