‘He massages Trump’s basest instincts’: why is Fifa’s Gianni Infantino cosying up to the US president?
NEWS | 30 November 2025
Gianni Infantino was 18 years old the first time he ran for office. It was a presidential election at FC Brig-Glis, the local amateur football club in the small Swiss town where he grew up. Running against two older men, and with no discernible footballing record of his own, the little red-haired kid with freckles was, unsurprisingly, the rank outsider in the race. But he had a vision. He had a ferocious work ethic, boundless enthusiasm, well-established networks in the town’s Italian immigrant community. And even at this tender age, he had a flair for an eye-catching scheme. To the shock of many veterans at the club, Infantino surged to victory: partly on the back of his pledge to attract new sponsors and revenue streams, and partly on something more tangible. Infantino promised that if he won, his mother Maria would wash all the players’ kits, every week, for as long as he was president. This earliest glimpse into the political life of the current Fifa president is perhaps revealing for two reasons. Firstly, it demonstrated a vaulting ambition that you might describe as delusional were he not so adept at forging it into reality. Secondly, it showcased his unparalleled ability to cut through the dry technocratic language of process and governance and appeal to our crudest, most transactional desires. Barely out of childhood and with the odds of life stacked against him, Infantino had already intuited the first rule of politics: everybody, whatever their stature or circumstances, has dirty laundry they’re desperate to get rid of. There’s Donald Trump, gabbling away about something or other. Next to him, a beaming Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt. Next to him Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and behind him Keir Starmer. Alongside Starmer is Friedrich Merz, in front of Merz is Emmanuel Macron, and next to Macron is Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia. About three along – in the back row but inclining his chin in the manner of a man who would really rather not be in the back row – is Infantino, the only man on stage at the Sharm El-Sheikh peace summit without a formal political role. So what was he doing there? How had an organisation more often associated with drawing the names of football teams out of a large hat ended up with a seat at a conference held to shape the future of the Middle East? And for all the gravity of the subject matter, Infantino was barely bothering to disguise the fact that he was simply delighted to be invited. He posed for photos with world leaders. He pledged to rebuild Gaza’s shattered footballing infrastructure. He created content for his personal Instagram page. He disclosed that his presence had been solicited at the personal request of President Trump. View image in fullscreen Infantino (on the far right of the picture) at the Sharm El-Sheikh peace summit in October this year. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images For a man who continually insists that football cannot solve the world’s political problems, Infantino seems to spend a considerable amount of time hanging out with politicians. During the Covid pandemic, he travelled to Washington to attend the signing of the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic ties between Israel and two Arab nations. He has kicked a football around in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin and attended a heavyweight boxing fight with Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. But it is Trump with whom he appears to have grown closest of all, a blossoming romance years in the making. Infantino featured prominently at Trump’s second inauguration earlier this year and has been a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office. In December 2024, Ivanka Trump opened the draw for the Club World Cup, Fifa’s new $1bn (£761m) showpiece tournament that took place in the US this summer. In July, Fifa opened a new office in Trump Tower in New York, which means the governing body of the world’s biggest sport is now officially a tenant of a company owned by the sitting US president. He assured Trump that they would ‘make not only America great again, but also the entire world’ Naturally, Infantino insists that maintaining a close relationship with the president of one of the countries co-hosting next summer’s men’s World Cup – an event responsible for more than 80% of Fifa revenues – is simply part of his day job. But this is a level of mutual admiration that goes well beyond your common or garden obsequiousness. Kirsty Coventry is the president of the International Olympic Committee, responsible for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. But despite being elected more than nine months ago, she is yet to make a single public appearance with Trump. Infantino’s relationship with Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, by contrast, was much cooler. The pair briefly met at a G20 summit in 2022, and