The Gilded Absurdity of the FIFA Peace Prize

If you squint past the narcissism and slop aesthetics, you can see, reflected in the FIFA Peace Prize, a definite stage of imperial crisis.

by

Steven D. Cohen

Why is a raven like a writing desk? The FIFA Peace Prize is real, in that FIFA, a real organization, did in fact award a really hideous trophy, likely not made of real gold, to Donald Trump last December at the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington D.C. Or rather, the FIFA Peace Prize is real so that it could be awarded to Donald Trump at the World Cup draw last December. Unveiled in the “Trump Kennedy Center,” a performing arts venue recently renamed to honor the still-sitting and “healthiest ever” president and awarded by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a clammy Swiss bureaucrat who looks exactly like an egg and whose surname essentially means “little child” in Italian—the FIFA Peace Prize is as real as any piece of wish fulfillment can be. Trump desired the Nobel Peace Prize but did not win it. When the facts refused to care about Trump’s feelings, Infantino stepped in with a pure, gilded manifestation of alternative facts.

Trump was recognized by soccer’s global governing body for “exceptional and extraordinary actions to promote peace and unity,” a citation nearly as absurd as the prize itself. And yet, the FIFA Peace Prize itself is real enough: a mangled pedestal of spindly golden hands, grasping at a desiccated golden planet. Copied, with no evident craft or artistic purpose, from a garden statue at the United Nation’s Geneva headquarters, it is essentially a 3D print of an AI hallucination, an express-ordered empty signifier, produced solely because it can be—and to titillate the imagination of the terminally lazy and incurious.

But if you squint past the narcissism and slop aesthetics, you can see, reflected in the FIFA Peace Prize, a definite stage of imperial crisis. One day, when the beautiful new White House ballroom dedicates a special gallery to these post-postmodern artifacts, the FIFA Peace Prize will sit right at the center, flanked by the FIFA Club World Cup trophy Trump interdicted from Chelsea last summer, the glowing Tolkienesque orb he fondled, backroom, at a 2017 summit in Riyadh, and, of course, the real Nobel Peace Prize he was gifted by the real 2025 laureate Maria Corina Machado—the off-with-their-heads, though very much anti-Red, leader of the Venezuelan opposition—in what may be the most obsequious act in the history of prizes (real or fake).

It turns out we are all a bit mad here. As Patrick Blanchfield rightly cautioned in a recent n+1 essay titled “You Can Just Do Things,” neither the United States nor its fizz-brained unitary executive enjoys a “singular and uncontested prerogative to alter reality through magical thinking, force of arms, indignant entitlement, and sheer dippy fiat.” But until reality somehow imposes causal law on our spiraling nightmare of elite impunity, the impression can be curiously similar.

In the months since that fateful day at the Trump-Kennedy Center in December, the first—and, odds are, only-ever—FIFA Peace laureate has mused, respectively, about invading and annexing Mexico and Canada, the neighboring co-hosts of the 2026 World Cup. He has converted the Atlantic and Pacific waters that surround qualifying nations from Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, into an arena for counternarcotics bloodsport, the extrajudicial bombing of “drug boats” that are quickly disseminated as gamified snuff films on Elon Musk’s internet. He has said that he is prepared to seize Greenland by force—a move that could conceivably trigger war with the fourteen NATO nations that have qualified for the World Cup—threatened to sever trade with several of Europe’s qualifying nations, and mocked the wife of France’s prime minister. Trump has, in short, violated, sabotaged, humiliated, menaced, subordinated, destabilized, or otherwise provoked and imperiled most of the World Cup’s forty-eight nations, with FIFA President Giovanni Infantino sanctioning this flailing enmity at every turn.

Nevertheless, the World Cup continues. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney et al. may bemoan the “rupture” of the Rules-Based International Order, but Infantino is betting that, when push comes to shove, the years he has spent kissing Trump’s ass will pay off—literally. When Trump said that the only restraint on his power was “my own morality, my own mind,” FIFA’s impossibly bald president was listening. Trump’s increasingly addled morality and mind call the music; Infantino dances the tune. Under the aegis of Trump’s preposterous Board of Peace—an assembly devoted to the president’s pay-for-play schemes, rather than his expanding portfolio of foreign conflicts, wars, and other entanglements—Infantino announced a “comprehensive recovery program” for Gaza through which FIFA would spend tens of millions of dollars building soccer pitches amid an ongoing genocide. Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, as it were, and order a double-tap on the Iranian national team and the FIFA president would still stand behind him.

So long as the World Cup proves a commercial success—for FIFA, that is—who is to say that Infantino is deluded about how the world actually works? Rational analysis demands that we allow for the possibility that FIFA emerges from this summer’s tournament, functionally, as the realest Global Governance Body left.

Steven D. Cohen is a writer, historian, and teacher based outside of Washington, D.C. At a showcase leading up to the Indigenous People’s Copa América, Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama assured him that a 14-year-old Luis Diaz would one day play for the Colombian national team.