Time to check in on Gianni Infantino, the only man on the planet who makes you wish the AI overlords would just get on with it already. If they’re coming for all the jobs, at least that means Fifa will at some stage be overseen by something other than this toadying grab-bag of cringe and gibberish. Who would even care what would come next?
The latest sign of the apocalypse on Infantino’s watch is the Fifa Peace Prize, the sort of wheeze you throw out as a joke in an ideas meeting when you’re too hungover to hide the fact that you’re too hungover. The Fifa president will be awarding it for the first time at the draw for the 2026 World Cup in Washington on December 5th. And sure who knows who might also be ligging about in Washington that day to accept it?
The Fifa Peace Prize. This is actually happening. The actual president of the organisation overseeing the world’s biggest sport is actually going to give out a makey-uppy peace award and he’s going to do it with an actual straight face. No tipping the wink, no ironic smile. Just a statue or a plaque or whatever, dedicated to the Peacefulest Peacemaker Who Ever Passed A Piece of Peace.
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And obviously everyone assumes that the first recipient will be the Pol Pot of Peace himself, US president Donald J Trump. Infantino was in Miami this week at something called the America Business Forum, at which he took the stage for a half-hour session immediately after Trump and immediately before Leo Messi. Pressed on whether Big Orange would be the one who gets the nod next month, he gave a knowing chortle and said, “Well, on the 5th of December you will see!”
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Trump, of course, was famously snubbed in his pursuit of the only peace prize that means anything last month, when Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel. But now that Infantino has magicked up a Fifa Peace Prize, perhaps we should start thinking of Machado as a latter-day Howard Wilkinson, the last winner of the old First Division. Maybe the Nobel is yer da’s peace award and it’s Fifa all the way from here on out.
Of course, the funniest thing now would be for Infantino to give it to somebody else. If only he had the cojones to do it, right there on stage at the World Cup draw, a couple of miles from the White House. “And the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize goes to… Virgil Van Dyke and Wayne Rooney for their admirably grown-up conversation on live television, showing that pundits and players can get along even when they disagree.”
Can you imagine? The dreaded double-snub! Trump left hanging, like a serial Oscar nominee who never gets to skip up the steps. Infantino said at the America Business Forum thingy that a billion people will watch the World Cup draw, which is obviously poppycock. But you can be sure they’d get a few more people tuning in once the news landed that Trump had been Amy Adamsed.
It won’t happen. It can’t happen. Trump would be liable to cancel the World Cup if Fifa embarrassed him like that. Although, to be fair, he seems well able to handle the fact that the whole thing is so fist-gnawingly embarrassing already. A sports organisation dreaming up a prize to soothe your feelings after you missed out on the original prize? How is he not hyperventilating with the sheer humiliation of it all?
It’s tempting to dismiss the whole thing as being childish but that would be an insult to kids the world over. Any child would suss this out immediately. Put a gang of eight-year-olds in any circumstance where there is an actual prize and a pretend prize and it will take them 0.004 seconds to work out which one is worth winning and which one will make them want to shiv their parents for having to endure.
No, this is the work of men-children. Delusional, self-centred fantasists who, in the most damning indictment possible of The State Of Things, have engineered themselves into positions of enormous power and responsibility. And this is what they choose to do with it. Gadding about the place, oiling each other’s ego, playing dress-up games while the world burns.
The thing is, if Infantino had ever hinted at being a serious person, you might want to give him the benefit of the doubt here. Trump is such a thin-skinned maniac that there’s obviously no percentage for Fifa in anything other than total obsequious abasement in the run up to the World Cup.
He has twice warned that he’ll move matches from certain cities if he – and he alone – decides they’re unsafe. Moving games at such short notice would be a disaster for Fifa, for their sponsors, for supporters. So maybe who cares if Fifa have to invent a fake peace prize to keep him onside for a few months?
But the idea of Infantino as some 4D-chess playing super-strategist doesn’t really tally with what he’s brought to the job for the past decade. After all, it’s not so long since the dude was comparing his election campaign for the Fifa presidency to Rwanda’s recovery from genocide.
We know Infantino long enough by now to know who he is – a cack-handed, self-absorbed chancer in a suit with no sense of the real world and no fear of it ever troubling him.
Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile.
