FIFA ONLY GETS WORSE
Pining for Sepp Blatter at the 2026 FIFA World Cup draw.
“Dignity for the weak in the arms of the brave,” Robbie Williams crooned. He appeared on stage following a commercial break after an opening segment to the 2026 FIFA World Cup draw ceremony that was downright astonishing: Nothing happened1, and it said everything about what kind of event this would be.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino went on at length, apparently under the impression that we’d all tuned in to see him. There was a call-and-response section with the Kennedy Center audience: “U-S-A!” “CA-NA-DA.” Then we got some Ford F-150 commercials, and then Williams and Nicole Scherzinger showed up singing.
“We know who we are and what must be done,” they continued. “Despite the fury, the hope, the hate/If the devil rides, we will make him wait/Love is the law and it’s raging like a fire…”
What the hell were they even on about? The Genius lyrics have a helpful guide2:
“This is a grand, almost biblical opening line—immediately invoking themes of justice and protection. It suggests a world where the strong protect the vulnerable, a common motif in FIFA campaigns promoting equality and human rights through football. ‘Dignity for the weak’ aligns with FIFA’s advocacy for underrepresented communities: refugees, children in poverty…”
And then they finished, and Kevin Hart came out and declared it “a song for the summer.” Then they gave Donald Trump, the famous advocate for refugees, the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was well deserved for the man raining peace in the Caribbean as we speak. He took the medal out of the box himself with a half-smirk and put it around his own neck, standing next to a large gold trophy with five human hands reaching upward from the base, grasping at a globe. The palms were nearly as big as the planet, big enough that any one of them looked like it could get a nice grip of the thing if given half a chance. And all of them together?
The photos flashed in my mind’s eye in the moment: Infantino grinning next to kings of countries where citizens are not allowed to criticize the government. Infantino grinning next to presidents who think that whole arrangement is a great way of doing things.
The FIFA chief unleashed a monologue about Trump’s peacemaking as he stood newly medaled a few feet away3. “We want to see unity,” Infantino said while praising the notorious unifier. Then it was the American president’s turn, and he ran through the finer details of his own greatness before throwing a bit of praise back the other way for the man he seemed to be calling, “Johnny.”
“He’s set new records for ticket sales,” Trump said in his Peace Prize acceptance speech. “Not to bring that up, because we don’t want to bring that up right now.”
This was an admirably honest statement on the new order of things. Everything is a transaction now, particularly in the country where this event took place, and any talk of moral commitments or higher callings is a fig leaf. It’s a veneer so thin as to make a mockery of the whole business, delivered with a wink and a smirk. Of course we have no ethics. Of course it’s all for sale, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just sit back and watch. Soon enough, you’ll be required to cheer.
There was a time that FIFA had a corruption problem. Cash in manila envelopes, deals under the table. There was undoubtedly, each time the World Cup was staged, some graft and tomfoolery going on in the host countries, even around beautiful tournaments like South Africa in 2010 or Brazil in 2014. There were flaws, but the mischief was mostly swept under the rug. It was unseemly, gauche, to move the dollar bills out in the open. The appearance of propriety was considered necessary.
These were the times of Sepp Blatter, FIFA chief, who by the end of his tenure was considered a bona fide scourge on football. He escaped criminal charges, but the rampant corruption beneath him in the organization is not in dispute after a wide-ranging investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, among others. Blatter was showered in cash on-stage by a prankster and eventually forced out of FIFA, replaced by Infantino.
What really doomed Ol’ Sepp was the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 edition to Qatar, all in one sitting. When the details around that came to light, he had to go, and yet it merely represented the dawn of a new era that would outlast him. It was the end of the closed-doors, under-the-table stuff. This was brazen, shameless, out in the open.
Nobody has to ask why the 2034 World Cup went where it went. Some are afraid to say it plainly, but mostly it just feels unnecessary. FIFA has a rule that World Cup hosting privileges must rotate around the different continents so it’s truly a global event. Then somehow — thanks to the 2030 edition going to three different continents at once, thereby taking Europe, Africa, and South America off the board for 2034 — the tournament will be held on the Arabian peninsula for a second time in 12 years. The process for this decision was extra-ordinary, to say the least. Then, when FIFA had no broadcaster for the Club World Cup, DAZN showed up with $1 billion and the Saudi Public Investment Fund showed up with $1 billion for DAZN.
Again, it was like they wanted you to know how it all happened, and they wanted you to know there was nothing you could do about it. That it was all about the money, and the power, and who was throwing all that weight around. Of course there’s an official FIFA ticket resale platform with no limits on prices, where this non-profit entity is taking a 30% cut of those hefty scalper profits. Of course favored players get their inconvenient suspensions suspended. What are you gonna do about it?
Maybe, as the Blatter era indicates, all this stuff was always for sale. But maybe there was value in the genuine attempt back then to obscure it. This brazenness, it’s corrosive. We need our myths, our tales of justice. I can tell you as an American. Huge sections of our society — even some who don’t support the current regime — have now bought into the idea that it’s time we all stop pretending we care about anything else and start grabbing for the money. Meanwhile, bigger hands are grabbing for the globe.
Because “Johnny” seems to have learned a thing or two from his friends: Go outlandish with it, be shameless, do it fast, just do it, who will stop you? He’s assembled a bit of a crew, you see, the ones from all those pictures, and they love to operate behind the veil, the one so thin that it’s designed to cultivate a feeling of powerlessness as the Big Grab unfolds in front of you at formidable speed.
When his predecessor did whatever it is he did, it just felt different. Blatter was at least, as Jonathan Wilson put it on the podcast last month, “a football person,” a genuine lover of the game, a “bizarrely idealistic” believer in its human potential. When Infantino speaks about any of these things, he doesn’t believe it, you don’t believe him, he knows it, you know it, and none of it seems to matter. It’s paralyzing, whereas Blatter’s crooked blunders felt … galvanizing, even for his opposition. He stained the game, and it needed dry cleaning. Then his successor declared the whole garment stain-colored.
And at the very — very — least, Blatter didn’t spend such a large percentage of his time palling around with kings and wannabes on camera, offering football’s blessing to despotism. That’s got to count for something. And at least back then, we had “Waka Waka.”
Except for Andrea Bocelli. But there was zero World Cup drawing.
Possibly posted via Gianni’s burner account.
There was also a video montage laying out the American president’s credentials that — in editing style and cinematography — bore remarkable similarities to White House social media products. It announced the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize would be “bestowed upon” a “dynamic leader” in the form of “the honorable Donald Trump.”