The 2026 Fifa World Cup Draw: a show all about a very special individual called Johnny Infantino.
There was Johnny the Hypeman, reeling off his familiar patter: “104 Super Bowls”, “Official supplier of Happiness to Humanity”, “You call it Soccer, but in the rest of the world, we call it Football!”
There was Johnny the Comedian, bantering with Rio Ferdinand in a pre-recorded sketch show. That short item was unexpectedly revelatory: how could anyone have thought including it in the show would be a good idea? Here was clear evidence that we are dealing with a maniac.
Most of all, there was Johnny the Toady, which is Johnny’s most natural form, fawning on president Trump and to a conspicuously lesser extent on president Sheinbaum of Mexico and prime minister Carney of Canada.
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Johnny presented Trump with the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, which took the form of a fascinatingly weird dull-gold trophy featuring a small globe being clawed at by hands that – you somehow know – are being thrust upwards from the soil of a freshly-dug grave. What was the design spec here? “I want you to make me an obscene parody of the World Cup trophy. It should hint at nameless horrors, and portend death.”
The spectacle of the Fifa president abasing himself – and by extension, the world game – before Trump (or the Saudi crown prince, or the Emir of Qatar, or the Russian president) has lost its capacity to shock or surprise. The question is: why? Why does he do this? What is he getting out of it, beyond the chance to be in the same room as Trump at various high-level functions? (Which, to someone like Infantino, may be enough of a reason on its own.)
It’s not easy to say, but maybe a look at the kind of companies that sponsor the World Cup suggests an answer. At Mexico 86, the list of tournament sponsors is made up of conventional private companies making consumer products that football fans might want to buy: Budweiser, Coca Cola, Adidas, Cinzano vermouth, Camel cigarettes, Gillette razors, JVC and Philips consumer electronics, Canon cameras and Fujifilm to load them with, Seiko watches, Bata shoes, Opel cars.
Compare this to the list of companies that sponsored Qatar 2022. Budweiser, Coca Cola and Adidas are still there, but they’ve been joined by some new breeds of sponsor. You have state-capitalist megacorporations like Qatar Energy and Wanda Group, and you have Qatar Airways, the favoured channel by which the Qatari state distributes marketing cash to world sport. You have politically-connected national ‘champions’ like South Korea’s Hyundai-Kia and the Chinese trio of Vivo (smartphones), Mengniu (dairy) and Hisense (electronics). You have representatives of the new speculative economy in crypto.com and Byju’s – an Indian educational-tech startup that was worth tens of billions in 2022 and has since become insolvent.
Today, Fifa’s most important sponsor is Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, which has inherited the mantle of football’s official fossil-fuel partner from Qatar Energy and, before them, Gazprom. The real economic power in our world flows from political favour. The American tech barons we see grovelling before Trump know this. Infantino is doing what they do, for much the same reasons.
He would surely insist that his schmoozing is a big reason why Fifa’s income in the 2022-26 cycle may, for the first time, break the $10 billion barrier. Yet, though the cash is flowing, not everyone is feeling the benefit. From a European point of view, Infantino’s 48-team dream is already looking like the worst World Cup ever.
There will be 16 European countries at this World Cup. All group games featuring England, Germany, France, Switzerland and whoever comes through Uefa Path A (Fifa obviously hope that will be Italy, though it could be Northern Ireland) will kick off at a reasonable evening time – between 6pm and 11pm – from the point of view of their fans watching in Europe.
All the other countries will have at least one match that kicks off between midnight and 6am back home. Six of them – including Ireland, if we get there – will have two. Whichever lucky team makes it through from Uefa Path C can look forward to their first two games kicking off at 6am Central European Time, and the third at 4am.
Obviously, this will drastically reduce the impact of the World Cup across Europe. The casual fans who get drawn in by the big-match atmosphere are not going to be staying up to watch games at three in the morning.
Before Infantino, Fifa always organised the World Cup so that matches were played at times when people in Europe – the historic heartland and still the economic powerhouse of the game – can easily watch.
The latest matches at USA 94 kicked off at half-past midnight Irish time. In the two previous World Cups hosted in Mexico, no match kicked off later than 10pm our time; the most common local kick-off time was midday, or 6pm here. In Brazil 2014, the most recent World Cup held in the western hemisphere, the latest kick-offs were at 11pm Irish time.
There had been a convention where, even if the need to squeeze a large number of matches into a limited number of days sometimes forced suboptimal kick-off times in the group phase, the knockout phase at least would be scheduled at convenient times for European viewers.
Of all the knockout games in USA 94, only the Brazil v Sweden semi-final kicked off after midnight in Europe. In Brazil 2014, the latest knockout games began at 9pm Irish time. Contrast that to USA 2026, where nine of the 32 knockout games will kick off in the European small hours.
Europe, as everyone ceaselessly reminds it, no longer calls the shots in anything, and that also extends to football.
The day before Infantino gave Trump his Peace Prize, the US government published a new National Security Strategy document which outlined their latest thinking on American relations with the rest of the world.
For the authors, Europe is a US protectorate that the US no longer feels like protecting, but still insists on controlling. America’s vision for Europe involves Europeans spending much more money on American-made weapons, while voting for parties of the nationalist right to restore what the Trump administration calls “civilisational self-confidence”. (The authors seem to assume that these newly confident nationalist European states will set aside their confident nationalism whenever it’s time to carry out the latest orders from their masters in Washington).
The prescriptive attitude towards Europe contrasts with the respectful tone towards the Gulf monarchies. America has decided it’s time to stop “hectoring” these about human rights and other such woke nonsense. “The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
As to why Europe should not expect similar ‘acceptance’: “We recognise and affirm that there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in… maintaining good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours even as we push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms, furthering our interests as we do so.”
Since Europeans are lucky enough to be considered like-minded friends, we must accept America telling us how to run our affairs.
As he takes the World Cup away from Europe, Infantino is helping in his small way to set the terms of the new order.
