Trump’s MAGA World Cup

This summer, Donald Trump will complete his conquest of the American right. He will force the movement to submit to the very thing that it finds most abhorrent: soccer.

One curious biographical fact about Trump is that he likes the game. He began following it in his 20s. Years later, his son Barron further stoked this enthusiasm. In the past year, Trump has invited the greatest living players, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, to the Oval Office, even though he has argued that neither of them measure up to the Brazilian virtuoso Pelé. Trump’s fandom puts him at odds with the pundit Ann Coulter, who once declared, “Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.” Last year, the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld joked, “In Europe they call it football, in the United States they call it soccer, everywhere else they call it homosexuality.” (At least I think this was a joke.)

However alien the world’s most popular sport might seem to many of the president’s boosters, Trump’s relationship with soccer is not a contradiction of his politics but an expression of them. The game is a playground for Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern potentates, and Latin American strongmen—his people. The underlying corruption of FIFA, which runs the World Cup, makes the organization a willing accomplice in his quest for self-glorification. With the world’s attention fixed on stadiums in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Trump will seize the opportunity to reap the tribute he craves: the genuflection of supplicants, the accumulation of spoils.

The reasons for the right’s disdain for soccer are, in their way, principled. Whereas baseball and American football are indigenous to the United States, soccer is viewed as a cosmopolitan imposition—beloved by immigrants and elites, backed by multinational corporations eager to blend the world’s largest economy into a global market. Just over a decade ago, Coulter wrote, “I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s ‘Girls,’ light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton.”

[Franklin Foer: A spectacle of scoundrels]

But Trump is not a child of the American right. He is a creature of Studio 54 New York. During his early years on the make, in the 1970s, soccer was the glamour game. A new professional league seemed poised to bring the sport to a mass American audience. Pelé came to play for the New York Cosmos—short for Cosmopolitans, as if to prove soccer skeptics’ point. The Brazilian genius arrived thanks to then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a lifelong soccer enthusiast, who told Brazil’s foreign minister that preventing Pelé from coming to New York wouldn’t be in his country’s interest. Giants Stadium would sell out for glimpses of the soccer star’s late-career virtuosity. “I was a young guy, so I came to watch Pelé and he was fantastic,” Trump told one interviewer last year.

Whereas some MAGA stalwarts think of soccer like a smelly French cheese that they never want to see in their kitchen, Trump covets its presence. He knows that the strongest of the strongmen have presided over the World Cup, a tradition that extends back to Benito Mussolini hosting the 1934 edition of the tournament. In 2018, Vladimir Putin watched games from a thronelike seat high above the center circle in Moscow. In 2022, Qatar allegedly sprinkled cash all over the world in order to host the World Cup, then moved the games to November because playing in its summer heat might have killed players.

Because the World Cup is the ultimate bread-and-circuses spectacle, they hoped that their hospitality might lead the world to look past their crimes—Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Qatar’s sponsorship of Hamas, their shared contempt for human rights. By pampering guests from the global elite—media, sponsors, heads of state—they intended to launder themselves into respectability.

Of all the corners of the international community, FIFA is the organization best suited for Trump’s realization of his dreams because it is entirely at ease making concessions to power. In 1973, it allowed a World Cup playoff game in Chile to proceed in a stadium only recently used by the Pinochet dictatorship to execute and torture its foes. (When Chile’s opponents, the U.S.S.R., refused to play, Chile was awarded the win by forfeit.) In the years since, FIFA has become a complex, highly lucrative patronage system, led by men who trade bribes for votes, who tend to award World Cups to the countries with the fewest ethical qualms about the process. The system was so rotten that the FBI indicted nine FIFA factotums in 2015—but that was another era.

Once the United States sought to propel FIFA away from the muck, but now it’s happily frolicking in it alongside them. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, has become a fixture of Trump world—a regular at Mar-a-Lago, a guest at the inauguration last year, an attendee of the first meeting of the Board of Peace. (According to The Athletic, Infantino has visited the Oval Office more than any head of state during Trump’s second term.) Even though FIFA has a well-appointed office in Miami, it now rents space in Trump Tower. “Our success is your success,” Infantino told Eric Trump at the announcement of that deal. When the president brooded over the Nobel Peace Prize he will never receive, Infantino invented the FIFA Peace Prize for him. The merging of interests is so complete that Rudy Giuliani’s son, who runs the White House’s World Cup Task Force, described the event unveiling the World Cup bracket as the “MAGA-FIFA World Cup Draw.”

[Tom McTague: The Qatar World Cup exposes soccer’s sham]

We already have a sense of how Trump will turn the World Cup into a celebration of himself. Last year, the United States hosted an expanded version of FIFA’s Club World Cup Championship—featuring professional clubs, not national teams—explicitly billed as a dress rehearsal for this summer. At the final, Trump, like Putin before him, sat in a large chair in the center of the stadium, flanked by Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, who were then Cabinet officials managing the mass deportation of some of America’s biggest fans of the sport. When Chelsea won the tournament, Trump took the stage to present the trophy—and then simply never left, lingering through the celebration. He seemed to slip one of the winner’s gold medals into his jacket pocket.

More than 20 years ago, I wrote a book called How Soccer Explains the World, about how the sport was the purest distillation of globalization. The last chapter was about how the United States, which had unleashed Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the world, had never quite succumbed to the world’s game. While I was optimistic that soccer would triumph, I wasn’t creative enough to imagine that it would be the handiwork of an American president who prided himself on his cultural chauvinism.

The presidency was never enough for Trump. That’s why he has always dreamed bigger. When he created his Board of Peace, he said that it would supersede the United Nations. With the World Cup, he gets five weeks to cosplay as president of the planet—stepping into a spectacle that transfixes the world. Whatever their objections to his presence, the soccer-mad audiences will overlook them, as he turns the world’s game into a festival of MAGA.

How Soccer Explains the World has been republished this week with a new foreword.