Extortionate
tickets and matches moved at Trump’s whim: are you ready for the ‘greatest
World Cup ever’?
Marina
Hyde
You may
have thought Qatar and Russia were tournament lows. You didn’t account for the
US president and his Fifa soulmate, Gianni Infantino
Tue 18
Nov 2025 15.45 CET
“It’s
very clear,” claimed haunted Fifa cue-ball Gianni Infantino not so long ago,
“that politics should stay out of football and football should stay out of
politics.” But is it clear? Is it really? On Monday, the worst man in world
sport was – yet again – to be found in the Oval Office, this time nodding along
to Trump’s declaration that games could be moved from host cities for next
summer’s World Cup if the US president deems there’s “a problem” with security
or that the cities are non-compliant in some other way. In practice, that seems
to mean if they’re run by a Democrat/“communist”. Amazing that the Fifa
president will gladly allow his tournaments to be held in any old violent
autocracy but, for the purposes of the White House cameras at least, might need
to draw the line at Boston.
Honestly,
the very sight of Infantino these days causes decades of writing about Fifa to
flash before my eyes. How could it have happened? How could we have ended up
with an even bigger horror in charge of world football’s governing body than
the various ones who went before? When Sepp Blatter was thrown from a moving
gravy train in 2015 amid an explosive corruption scandal, it would have felt
like a genuine feat of sporting excellence to have beaten his record for craven
awfulness.
And yet
here we all are. This year, the Fifa president has been the Forrest Gump of
Trump’s administration. Back in May, he attended the US president’s Middle East
peace summit, causing him to be so late for Fifa’s own congress that even Uefa
accused him of prioritising “private political interests” and staged a delegate
walk-out. Last month, Gianni was back on the political trail at Trump’s Gaza
peace talks in Egypt, and earlier this month instituted some preposterous Fifa
peace prize that he’s going to inaugurate at the final draw for the 2026 World
Cup in Washington next month, quite possibly so that the orange organ grinder
can be the first winner of it. He spent yesterday grinning along while Trump
announced things such as the possible ordering of “strikes” on one of the US’s
2026 World Cup co-host nations, Mexico. Perhaps the writing was on the wall
when Gianni kicked off the year of ceaselessly grim politicking by attending
Trump’s inauguration, where he was filmed giggling appreciatively during the bit
where the US president announced he’d be changing the name of the Gulf of
Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Back
then, in January, Infantino looked like a competition winner. Now he resembles
a fully operational member of Trump’s troupe of winged monkeys. It used to be
host governments that got co-opted into Fifa’s supra-national edicts – I
remember South Africa being forced to set up highly dubious “Fifa World Cup
Courts” for errant fans during the 2010 tournament. But now Fifa is a wholly
owned tool of whoever will have it. Like all parasites, it relies on its host
organisms.
As far as
I can tell, a political leader removing a game from a host city has never
happened in the entire 95-year history of the World Cup tournament, which
should perhaps confirm the increasing global impression that the US might just
be a uniquely backward country. Football fans considering buying expensive
tickets and making even more expensive travel arrangements should consider that
they are journeying somewhere so apparently volatile that even its own
president talks its safety down. Hopefully here in the UK there will be
official Foreign Office advice warning of the logistical and political dangers
of watching a remorselessly poor match between two of the 48 countries that
Infantino has triumphantly ruined the group stages with. Or, indeed, watching
no match at all, because Seattle’s mayor has been deemed less politically
acceptable than anyone connected to the leadership of the last two host
countries, Qatar and Russia. Which, by way of a reminder, were not actually
even democracies.
Or as
Trump’s White House World Cup taskforce head, nepo gimp Andrew Giuliani, put it
on Monday, the next World Cup could only have happened because of Trump’s
“vision”, and is going to be “one of the greatest cultural events in world
history”. Infantino went with different superlatives, promising that it would
be “the greatest and most inclusive World Cup ever”. Mm-hm. In the hands of
marketing men, of which Mr Infantino is most certainly one, there are few more
telltale red flags than use of the word “inclusive”. If you ever hear the word
inclusive in what amounts to an advert, you can be sure someone’s about to get
done over or excluded – and in this case, would you believe, it’s the fans. Not
only has the Fifa overlord allowed World Cup game tickets to be subject to the
loathed dynamic pricing, but those games might be shifted hundreds or even
thousands of miles away due to politics.
No doubt
Infantino is patting himself on the back for all this. But his true achievement
– so far – is presiding over an era in which “sportswashing” stopped being some
niche critical term of art, and became something that all football fans know
the minute they see it. Because they see it all the time. As for that peace
prize, please don’t limit yourself to thinking it will be annual. The last time
Gianni invented a prize – Fifa’s The Best Awards – he held them twice inside
nine months. So there is every chance Trump could win it again before next
summer’s World Cup kicks off. It’s all thanks to the least political man in
world sport – or certainly, the least sporting man in world politics.
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