Infantino visited the White House in 2024 to meet with national security adviser Jake Sullivan for about an hour. Meanwhile, Infantino has spent far less time with Mark Carney and Claudia Sheinbaum, the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the other two co-hosts next summer. Certainly he did not seem inclined to borrow their campaign slogans, as when he assured Trump in January that they would “make not only America great again, but also the entire world”. Fifa’s ethics code has strict rules on political neutrality, and in private some Fifa officials express a certain unease at Infantino’s apparent closeness to a man reviled across much of the world for his scorched-earth rhetoric, immigration policies and authoritarian tendencies since assuming power for the second time. And yet by endorsing his slogan, Infantino stands accused of endorsing his politics. For a man acutely sensitive to his public image, not just a deal-maker but a skilful communicator in at least six languages, it is hard to imagine any of this is accidental. So how does Fifa’s slogan of “Football Unites the World” square with Infantino’s very public courtship of the most divisive politician on Earth? Is this simply a kind of cynical realpolitik, the indulgence of a prized customer? Or is there a more sinister alignment of principles at work here? The glory of football lies in its sheer unpredictability, the fine margins in a low-scoring game, the enchantment of the unknowable. The politics of football, by contrast, is more often than not a business of fixed and known outcomes, the tyranny of the possible, the art of the deal. Since first being installed as Fifa president in 2016, Infantino has been re-elected unopposed in 2019 and 2023, under the old football maxim that you can only beat what’s not put in front of you. On 5 December, the 2026 World Cup draw will be held at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the beloved arts venue that in recent months has been the focus of an aggressive cultural takeover by Trump and his allies, with the president himself installed as chairman of the board. At the draw, Infantino will announce the winner of the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, an attempt to – in his own words – “recognise the enormous efforts of those individuals who unite people, bringing hope for future generations”. Who will win? Put it this way: if it’s not Trump, it will be a far bigger shock than anything we are likely to see in the 104 games of next summer’s World Cup. ‘The key point is that Infantino is the symptom rather than the problem himself,” says Nick McGeehan of the human rights group FairSquare. “What is his job? It’s not to sustainably govern the game. His job is to accumulate power and money, and redistribute it to the associations to make sure they benefit as much as possible. If grassroots footballing development happens along the way, great. And it does. But that’s not its core function.” Infantino took over as president from the disgraced Sepp Blatter, at a time when Fifa’s stock had never been lower. Inheriting an organisation reeling from a corruption scandal, and with sponsors and allies fleeing in all directions, Infantino arrived in Zurich with two linked but often countervailing goals: restoring Fifa’s reputation, while also restoring the finances upon which Fifa operates a global game played in every country on the planet, and which form the basis of Infantino’s power. The 211 members of the Fifa Congress hold the keys to the castle. They meet every year, vote in a new president every four years and distribute the development funds required to sustain and grow the game. And of course, it is the last of these that has long been the crux of the enterprise. Blatter’s Fifa ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own grift: a system of lavish and often illegal personal enrichment that benefited only a select few at the top of the organisation. During his presidential campaign, Infantino declared to delegates: “The money of Fifa is your money. It’s not the president’s money.” The room exploded in applause. View image in fullscreen With Donald Trump at the Oval Office, 2018. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Infantino’s popularity within Fifa thus relies on generating as much revenue as possible. It explains the expansion of the men’s World Cup from 32 to 48 teams in 2026, a model that will be followed by the women’s tournament in 2031. It explains Fifa’s new Club World Cup, the inaugural edition of which was won by Chelsea this summer, and which is an attempt to muscle in on the runaway success of club football, which on a year-to-year basis generates far more interest and revenue than international football. At the same time, maximising revenue has forced Fifa into new and often questionable alliances. In a way Infantino’s masterstroke has been to shield Fifa from charges of shady back-door dealing by conducting its power games entirely in the open The World Cup has long been a playground for autocratic power. Its 1934 edition was held in Mussolini’s