The power games that paved the way for Trump’s World Cup
Football’s biggest show kicks off next week and the US president means to be its biggest star. But hosts do not always get what they want
Simon Kuper
It’s hard to find people who are massively looking forward to the World Cup — or the “MAGA World Cup”, as Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde calls it.
The image of Fifa’s president Gianni Infantino handing Donald Trump the freshly invented Fifa Peace Prize — just before the recipient attacked Venezuela and Iran — is “a metaphor for the tournament’s problems”, says Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch.
Trump aspires to join the ranks of Pelé, Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi as a star of the World Cup.
His country is chief host, staging 78 games including almost all the best ones, while Canada and Mexico have 13 each.
I’ll be there, attending my 10th World Cup.
Fans are outraged at the thousands of dollars being asked even for tickets to humdrum games — though now, in a new worry, many tickets remain unsold and hotel rooms stand empty, prompting price collapses.
NGOs fear that the US immigration police, ICE, will treat the tournament as a hunting ground.
ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons said the organisation would be a “key part” of security at the World Cup.
The tournament could prove a target-rich environment, if Hispanics in the US dare don Mexican or Colombian shirts to watch their teams in bars or stadiums.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino presents the inaugural Fifa ‘peace prize’ to Donald Trump in December © Fifa via Getty Images
Will this really be the “Trump Cup” — or could it jump up and bite him?
Is this tournament a shocking new departure, or does it fit neatly into the World Cup’s political history?
The tournament was founded by Jules Rimet, son of a Parisian grocer, who became Fifa’s president in 1921, just over two years after returning from the Great War.
It’s a wonder he survived.
One military dispatch just before the Armistice said: “Monsieur Rimet, lieutenant, at the front for three years now, while engaged on October 20 1918 with determining the elements of an indirect machine-gun assault, and caught in a violent enemy bombardment, did not leave the terrain until he had accomplished his task.”
He won three Croix de Guerre, the French military cross.
Rimet barely spoke about the war afterwards, but it seems to have remade his worldview.
Like many ex-combatants, he returned from the front obsessed with peace.
His lifetime preoccupation became, to quote the title of a pamphlet he published aged 80, “Football and the reconciliation of peoples”.
He thought the game could eliminate “suspicions and rivalries that today still set peoples against each other”.
Fifa scheduled the first World Cup for 1930, but couldn’t pay for it.
The global football authority didn’t even have a bank account.
Its secretary-treasurer, Carl Hirschmann, an Amsterdam stockbroker, was investing its scant funds in stocks, apparently unbeknown to his colleagues.
Fifa needed to find a host country willing to finance the World Cup’s stadiums, infrastructure, security and everything else.
Fifa president Jules Rimet presents the first trophy — the original was named after him — to Raúl Jude of the Uruguayan Football Association after the home team’s victory in the 1930 World Cup © Popperfoto via Getty Images
The Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, built to host the 1930 World Cup © Popperfoto via Getty ImagesHappily, Uruguay volunteered.
This proved exceptionally handy when the 1929 crash bankrupted Hirschmann and wiped out almost all of Fifa’s funds.
“The host pays” has always remained the tournament’s operating principle.
That incentivises Fifa to choose hosts ruled by prestige-hungry autocrats, who can spend fortunes unfettered by parliamentary scrutiny or mouthy citizens.
Benito Mussolini’s Italy hosted the second World Cup in 1934.
Rimet, a future collaborator with Vichy, was fine with a fascist host.
“Peace through football” meant that Fifa was happy to deal with any country (except colonies, which didn’t count).
Rimet strove to please Mussolini, though it wasn’t always easy.
He wrote that he often had “the impression during the World Cup that the real president of the international football federation was Mussolini”.
The night Italy won the final, the president of the country’s football federation, General Vaccaro, took the men from Fifa for a splendid dinner in Ostia.
