A day before his unopposed reelection as president of soccer’s governing body in March 2023, Gianni Infantino’s motorcade fought its way through Rwanda’s capital as thunder and lightning loomed so he could take the field alongside the country’s president and retired players in a star-studded exhibition match.
The next day, the stands at Kigali Pelé Stadium were nearly empty. But Infantino was back, watching with interest as teams of amputees, most survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, faced off in a soccer game organized by the Paralympic Committee of Rwanda. After the match, as a black Mercedes limousine idled outside, someone rushed to Infantino with a request from players and coaches that he return to the field one last time. Infantino jumped up, smiled contentedly, bounded down the steps to hang medals around the winners’ necks.
With the same blend of relentless enthusiasm and attention to image-making, Infantino has made himself a player in American politics. Over the past year he has barnstormed the country’s power centers, from city halls to the White House, charming politicians and dispensing money from FIFA’s well-funded treasury to support local projects.
Infantino showed off his most important new political ally this month at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, where he brought President Donald Trump to the field to help award FIFA’s Club Winners Cup to champion Chelsea. One year from now, Infantino will return to the same field, almost certainly with Trump by his side, to hand out an even bigger prize — the World Cup.
But getting to the final on July 19 will not be easy, as the 104-match tournament — which will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico — is fraught with political and policy challenges. Organizers hope to welcome millions of foreign nationals amid Trump’s border crackdown and secure areas where law enforcement brings little experience corralling hordes of unruly soccer fans, all without bankrupting local governments.
Infantino, the 55-year old son of a Swiss-Italian railman, has already demonstrated savvy in navigating American government at every level. He maintains a bromance with Trump through Oval Office visits and ostentatious gift-giving. He woos the leaders of the Democratic-led cities and states where a majority of matches will be played, without alienating a White House clashing with them on other issues.
“You might say he’s a politician,” said Peter Tomozawa, CEO of the Seattle 2026 World Cup Organizing Committee. “But in the other sense, he’s just trying to promote what good soccer can do across the world.”
Not everyone is pleased. Just as Infantino drew criticism for cozying up to Russia’s Kremlin and Qatar’s monarchy when those countries hosted the World Cup, his embrace of the polarizing American president has not sat well with FIFA’s members. When Infantino chose to travel with Trump instead of attending a meeting of the sport’s top governing body as scheduled, the organization representing Europe’s soccer federations accused Infantino of prioritizing “private political interests,” saying that “does the game no service and appears to put its interests second.”
The road from Zurich
In a certain way, Infantino owes his current post to the United States.
In the early hours of May 27, 2015, plainclothes Swiss police agents walked into the luxurious Zurich hotel where FIFA was holding its annual meeting. They were there at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice, which had been investigating corruption in the soccer world for five years. Police nabbed several organization officials as Baur au Lac hotel porters held white bedsheets in an attempt to shield the scene from the press. Ultimately, 14 officials and marketing executives were indicted in American courts on charges of fraud, bribery and money laundering.
The investigation toppled the sport’s top leaders. Sepp Blatter, who had served as FIFA’s president for 17 years announced his resignation just days after being reelected to another term. Months later, a suspicious payment Blatter had made to Michel Platini, Europe’s top soccer official, triggered a Swiss Attorney General investigation. That October, FIFA’s Ethics Committee provisionally suspended both men; the subsequent bans ended their careers.
That cleared a path for Infantino, who had moved his way up the bureaucracy of the European federation UEFA before serving six years as its general secretary. (A federation’s president resembles its head of state, the general secretary its head of government.) He was seen as Platini’s right-hand man, his bald head recognizable to fans worldwide from televised ceremonies in which Infantino drew the lottery balls that determined the Champions League draw.
But the polyglot lawyer was also a practical dealmaker, and he used those skills to propel himself to the FIFA presidency, in which the 207 member countries each have a vote. At a special session called in February 2016 due to the corruption case, Infantino built on his European base with support from North and South American associations, winning 115 votes in a runoff.