Italy; the 1978 competition was staged under a military dictatorship in Argentina. The 2018 and 2022 tournaments in Russia and Qatar, which attracted accusations of improper voting practices, were awarded long before Infantino joined the organisation. And in a way Infantino’s masterstroke has been to shield Fifa from charges of shady back-door dealing by conducting its power games entirely in the open. Last December, the 2034 men’s World Cup was awarded – unchallenged – to Saudi Arabia, another state with which Infantino has developed close ties over recent years. It was Saudi money – funnelled indirectly into Fifa’s coffers through an eye-wateringly expensive broadcast deal – that helped to fund the Club World Cup. Evaluating the country’s World Cup bid, Fifa assessed Saudi’s human rights record as a “medium risk”, a verdict described by Amnesty International as “an astonishing whitewash” of the country’s record on labour rights. Rather than running from the controversy, Infantino has often chosen to go on the attack, portraying these immensely powerful regimes as victims of Euro-centric discrimination. On the eve of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he made an extraordinary address in which he accused the country’s critics of perpetuating colonial attitudes to the Arab world and repositioned himself as a champion of the downtrodden. “Today I feel Qatari,” he announced. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel like a migrant worker. I feel like them because I know what it means … to be bullied. At school I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. Plus I was Italian. So imagine.” Quite apart from the fact that no group of people has ever been enslaved or had their basic human rights denied on account of having freckles, Infantino’s backstory does help to explain his meteoric rise. Born in 1970 into an Italian immigrant family, Infantino was the son of a railwayman and a mother who worked in the station kiosk. His first experience of football came in local teams, albeit with little success. “Let’s just say he wasn’t the best player,” his cousin Renato Vitetta once said. As early as primary school he had already given up on his dream of becoming a footballer, writing in a school assignment that he was instead set on becoming a football lawyer. His successful run for the presidency of FC Brig-Glis was merely the start of his career in football governance. After completing his law studies at the University of Freiburg he joined Uefa, Europe’s football governing body, in 2000 and became its secretary-general in 2009. For years he was known by European football fans as the man who oversaw the Champions League draw: the egg-headed Swiss technocrat drily explaining pots and permutations, introducing far more famous names to the stage to conduct the draw itself. But upon the collapse of Blatter’s presidency, Infantino’s sharp-elbowed ambition reared up again. The Uefa president Michel Platini was initially seen as the favourite to replace Blatter, but after accusations emerged of illegal payments between the two men (of which they were ultimately exonerated), it was Platini’s protege who emerged as the preferred European candidate, a clean face and a clean break. Even so, his eventual victory over Prince Ali bin Hussein of Jordan was seen as a huge shock, a testament to his tireless campaigning and the pivotal work of US Soccer president Sunil Gulati in shifting votes towards Infantino between the first and second rounds. Once again, Infantino had defied expectations. Those who encountered him during his early years describe a quiet, meek and unremarkable man, not overtly charming or charismatic, absorbed above all with process and detail. Those who have worked more closely with him, however, paint a more nuanced picture of an operator capable of switching between dad banter and deathly seriousness at a moment’s notice. Blatter had a bed in a room next to his office so he could take daytime naps; the workaholic Infantino replaced the beds with exercise machines. Perhaps this is why Infantino looks so comfortable in the company of the rich and powerful. This is his milieu, his destiny, the freckled kid from Brig who made it big Fifa employees in Zurich have spoken of his abruptness and his impatience, the hallmarks of a man who simply wants to get things done and has little time for prevarication or obstacles. Lowly French-speaking staff who had known him for years were quietly reminded to address him as “vous” rather than the more informal “tu”. The Swiss newspaper 24 Heures quoted an associate who described Infantino as a cold presence, a man who “goes to the smoking area, takes out a cigarette and stares at his smartphone”. Among influential company, however, he comes alive. Infantino has an innate instinct for gravitating towards the most powerful and consequential elements in any given room, and tailoring his offering entirely towards them. For a president who started his reign by pledging to fly on budget airlines, he seems to spend most of his year jetting across the world on