Rimet, writing his memoirs after the second world war, realised that some readers might disapprove of Vaccaro’s spell commanding Italian fascist troops on the eastern front.
It was not necessary to “appreciate his political persona”, grants Rimet, but Vaccaro had been a nice chap.
Rimet’s associates at Fifa later proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1956, while they were assembling the supporting dossier, he died, aged 82.
The creator of today’s World Cup now lies practically forgotten in a family grave in the Parisian suburbs.
Fifa has continued to embrace brutal regimes.
Argentina’s military junta hosted in 1978, Vladimir Putin in 2018, while Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is scheduled for 2034.
It’s all part of peace through football.
Infantino’s predecessor as president, Sepp Blatter, said he met the Nobel organisation to ask “for the Nobel [peace] prize — for football, not for a man.
It is the movement, for Fifa.”
Putin, something of a connoisseur of war and peace, said in 2015 that Blatter “must be awarded the Nobel peace prize”.
Putin’s World Cup opened with the Russia-Saudi Arabia “petro derby” in Moscow.
When Putin rose before kick-off to give a speech, the mostly Russian crowd applauded, though only for about 10 seconds.
He spoke of football spreading love.
But the fans’ attention soon wandered, and as he droned on, he was drowned out by a hubbub of chatter.
The biggest cheer came when he finished.
Then he settled down in his VIP box, chatting and laughing with MBS and Infantino.
This was Infantino’s entrée into the select club of autocratic men who increasingly run the world.
It must have been a heady experience for an obscure, uncharismatic Swiss football official who suddenly became Fifa’s president in 2016.
Over time, Infantino has come to resemble his clubmates: he is monied (he earned over $6mn last year), untroubled by elections (he has twice been re-elected unopposed) or by critical media (his last press conference was in 2023).
He runs Fifa largely solo.
The best way to track its doings is to follow his personal Instagram account.
He seems to enjoy consorting with the mighty.
Ahead of this World Cup, he has been working mostly from Fifa’s headquarters in Miami, handy for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Last year Trump spent more time with him than with any leader of a country.
Infantino attended Trump’s “Summit for Peace” in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, celebrating the supposed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“Without President Trump, there would be no peace,” he said, adding that Fifa intended “to support, to help, to assist” the “peace process”.
Such is his faith in peace through football that just before announcing his candidacy for his fourth term at a recent Fifa congress, he called an Israeli and a Palestinian football official on to the stage and encouraged them to shake hands.
(They didn’t.)
Infantino attended the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace sporting a red baseball cap inscribed “USA” and “45-47”, for Trump’s presidencies.
He even showed up at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the premiere of Melania Trump’s Amazon-funded documentary Melania.
As Fifa president, Infantino understood Trump’s frustration at being denied the Nobel.
Hence the “Fifa Peace Prize”.
This kowtowing probably doesn’t help the World Cup.
Fifa has forgone the leverage it usually enjoys over a host.
But Infantino’s agenda appears to be more personal.
Trump views the World Cup differently from any previous host.
Mussolini, Argentina’s generals, Putin and Qatari royals were attempting what’s now called “sportswashing”.
That is, they used the tournament to portray their regimes as cuddly and welcoming, with world-class infrastructure.
Mussolini subsidised foreign fans’ travel.
The Argentine junta built a wall along the main road into Rosario, painted with the facades of fine houses, to hide the city’s slums.
(The “Misery Wall” was shortlived; slum dwellers stole the concrete slabs for their own homes.)
Putin let spectators enter Russia without a visa.
But Trump’s project isn’t sportswashing.
He doesn’t want to appear cuddly, and he is proud of being unwelcoming to foreigners.
Fans from Haiti, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Iran cannot even request visas — something that appears to breach Fifa’s rules against discrimination.
Far from hiding violence by his military or ICE, Trump often showcases it.
This World Cup isn’t about changing the brand of his US — which is in any case already probably fixed in most people’s minds.