The first two major tournaments over which the new president would preside were already set. The subsequent World Cups were assigned to Russia, in 2018, and Qatar, in 2022 — two autocracies whose human-rights abuses Infantino papered over as he sidled up to the countries’ leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar.
Back in 2023, at Rwanda’s Pelé Stadium, one of Infantino’s longtime inner-circle advisers spoke at length about the FIFA president’s public image. “This whole idea of shoulder-rubbing with dictators? It’s not real. Sometimes the U.S. president is Joe Biden, sometimes it’s Donald Trump. Gianni can’t change that,” the adviser said, leaning back in the stands. “He’s not interested in politics — only in football.”
The local strategy of a global game
The tournament’s 2026 installment represents a very different political challenge for Infantino. The U.S., Mexico and Canada — who were awarded the games in 2018 after mounting a joint bid — would be the first triple co-hosts. Without a federal sports ministry, as exists in many of the other countries that have hosted the World Cup, FIFA could take a hands-on role shaping the American government infrastructure that would coordinate everything beyond a stadium’s perimeter.
Infantino made his first trip to the Oval Office in 2018, accompanied by U.S. Soccer Federation President Carlos Cordeiro. Infantino handed over a referee’s red card that Trump enjoyed brandishing for cameras and a soccer jersey emblazoned TRUMP 26 — even though it was then unimaginable that under any circumstances Trump would be in office when the tournament took place. But having a passionate supporter in the White House would be useful during the years of preparation.
“They were calling me constantly trying to get me to come on board,” Trump recounted at the time. “But it only took one call because when I heard ‘World Cup,’ I wanted to do it.”
But there was only so much Infantino could accomplish in Washington. (Unlike recent World Cup host nations, the United States will be notable for not hosting any matches or official events in its capital city.) Unlike in 1994, when the U.S. hosted the World Cup for the first and only time, there is no central organizing committee to oversee events in different cities and coordinate fundraising and commercial rights across them. Instead, 16 American, Canadian and Mexican host cities have individual relationships with FIFA.
International soccer would be just about starting from scratch, and Infantino began a yearslong campaign of laying down roots for FIFA, one trip at a time. The footloose Infantino showed up just about anywhere there might be cameras, with his own crew that documents every speech and handshake to his 3 million Instagram followers.
“I think in today’s world, without (his style), you probably aren’t going to be successful. But there’s a significant amount of ego, power and influence behind it. It surprises me and many others that he has become the face of not only FIFA, but its brand, its events,” said a person close to tournament planning granted anonymity due to fear of retribution. “Every day, it’s about Gianni Infantino, which is really unusual in the world of international sports.”’
When Infantino went to Seattle in October 2024, Tomozawa brought Washington Gov. Jay Inslee for a tour of the Seattle Sounders training facility before introducing him to the Puyallup Tribe, a federally recognized sovereign nation of more than 5,000 members, and its chair, Bill Sterud. “It was a wonderfully warm meeting,” said Tomozawa. “I know he’s got this persona and all that, but he’s a very, very nice, caring guy. Easy to talk to.”
In June, FIFA inaugurated its first Club World Cup, a 32-team club competition established partly as a warmup for its quadrennial showcase tournament. For his part, Infantino used this summer’s monthlong event as a way to deepen FIFA’s footprint in local governments nationwide. He met with Mayors Freddie O’Connell of Nashville, Tennessee, and Vi Lyles of Charlotte, North Carolina, on trips to their cities, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott while in Dallas. He chaperoned Vice President JD Vance to a match in Cincinnati, and attended a private fundraising dinner for the New York New Jersey Host Committee with Govs. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Kathy Hochul of New York, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In Los Angeles, Infantino appeared with police and fire chiefs from Pasadena and Los Angeles for a ticket giveaway to those who had battled the cities’ wildfires.
In each city he visited, Infantino pledged $1 million in FIFA funds to support local soccer development programs. He sat for interviews with local news broadcasts and sports-talk radio hosts even as he mostly shunned national and international press. (FIFA declined to make Infantino available for an interview for this story.)
