How’s that Fifa Peace Prize going, Gianni? Any second thoughts at all? Any nagging doubts?
As we sit here gazing around the wreckage of the first week of this World Cup year, with Donald Trump openly threatening any country that looks sideways at him, it feels like we’re a long way past the point of crazy. Though the American president is famously teetotal, he reminds you now of nothing so much as an aggressive drunk at the afters of a wedding, throwing his weight around, basically daring someone to try stopping him.
One thing’s for sure – Gianni Infantino ain’t going to be that someone. Today is one month on exactly from the Fifa president’s gross act of brown-nosing at the World Cup draw in Washington. Without so much as a by your leave from the rest of Fifa, Infantino invented a makey-uppy peace prize and gave it to Trump, essentially to soothe the man-baby’s ego after he got pipped to the Nobel by, of all people, the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.
Even at the time, the overriding feeling as you watched the wretched charade taking place was the deep humiliation of everyone involved. It was hard to tell which was worse – Fifa, for deciding that they were so in hock to the guy hosting the World Cup that Infantino felt the need to present him with a fake award to keep him onside, or Trump, for not telling them to wise up and stop embarrassing him in front of the watching world.
A month on, it’s clear now that Fifa and Infantino are the ones who made the biggest eejits of themselves with the whole thing. The Fifa Peace Prize was like one of Trump’s Diet Cokes – he was handed it, he downed it, he belched and he moved on. It was forgotten by the time he got back in the car.
In the 31 days since, Trump has rained bombs down on targets in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and Venezuela. According to the Military Times website, the Trump administration launched 626 separate air strikes worldwide in 2025. For context, Military Times says that Joe Biden oversaw a total of 555 air strikes in his four years as US president. The world has clearly grown more dangerous in the past year, driven by the war-mongerer in chief. But sure, give the guy a peace prize.
Given recent events, the Fifa Peace Prize, which Gianni Infantino presented to Donald Trump last month, isn’t just some harmless trinket. Photograph: Jia Haocheng/Pool/Getty Images
On Sunday night, Trump was giving one of his periodical word-vomit sessions to reporters on AirForce One. High on his own supply after events in Venezuela over the weekend, he started riffing on what he may or may not do and to whom he may or may not do it if the mood takes him. Were it any other US president at any other time in history, his few minutes of scattergun threats and warnings would have led news bulletins the world over.
He put Colombia on notice of an operation similar to the one the US just carried out in Caracas. He said the US could take action against Mexico and Iran, warning that they will get “hit very hard”. He dismissed Cuba, saying it was about to fall and that it depended on Venezuelan oil, which the Americans were now going to be in control of. He finished by making it clear he hadn’t forgotten about Greenland, which Trump says the US needs for national security.
So there you have it. In the space of a few sentences, Fifa’s Peace Prize standard-bearer threatened five different countries on three different continents, in effect telling them that the hard rain of American might is about to fall upon them if they don’t do what he says. And has there been a word at all from Infantino or anyone in Fifa? Of course there hasn’t.
Not that it should matter at all obviously, but Iran, Colombia and Mexico are all playing in the World Cup in the summer. Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous part, have designs on being there too (although, you know, we’ll see about that, etc). And yet Trump thinks nothing of throwing around loose talk about waging war against some or all of them in the near future.
All of which means that not only is the mad king in charge of the World Cup’s host country threatening to wage war against some of the participants, he’s doing it with the imprimatur of the World Cup organisers. The Fifa Peace Prize in this context isn’t just some harmless trinket handed over to stop the baby crying because he lost his rattle. It’s now the perfect cover for Trump to go around the place bombing countries that displease him.
Infantino had no business involving Fifa in this world. This is not what football is for. The stain will linger down the generations.