Rather, Trump aims to be the main character of the world’s biggest show.
He has said this World Cup is “like having many Super Bowls in a short period of time.
Because each one of these games, essentially, is a Super Bowl.
Some of them are bigger than Super Bowls, actually.”
This is correct: individual matches at international football tournaments have long drawn larger TV audiences than the Super Bowl.
Whereas sportswashing leaders aspire to host smooth, conflict-free World Cups, Trump comes from reality TV, where conflict is entertainment.
Expect him to narrate the tournament daily, commenting on Haitian fans, Iran’s team, co-host Canada (“the 51st State”) etc.
He’ll also be tempted to intervene in the action.
What he probably won’t do is embrace the US team, knowing that it’s unlikely to win and may include players who oppose him.
(Many American athletes have declined invitations to his White House.)
Yet this World Cup won’t be a straightforward Trump Show.
Leaders always try to use the tournament, but their opponents use it against them.
For instance, when Mussolini’s Italian team visited Marseille for the World Cup in France in 1938, “they met Norway on the field and an estimated 10,000 Italian political exiles in the terraces,” writes Simon Martin in Football and Fascism.
The team’s fascist salute before kick-off prompted what their manager Vittorio Pozzo called a “barrage of whistles and insults”.
In response, the team saluted again.
World Cups often attract attention to issues the host country hoped to hide.
Foreign NGOs leveraged the Argentine and Qatari tournaments to publicise Argentina’s torture of dissidents, and Qatar’s treatment of construction workers.
And Trump, unlike those regimes, has to worry about domestic protests.
Unluckily for him, the tournament takes place almost entirely in blue America.
All 11 host cities voted Democrat in their most recent elections.
Inside and outside stadiums, a World Cup offers an ideal stage for protest, both informal and organised.
Trump seems to realise that: he has repeatedly called for games to be moved from left-leaning cities such as Seattle.
This World Cup, like almost everything in the US, could become a culture war.
There’s such a thing as the universal freedom of the football stadium.
Even in dictatorships, it’s often the one venue where big crowds can gather and shout and sing what they like.
Fifa traditionally suppresses any sign of “politics” in the stadium.
Spectators aren’t allowed to display political messages.
In 1998, at the Iran-US game in Lyon, France, I watched possibly the largest demonstration in the World Cup’s history, when just before kick-off, thousands of Iranians living in Europe stood up in their seats and revealed T-shirts bearing the face of a dissident leader, Maryam Rajavi.
Throughout the game, whenever the ball went into the crowd, people jumped up, pointing to their shirts.
But nobody saw the protest on TV.
Fifa had instructed the camera crew not to film it.
At this World Cup, suppression won’t work.
Spectators will film themselves.
Trump’s popularity is now at all-time lows.
If he attends a match in a Democratic city, and his face is shown on the videoboard, he will probably be jeered.
It happened to him at a Washington Commanders NFL game last year.
That prospect could keep him away from the stadiums.
And blue America is using the tournament for more concerted political action.
New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani, a devotee of African football and an Arsenal fan who wore a club kurta to Eid prayers, spotted the gap in the market for a left-populist soccer politician.
He is leading the charge against the overpriced World Cup.
He recently announced he had arranged for 1,000 match tickets at $50 each to be made available to New Yorkers.
Standing beside him as he spoke was American international Tim Weah — son of former Liberian president and superstar footballer George Weah — who praised his work.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has also taken the no-lose political position of calling for cheaper tickets.
And the Democratic attorneys-general of New York and New Jersey are investigating Fifa’s ticketing practices.
All this fits the Democrats’ new focus on affordability in a billionaire’s America.
Suddenly, half a nation cares about the same thing.
It’s ecumenical: equal numbers of American Democrats and Republicans say they will watch this tournament
The World Cup’s other domestic flashpoint could be ICE.
Latino immigration is the core Trumpian issue, and nothing would dramatise it like the sight of crowds of people in the US wearing Mexico or Colombia shirts.