“We will bring them here because we know that you are such a welcoming city,” Infantino told Philadelphia’s City Council. “They will fill the stadium, but they will also fill the city with joy.” That blend of statesman-like grandiosity and hyper-local politicking has made Infantino an unlikely player in U.S. civic life, and a useful one for figures in both parties.
But a perpetual eagerness to please has caused Infantino political problems before. “Today I feel Qatari,” Infantino said at a press conference on the eve of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.” The comment managed to offend just about everyone — human-rights organizations which had taken issue with the use of migrant labor in stadium construction, LGBTQ+ activists who believed the comment trivialized the nature of sexual orientation, social conservatives who perceived a corporate executive going woke, even a female reporter who noted that he had omitted gender in his litany of human identity. (“I feel like a woman,” Infantino quickly added.)
“The most important thing is that personally I have nothing against him — he is not a crook,” said one member of the FIFA council, the organization’s main decision-making body, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But the problem is his self-confidence: he loves dictators and billionaires. When he sees people with money, he melts.”
Miami clout machine
Behind the glossy black doors and ornate gold swirls of a Coral Gables commercial building sits Infantino’s American power center. It is technically a satellite of the Zurich headquarters where since its 1904 founding FIFA has set the rules of the game, managed the international transfer of players and provided support to improve infrastructure, training and access to soccer worldwide.
In Miami, FIFA has quietly built out a 60,000-square foot space that used to house HBO, where 400 people now work for the federation. There are legal and compliance departments permanently relocated from Zurich, a new digital-communications team and all of the operations and planning staff for both this year and next year’s tournaments. FIFA, which this month opened a separate office in New York’s Trump Tower, says it plans to maintain a U.S. headquarters in Miami after the 2026 games.
“There’s FIFA with all capital letters, and then there’s FIFA lowercase,” said one person involved in World Cup preparations granted anonymity to preserve working relationships. “Zurich is FIFA. Miami is ‘fifa’ unless Gianni is in town.” Infantino is guided by a small circle of advisers, including Portuguese public-relations strategist Onofre Costa, who ran Infantino’s 2016 election campaign before taking charge of FIFA’s communications. Another is the Dutch-Swedish lawyer Mattias Grafström, who became FIFA’s secretary general in 2024, is routinely described by experts as “the second-most-powerful man in world football,” leading day-to-day operations while the president travels.
Above all is Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs partner who resigned from the U.S. Soccer Federation president in 2020 amid a backlash related to the equal pay lawsuit filed by the women’s national team. He has since returned to Infantino’s side as a senior adviser, a Miami-based fixer who maintains U.S. relationships by vetting meetings and coordinating his schedule.
Cordeiro is supported by a robust Miami-based government-affairs team stocked with former White House and Hill staffers. After reporting no federal lobbying expenses in 2023, the FIFA World Cup committee hired the firm Arnold & Porter, and spent $535,000 in federal lobbying expenses that year, more than the NCAA, up from zero in 2023. Many of the host cities have their own contracts with other firms for World Cup-related lobbying.
The Miami office has become a place for Infantino to host everyone from members of the Florida Bar Association to top federal officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who came to consult with Infantino about World Cup security. (During the 2015 terror attacks across Paris, three suicide bombers detonated explosives outside the stadium where French President François Hollande was watching a match between France and Germany.)
This time, when American law enforcement was at the door, FIFA eagerly extended a welcome.
Trump wins a trophy
Upon the final whistle of the Club World Cup on July 13, Infantino led Trump from the luxury box where they had watched Chelsea defeat Paris Saint-Germain with their wives and three of Trump’s Cabinet members. The two men descended to the field of New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, where Chelsea’s players had gathered to celebrate their victory.
Trump pocketed a gold medal Infantino handed him and helped present a replica of the Club Winners Cup trophy, then lingered awkwardly while players impatiently waited for the politician to yield the stage.
