Can the World Cup Transcend Donald Trump?

[dalton99a]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/global-notes/can-the-world-cup-transcend-donald-trump

Can the World Cup Transcend Donald Trump?
How to defeat the politics of a fraught tournament.
By Ishaan Tharoor
June 11, 2026

For most onlookers, the defining moment of the previous World Cup, held in Qatar, four years ago, came at the very end. Argentina had defeated the defending champion, France, via penalties in the tournament’s final match. That victory marked the crowning triumph in the career of Lionel Messi, Argentina’s talismanic captain and, arguably, the greatest soccer player of all time, who could, at last, claim the one prize that had eluded him for nearly two decades. But, before Messi took center stage to receive the World Cup trophy from Gianni Infantino, the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the powerful entity that governs global soccer, another eminence wanted to play his part. The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, strode forward and cloaked Messi in a ceremonial Arab bisht, a garment of sheer black fabric trimmed with gold that obscured his blue-and-white Argentina jersey. The emir’s gesture was explained as an act of respect, but angry TV pundits saw it as detracting from Argentina’s success. “Just why? There’s no reason to do that,” Pablo Zabaleta, a former player for Argentina, lamented on the BBC.

But the reason was obvious. Argentina won the World Cup, yet the prestige also belonged to Qatar — particularly to the royal family, which holds complete sway over the wealthy petro-state. Qatar had endured weeks of bad press ahead of the start of the tournament, including criticism of alleged human-rights abuses against migrant workers brought in to build stadiums and help construct other megaprojects for the World Cup, concerns for the reception of L.G.B.T.Q. tourists in the country, and renewed scrutiny of FIFA’s decision to grant the World Cup to the tiny Gulf state in the first place, despite its having only one major city and an inhospitably hot summer. But the story lines shifted once the games got under way. Western grumbling subsided, calls for boycotts were forgotten, and the fans in Qatar found themselves gripped by a tournament bursting with drama. Visitors praised the gleaming new facilities and purpose-built infrastructure, including a metro system that was free for all World Cup attendees. “We had incredible matches, we had excitement, we had passion, we had heartbeat, we had joy, we had tears, we had emotion; we had everything,” Infantino declared a year later, describing the tournament in Qatar as “simply the best World Cup ever.” By the time Messi had his moment of destiny — cheered on by more than a billion people around the world — it seemed almost natural that Qatar’s absolute monarch would share in the glory.

If Infantino appeared to do too much to ingratiate himself with Qatar’s rulers, he has reached new levels of flattery with Donald Trump, who clearly sees the imminent 2026 iteration of the tournament — a sprawling continental affair jointly hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico—as a source of prestige to boost his flagging Presidency. It will be the largest World Cup in history, with forty-eight national teams playing in a hundred and four matches across sixteen host cities, eleven of which are in the U.S. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, he took personal credit for the U.S. and its neighbors winning the bid to host the 2026 Cup, although some soccer officials suggested that his divisive politics had put that selection in jeopardy. In the years since, Infantino, seemingly eager to curry favor ahead of the commercial bonanza that the tournament represents for FIFA, has been trailing Trump on the geopolitical circuit, joining him at summits in Sharm el-Sheikh and Davos, and extolling his diplomacy. In December, Infantino bestowed the made-up and farcical FIFA Peace Prize on Trump, who gladly accepted it at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Last summer, for the trophy presentation following FIFA’s Club World Cup final, at MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey, Infantino ushered Trump onto the stage — and the President refused to leave, clapping amid a bemused gaggle of players from London’s Chelsea F.C., which had just won the competition. A similar, Trump-centric scene can be expected in the same stadium on July 19th, when the World Cup final will be played.

So far, Trump is dominating the buildup to the World Cup for all the wrong reasons. This is the first World Cup in which the host nation is at war with one of the tournament’s participants (Iran), and the U.S. also has sweeping travel bans or visa restrictions on a number of the participating countries. (This is despite Infantino’s repeated assertions that there would be no problem with travel to the United States for players, sporting officials, and ticketed fans.) Although the players on Iran’s national team have received visas to participate in U.S.-based games, more than a dozen members of the technical and administrative staff associated with the team have not. So the Iranian squad had to relocate its training to Tijuana, Mexico, in order to prepare for its first game next Monday in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, Iran’s football federation said that the official ticket allocation for Iranian fans had been revoked, even though many had already bought tickets and made travel plans. Other national teams have experienced difficulties and indignities, too; a Haitian player based in Port-au-Prince is still waiting to receive a visa. Meanwhile, foreign fans — even from countries as dear to Trump as Scotland — are reportedly being denied entry for a range of bureaucratic vagaries, after spending enormous, unrecoverable sums on accommodations and stadium tickets, which are the most expensive in World Cup history.

...