This was a central yet under-reported issue of the US’s previous World Cup, in 1994, writes Celso Thomas Castilho, a historian at Vanderbilt University.
Latino immigration to California had jumped 70 per cent during the 1980s.
By 1994, the state’s governor, Pete Wilson, was campaigning against “illegal immigration”, offering an initiative known as Proposition 187 that would deny undocumented immigrants social services, education and some forms of medical care.
When Wilson gave a speech at the Colombia-Romania game in LA, the largely Latino crowd jeered him.
Elsewhere, too, Hispanic fans clashed with authorities.
Police officers in riot gear tear-gassed Latinos in LA celebrating Mexico’s win over Ireland, writes Castilho.
When Latin Americans in New Jersey celebrated Brazil’s victory in the final, police even confiscated their flags.
That was in Bill Clinton’s America.
Imagine the response to similar gatherings in Trump’s.
And there are countless other potential clashes when 48 participating countries, each with their own political conflicts, and almost all with diasporas in the US, suddenly find themselves in the world’s eye.
Iran’s footballers have frequently tangled with the regime.
For instance, six female players at the Women’s Asian Cup this year sought asylum in Australia after not singing their national anthem before a game.
The Iranian regime aims to deter dissent at the World Cup.
Last month it seized assets of dissident former star player Ali Karimi, while Iran’s ex-keeper Rashid Mazaheri was arrested after criticising then Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during national protests early this year.
However, Iran’s diaspora remains free to speak.
Iranian-Canadian activist Maryam Shojaei, sister of Iran’s former captain Masoud Shojaei, says: “I’m sure there will be protests.”
Don’t expect the political theatre to bring change.
World Cups fade like dreams, leaving behind only memories — especially in Trump’s US, where the news cycle moves at unmatched speed.
Views of the president are too entrenched to be changed by a soccer tournament.
Swing voters care more about gasoline prices.
Any impact of this World Cup is likely to be on future World Cups.
By jacking up ticket prices, Fifa has inadvertently turned this tournament into a referendum on what the World Cup should be: a moneymaking opportunity, or an international public good?
I keep encountering fans who feel too outraged to watch the football.
I suspect most will change their minds when the games start, and I’m glad.
The World Cup doesn’t belong to Trump or Infantino.
Fifa just gets to stage and monetise it.
This is an almost entirely televisual event (the tiny proportion of fans in the stadium are largely decor) that brings happiness to people worldwide.
Fans gather in living rooms and bars to watch games — a rare experience in our era when everyone normally watches their own content on their own screen.
Suddenly, half a nation cares about the same thing.
It’s ecumenical: equal numbers of American Democrats and Republicans say they will watch this tournament.
Stefan Szymanski and I show in our book Soccernomics that suicide rates fall in European countries playing in a World Cup, probably because lonely people are welcomed into the national conversation.
I struggled to articulate what’s special about World Cups until I sat down one weekday morning in an empty Anglican church near Marble Arch in London with the vicar, Father Lincoln Harvey.
He’s an Arsenal fan, and author of A Brief Theology of Sport.
He said the World Cup was a bit like a religious feast — like Easter, or the Islamic Eid, but shared by people of all religions, plus atheists.
A religious feast offers respite from life’s drudgery and toil.
So does the World Cup.
It’s a celebration of many things: football; great individuals but also the team; one’s own nation, but also every participating nation.
During World Cups, people honour the unique qualities (often imagined) of Brazil, England, Haiti and all the rest.
Nations compete, but joyously, knowing that football is only the most important of unimportant things.
The victories and defeats are a pageant of life and death, full of contingency.
The tournament, Father Harvey concluded, “is about as good as it gets”.
I’ll keep going to World Cups as long as I can.
Simon Kuper is an FT columnist. His books include ‘World Cup Fever’ and ‘Football Against the Enemy’
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