The original trophy, an oversize 24-carat gold bauble that Infantino liked to point out had been designed by Tiffany & Co., remained in the White House. Infantino had brought it to the White House for its public unveiling in March, and then the trophy never left.
“We put it in the Oval Office and then I said: ‘When are you going to pick up the trophy,” Trump explained in a midgame interview with DAZN, a broadcaster backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund which won rights to air the tournament at the same time the country was controversially awarded the 2034 World Cup. “He said, ‘We’re never going to pick it up, you can have it forever in the Oval Office.”
While Infantino made efforts to cultivate relationships with Biden, including by hiring former White House staffers to FIFA’s Miami-based government-affairs team, he won limited access to the administration’s principals. Even as staff-level planning continued without incident, Infantino had little to show for his access beyond a grainy photo taken on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Indonesia, in 2022.
But that has changed with Trump’s return to the White House. In January, Infantino traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet privately with the incoming president, and attended a Washington rally the night before the inauguration where Trump mentioned him by name five times. During the swearing-in ceremony itself, Infantino sat just a few rows behind Trump, visible throughout the speech. In March, Trump called Infantino “the king of soccer.”
“He might be the most connected man in the world,” said Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz. “You know, the Dos Equis commercials, the most interesting man in the world? That is him. This guy is having this moment, and he’s capitalizing on it.”
While Infantino is winning support among the American political class, he still has to keep an eye on his core constituency: the 211 national federations who each have one vote when he faces reelection as FIFA president in 2027. They include not only the three North American countries with a stake in next year’s tournaments, but also the nearly 20 — largely in Africa and Asia — whose citizens will likely be prohibited from entering to the United States for the tournament because of Trump’s ban on travel from countries deemed a national security threat. (The administration has carved out players and coaches from countries like Iran, the first to earn qualification to next year’s cup, but has not made any concessions for fans.) Then there are scores of other countries whose governments have found themselves at odds with Trump over issues varying from tariffs to Mideast policy.
Yet those concerns are often quieted by the proceeds Infantino channels back to member associations through the FIFA Forward program, using FIFA’s profits from Club World Cup and other events including next year to support development programs across the world.
“He walks a difficult tightrope,” the FIFA official said, “trying to balance so many conflicting issues in the world of football and geopolitics, and he manages to do so quite deftly, in a way where he’s genuine, authentic, but also able to build the connections that he needs to.”
In May, FIFA postponed its annual congress in Asunción, Paraguay, to accommodate its president’s plans to accompany Trump on his first major overseas trip, to the Persian Gulf, and converted a session of its governing council to a virtual meeting so that Infantino could join remotely. From Infantino’s perspective, it was a worthwhile trade-off: he won a front-row seat at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh and a standing ovation from the crowd at Trump’s urging from the podium.
When Infantino finally did arrive in South America, by private jet, he was three hours late, angering European officials including UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin, who stormed out of the venue upon Infantino’s arrival.
“To have the timetable changed at the last minute for what appears to be simply to accommodate private political interests, does the game no service and appears to put its interests second,” UEFA explained in a statement.
Infantino’s ultimate reward may be the existence of White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026, which Trump announced in May. The task force, which includes Cabinet officials, senior presidential aides and is led by longtime Trump sports adviser Andrew Giuliani — offers Infantino a direct channel to the highest levels of the U.S. government via Cordeiro, appointed a senior adviser.
Officials have used the new institution to pressure the State Department around visa backlogs and work with Homeland Security to monitor safety protocols at Club World Cup matches. The reconciliation megabill Trump signed into law earlier this month included $625 million for World Cup security costs.
“FIFA is an official provider of happiness to humanity,” Infantino said at the task force’s inaugural meeting, from a seat next to Trump. “And in the next year, we are providing happiness to humanity from the United States of America.”
Once the session disbanded, Infantino was distracted. He received word that Inter Milan was making a comeback at the UEFA Champions League semifinals against Barcelona. Infantino pulled out his phone, and watched the last 15 minutes on his phone from the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk, outside the White House.
