by Ziyad Motala
Infantino has spent years polishing his image as the grand impresario of world football. He presides over an empire where money is the first principle and ethics are a regrettable afterthought. He now appears eager to burnish that empire by associating it with American power, even if the chosen avatar of that power is a man whose public life has been a long sermon on division and the antithesis of harmony. Trump has branded foes, mocked allies, debased civic culture and treated truth as a negotiable inconvenience. Trump has spent years inflaming racial hostility, threatening political opponents with retribution and praising violence as if it were a civic virtue. His public life has been a steady sermon in the art of division, the antithesis of any credible understanding of peace. Yet FIFA has declared him a laureate of peace. Orwell would have understood.
This is not merely a lapse in taste. It is a declaration of the organisation’s moral illiteracy. FIFA, ever sensitive to the scent of influence, has found in Trump a figure too grotesque to resist. They have mistaken crude and crass power for character and bluster for statesmanship. In their eagerness to ingratiate themselves, they have reduced the word peace to a joke.
That eagerness extends to a glaring double standard. FIFA was swift and self-righteous in suspending Russia, insisting that football could not be indifferent to war. Yet when confronted with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the mass killing inflicted by Israel, FIFA has discovered the virtues of silence. This is not neutrality. It is complicity dressed as administrative discretion.
Infantino’s stewardship has long been an exhibition of institutional drift. The organisation that claims to govern the world’s most beautiful game has repeatedly embraced some of the world’s most unsightly regimes. Its devotion to human rights is episodic. Its discipline is selective. Its transparency is aspirational. Now, by attaching the idea of peace to a man whose political career has been a carnival of resentment, FIFA has announced that it is no longer content with mere hypocrisy. It seeks grandeur in its folly.
Football deserves better. The billions that sustain the game with their loyalty deserve an institution capable of distinguishing between virtue and opportunism. They deserve leadership that understands that peace is not an ornamental word but a demanding ethical commitment. Instead, they have Infantino, who treats the presidency of FIFA as a stage upon which to perform gestures that flatter the powerful and embarrass the rest of us.
A peace prize for Trump is not a misjudgement. It is a confession. FIFA has told the world what it is. It is an organisation imprisoned by its own cynicism, drawn to power and money as moths to flame, willing to abase itself before any figure who can offer prestige, relevance or spectacle. Its shielding of Israel while punishing Russia only confirms the point. There is no principle it will not contort, no standard it will not dilute, if the politics of the moment demand convenient blindness.
In awarding Trump the language of peace, FIFA has done what it so often does. It has diminished itself. It has reminded the world that it is less a steward of football than a global billboard for vanity. Donald Trump has the emotional maturity of a toddler. And under Gianni Infantino, whose name aptly means little child, it appears determined to prove that there is no principle it will not cheapen in the pursuit of applause.
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