private planes. As an anonymous source put it to Politico: “He loves dictators and billionaires. When he sees people with money, he melts.” Perhaps this is why Infantino looks so comfortable in the company of the rich and powerful. This is his milieu, his destiny, the freckled kid from Brig who made it big. “He clearly thinks of himself as a statesperson,” says McGeehan. “If you don’t think that power can be challenged, you start to behave like an authoritarian and feel at home with others with the same power. Is it ideological? I don’t think so. I think he’s ultimately quite a weak man.” In May this year, Infantino was in the East Room of the White House attending a meeting of the World Cup taskforce with, among others, Trump and US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem. Afterwards, he got word that his beloved Inter Milan were making a comeback against Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final. For the last 15 minutes of the game, he sat on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, watching the football on his phone, utterly engrossed. Even Infantino’s staunchest critics will admit that the Fifa president is a true football obsessive, an unashamed evangelist for the game and its unifying power. Associates testify that he has no real hinterland, rarely if ever speaks about other sports, does not appear to enjoy art or music. When he talks about football as an “investment in happiness” and sells the sport as a positive influence that can stop wars and bring people together, there is a genuine heartfelt delusion at work there. Which in a way seems to encapsulate the basic paradox of Infantino: that a man in charge of the global game can be so instrumental in harming it. The Club World Cup was forced into existence despite the protests of the global players union Fifpro, which argued that adding yet another competition to a saturated calendar would do irreparable damage to player welfare. Fifa has responded by refusing to deal with Fifpro and instead legitimising its decision through much smaller bodies that Fifpro describes as “fake unions”. View image in fullscreen With Vladimir Putin at the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow. Photograph: Alexey Nikolsky/SPUTNIK/AFP/Getty Images Perhaps Infantino’s approach can best be described as sucking up and punching down: a two-pronged strategy in which the most powerful men in the world are endlessly indulged while those most in the need of his assistance are marginalised. Rights groups have criticised his lack of action on the Iran football federation for continuing to restrict the access of women at games. A complaint from the Palestinian football federation over allowing teams from illegal West Bank settlements to play in the Israeli league has been unresolved for more than two years. Meanwhile Infantino’s charm offensive towards Trump continues unchecked. By all accounts Trump had never shown much interest in football until a call with Infantino in early 2017 in which the Fifa president informed him that it would offer him access to the world’s biggest and most captive television market. A key factor in their friendship has been Infantino’s ability to massage Trump’s basest instincts: in a 2018 Oval Office meeting Infantino handed him souvenir red and yellow cards, which he jokingly suggested could be used on the assembled press. In return, Fifa is getting the biggest payday in its history. Fuelled by dynamic pricing, the most expensive ticket for next summer’s World Cup will be almost five times the equivalent cost at Qatar 2022. Parking spaces for the final in New Jersey will cost $175 (£133) each. None of this revenue will be subject to tax, flowing unimpeded into Fifa’s accounts, refilling the pool of cash that can be disbursed to the member organisations, securing his power base. For an organisation that only actually makes money one year in four, Infantino’s bromance with Trump isn’t simply a personal mission, but a business imperative. Perhaps it is curiously fitting that both Trump and Infantino began their rule in 2016, a year that in hindsight increasingly seems to mark the start of a new world order, an era of unapologetic brazenness in global politics. Like Trump, Infantino would not allow himself to become a prisoner of history. Rather, he would be its protagonist, strident and reactionary, always posting and always selling, merciless to his enemies and unashamedly pecuniary in his instincts, a worldview in which the worth of a human being was innately tied to their ability to pay for stuff. Traditionally, only players who have won the World Cup are allowed to touch the cup itself. But on an August visit to the White House, Infantino made an exception for Trump. The president held the trophy in his tiny hands, fumbled it a little, described it as a “beautiful piece of gold”, and then asked Infantino if he could keep it. As a metaphor for football itself, and the men who have it locked in their grip, it was about as good as any.
Author: Jonathan Liew.
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