Next up: Fifa Compassion Prize
Is this a joke?
President Trump wins inaugural Fifa Peace Prize
The guy who kills civilians in lifeboats wins a peace prize? The guy who responds to protests by sending soldiers to terrorize the protesters? The guy who is helping Putin gobble up Ukraine? The guy who cheers on violence provided it’s his team perpetrating it?
Trump is not a good symbol of peace or peace seeking or peacemaking.
Trump received the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize before the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup.
The award has been introduced this year by Fifa president Gianni Infantino, designated for a person who has “taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace” and “united people across the world”.
Description does not match perpetrator.
As well as receiving a large golden trophy, Trump was also given a medal and certificate by Infantino before making a speech.
Are we sure this is not a transcription of Trump’s diary?
United people across the world in their opposition to him, perhaps.
I have never been much of a soccer fan, but Google (via AI) tells me that
Well, that may be the case, but soccer is the game most associated with crowd violence, which I suggest is due to its built-in low scoring rates (typically 1-0, 2-1, 0-0, etc, etc) for which, in conversation with fans of English soccer, I once suggested some remedies: enlarge the goal mouth, get rid of the goalie, etc, etc, for which I was promptly accused of HERESY!!! and threatened with burning at the stake, etc, etc. To which I replied: “My point exactly.”
So if Trump is getting FIFA endorsement, IMHO it fits.
Maybe the Nobel committee should declare the World Cup winner and we can skip the upcoming tournament.
Not only is soccer a sport of hooligan fans, but FIFA itself is a miserable shitshow, like many international sporting orgs. They routinely turn a blind eye to World Cup host nations’ abusive practices, not only in broad general terms, but specifically related to WC preparations (such as abusing migrant workers who are employed to set up facilities). Really, this is a match made in the deepest bowels of Hell.
I was wondering what Infantino’s goal is in all of this. Why flatter and fawn over Trump? What’s in it for Infantino or FIFA? Answer: The US market. In the rest of the world, soccer is much more popular than it is in the US. My guess is that Infantino, having awarded the Orange Monster his shiny, new, minted-for-exactly-this-purpose “Peace Prize,” is hopes that Trump will now go out and promote soccer in the US for the sake of his new-found Close Personal Friend and Admirer. (That, and for an as yet undisclosed payment of some sort or another.) He may, he may not. Trump doesn’t really pay too much attention to deals, or contracts, or agreements, or the law, so this is a bit of a gamble. Further payments and ego stroking will likely be required for Trump to follow through. But the combination of insatiable self-interest, microsecond attention span, and accelerating mental decline, is going to make it hard for Trump to be of much long-term use to FIFA.
Quite apart from Trump’s doubtful value as a soccer
hucksterambassador, there’s an even bigger hurdle for this odd partnership to clear. “American” sports have a massive home field advantage in the fact that they are perceived and marketed as Honest to God, Red, White, and Blue, AMERICAN sports. Even with Trump’s influence, is MAGA really likely to take up soccer over football, baseball, and NASCAR? After all, it’s a sport played by brown foreigners, living in shithole countries.Your Name’s not Bruce? @5:
That, honestly, is the great mystery of Trump–how the hell has no one figured out the pattern, yet? Trump uses you until he’s done with you, then he never met you. Time and again we see yet another one of his relationships suddenly be recast by the Great Orange One as no real association at all, they were always horrible, awful people who should just be forgotten.
Why do all of these idiots think they are going to be the special one who actually gets the promised payday?
And the FIFA Hair Award goes to Patrick Stewart…
YNNB: I don’t think Infantino primarily wants Trump to promote soccer in the US at this point. They’ve been working on that for decades—which is why the US got to host back in 1994, and is doing the bulk of the hosting now even though Mexicans actually watch the sport—and so far nothing will get white American men to watch it.
I believe the main reason Infantino is sucking up to Trump right now is because the criticisms of all those empty seats in Qatar touched a nerve, and he suspects that this one could be even more of a fiasco. Most soccer fans in the US are the same Latinos being grabbed off the street by ICE, so they’re not going to sign up for a “FIFA ID” and go to somewhere as public and crawling with cops as a World Cup game. Every country in the world right now has a story of one of their nationals being hauled off to some appalling detention centre, multinationals are cancelling all business travel to the US because they can’t ask their people to take the risk—if crucial business meetings are being rerouted to India and EMEA then there’s not going to be much enthusiasm for sports tourism. Infantino is hoping that with enough sycophancy and golden trophies, Trump will bring ICE to heel for the duration of the event and not do things like, say, detaining the entire entourage for Team Haiti.
I’m not sure what I’d prefer to see—the entire thing as an embarrassing washout, or big happy crowds at the games in Mexico and Canada, with NOBODY in the US.
Soccer has actually been growing in popularity in the US, in large part because it is a game that any kid can play and organized soccer for kids has been a part of life for us since the 80’s. Enough so, that Clinton in the early 90’s sought to appeal to the “Soccer Moms,” whose social life apparently consisted of mini-vans and chatter on the sidelines while their kids ran around chasing the ball. There are an average of 23k fans in attendance at Major League Soccer games in the US, which may not seem like much in comparison to American Football, but it is not far behind baseball at 29k per game. So, I don’t think that there is much chance of empty stadiums for the American venues.
I think that what is behind it is this: There are going to be teams from around the world coming to visit and with the threat of ICE being assholes to tourists from “shithole” countries, there is the fear that many will stay away. Tourism is already down due to the belligerent nature of our government, they don’t want it to affect the World Cup. Also, Trump has a habit of asking for the trophies and Infantino wanted to head that off before it even got to the pass.
And there’s that fools standing up their with his medal beaming like he got first in line for the chocolate cookies.
It’s craven, it’s corrupt, it’s tacky… it’s FIFA. Lickspittles gonna lick.
But did you notice how damn hideous that trophy is? It’s got like zombie hands on it. Like the dead slaves who built the stadium in Qatar are reaching up out of the dirt.
Good comments all. I just thought, Yuck, how humiliating dignitaries have to throw this elderly Caligula another shiny toy. Tribute to an Emperor who has lousy, tacky taste. I hadn’t thought of the promoting football angle – though as said above Trump doesn’t do quid pro quo.
KBPlayer: to be perfectly honest, the style isn’t that far from the current World Cup trophy. The original Jules Rimet Trophy was a nice art deco kinda thing, but when it was stolen they decided to replace it with something that looks like a five-year-old made it by covering a tennis ball with gold foil. The 80s really was the decade that taste forgot—no wonder Trump’s aesthetics are stuck in it.
The style of the thing does indeed make me think of the current World Cup trophy, though it’s just the sort of design that Donald Trump adores. It would make Jules Rimet turn in his grave, but then many things about FIFA as it is now would make him turn in his grave.
When I was doing post-doctoral research at Berkeley there was in about 1968 one of several (maybe the first) attempts to popularize real football in the USA (by real football I mean the game played with the feet in almost the entire world, not the weird hybrid of chess and pat-a-cake played with the hands in the USA and Canada). It was quite successful in Oakland, just down the road from Berkeley, but didn’t really catch on otherwise. One thing that struck me was that immediately there were suggestions that the rules needed to be changed — just the thing to make a new member of a club popular.