The World Cup is coming to America—and It has a plan to keep Trump onside
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The plans for next summer’s World Cup had been brewing for nearly a decade by the time Gianni Infantino, the president of soccer’s world governing body, stepped into the Oval Office last month.
It was one of his regular check-ins with President Trump ahead of the largest undertaking in the history of professional sports—a monthlong, 48-team tournament, held across 16 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, with over 1.2 million fans expected to flood in from abroad. Even for FIFA, which has organized the World Cup since 1930, the logistics are staggering.
So Infantino was visibly taken aback when Trump faced a bank of cameras and suggested stripping games from Boston over his displeasure with the city’s Democratic mayor. “If somebody is doing a bad job and if I feel there’s unsafe conditions," Trump said, “I would call Gianni, the head of FIFA, who’s phenomenal, and I would say, ‘Let’s move it to another location.’ And he would do that." FIFA has insisted that no venue changes are in the cards.
But the mere suggestion of a White House-ordered switch was a powerful reminder that Trump’s influence on the 2026 World Cup will be impossible to ignore. He will be ever present on World Cup matters through next summer, starting from Friday, when the president is expected to join Infantino at the Kennedy Center for the tournament draw.
“I have a great relationship with President Trump, where I consider him a really close friend," Infantino said during a November appearance at the America Business Forum in Miami. “He has such incredible energy and this is something that I really admire." For global soccer, this World Cup was supposed to be the easy, uncomplicated one, after editions in Vladimir
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