Say what you like about the Olympics, its organizers understand rituals and protocols. Its invented traditions, often absurd, nonetheless insist that something is going on here that is not mere commercial spectacle or entertaining diversion: the parade of nations, the Olympic oath, anthem, torch and flame, and above all—despite De Coubertin’s preference for participation over performance—the medal ceremony. This was first codified in its modern form—three-stepped podium, laurels or flowers, gold, silver, and bronze medals, no heads of state, but national flags and the winner’s national anthem—in Los Angeles in 1932, and it has barely changed since, because it works. Victory may be illusory, fleeting, pyrrhic, but the prospect of it is what animates the sporting spectacle. A symbolic moment is vital.
Given the ritual importance, preeminence perhaps, of the climactic celebration of victory, FIFA took a long time to establish some kind of stable protocol for the World Cup. It is not clear that it has arrived at one even now. At the first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, FIFA president Jules Rimet went to the cost of commissioning the beautiful Nike-winged (the goddess, not the shoe company) sculpture from Abel Lafleur, and the trouble of crossing the Atlantic Ocean with it in a box, only to fail, it seems, to give it to the Uruguayans at the end of the inaugural final. The film of the celebrations shows Pablo Dorado, Uruguay’s first goal-scorer in the final, streaking across the pitch with a cup in his hand, but it is an entirely different trophy.
The next two World Cups, held under the more explicitly politicized conditions of Europe in the late 1930s, switched to heads of state presenting the trophy: Mussolini in 1934, and in 1938 French president Albert Lebrun. Mussolini also handed over to Gianpiero Combi, the victorious Italian captain, his very own Coppa del Duce, a huge silver pot maybe six times the height of FIFA’s trophy, as the band played the Fascist anthem Giovinezza.
In the immediate post-war era, heads of state were set to one side and FIFA had their own presidents do the job. In Brazil in 1950, Jules Rimet, overwhelmed and perhaps intimidated by the despair of the home crowd at their inconceivable defeat, hurriedly gave the trophy to the Uruguayan captain Obdulio Varela on the pitch before swiftly getting it back in its wooden box. In 1954, in Bern, standing on a tiny plinth that looked as if it had been knocked up from recycled pallets, Rimet handed the trophy to West Germany’s rather downbeat Fritz Walter, both drenched by the endless downpour that played a pivotal role in that final. In 1958, though the King of Sweden was on hand and eager to get involved with proceedings, the new FIFA president Arthur Drewry handed the cup to Brazil’s Hilderaldo Bellini who, for the first time, lifted it aloft for the cameras. In 1962 in Santiago, Chile it was much the same after Brazil had beaten Czechoslovakia, with yet another elderly English FIFA president—this time Sir Stanley Rous—conducting affairs, though this dour era of understatement was broken by a Brazilian official who leapt on the tiny podium to embrace his captain Mauro Ramos.
Stanley Rous, as FIFA president, might have stood higher in the pecking order than the mere president of Chile, but that is not to reckon with the British class system, and in 1966, he was not going to outrank the Queen. Elizabeth II, in canary yellow—feathered hat and matching gloves—handed the trophy to Bobby Moore, his hands wiped clean on the velvet of the royal box’s table. In 1970, Mexico’s President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz did the honors, though the real presidential hands on the trophy were back at the Planalto in Brasilia where the nation’s military dictator, President Emílio Garrastazu Médici, received the trophy as tribute from the team, and made it the emblem of the military dictatorship.
This was the end of the old trophy. The English had done their best to lose it in 1966 when, a few months before the tournament, it was stolen from a philatelic exhibition, “Sport in Stamps”, held in Westminster only to be miraculously recovered by a dog called Pickles who found it wrapped in paper under a car in Norwood, South London. From screwball comedy to heist movies, the Brazilians, thrice winners got to keep the trophy, though in 1983 it would be stolen from a cabinet at the football federation’s headquarters never to return.
FIFA weren’t taking those kinds of chances again and the new trophy—first presented in 1974— remains at HQ in the bunker in Zurich. It goes on tour, but everyone else is getting replicas, and there are now rules about who can and can’t touch it, with or without wearing gloves (past winners, heads of state and FIFA people). In 1978, the evil moustachioed President Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, another military dictator, gave the moment a real pantomime villain. King Juan Carlos I of Spain passed the cup to Italy’s Dino Zoff in 1982, Mexico’s President Miguel de La Madrid to Maradona in 1986, and Italy’s Francesco Cossiga to Lothar Matthäus in 1990. Despite tightening up these rules, the ritual remained strangely unchoreographed and haphazard.
The last great comedy of errors was 1986. Maradona, having received the trophy, was about to lift it to the crowd when, stage left, there entered a very harried-looking Sepp Blatter—then general secretary of FIFA—with a tray of medals. These were meant to have been handed out first and Maradona was hauled back to get his before the celebrations could get going. The year is also notable for being the last time there was really a proper pitch invasion at a World Cup final. Alongside the Argentina squad, staff and media, thousands and thousands of people descended to the pitch, some from the upper levels via impromptu ropes made from huge twisted Argentine flags.
Things had tightened up considerably in 1990 with the event mainly confined to a small secured square at the bottom of one of the stands. There was security right around the pitch, there were fireworks and music, but then there were also women in togas with silhouettes of buildings on their heads. President Cossiga had been working on his medal-giving skills—a model of rhythm, economy, and poise. By contrast, the final of the 1994 World Cup was chaotic as Vice President Al Gore handed over the trophy to Brazilian captain Dunga in a pitch-level scrum of bodies.
Over the next decade, the whole problem of podiums and displays was resolved in a DIY manner by the players themselves. In 1998, Didier Deschamps just climbed up on a table in front of President Chirac, joined by Zidane and others to lift the trophy. In 2002, marooned on a dais in the middle of the pitch in Tokyo, Cafu suggested to Blatter that the small cylindrical plinth that the trophy had been sitting on would serve a purpose, and with some aplomb climbed onto it, and proclaimed victory from there. Sensing the need for something, perhaps more dignified, FIFA included a curved bench on their victory plinth in Berlin in 2006, but Fabio Cannavaro, undaunted, just stood on it to lift the trophy.
FIFA presidents had been very much bit players in all of these affairs, but in 2010 and 2014, the exuberant Sepp Blatter, emboldened by his successes, moved center stage. In South Africa Presidents Zuma and Blatter approached the trophy together and handed it over to the Spanish as one. At the 2013 Confederations Cup, a dress rehearsal for the World Cup the following year, and accompanied by the greatest surge of nationwide social protest in a generation, President Dilma Rousseff was booed so badly that Blatter took to publicly interceding on her behalf with the crowd. In 2014, having seen the national team humiliated by Germany in the semi-finals 7-1, Dilma won the prize for the unhappiest head of state at a World Cup final and could barely bring herself to take it from Blatter’s hands and to give to Germany’s Philip Lahm.
At the last two World Cups, the head of state has stolen the show. In 2018 in Russia, the ten minutes required to assemble a dais on the pitch were accompanied by an explosive summer rain storm; the sky was streaked with lightning and the pitch and stands were drenched. Players, coaching staff, photographers, FIFA officials, the Presidents of France and Croatia, were all soaked to the skin. Yet one man, standing at some remove from the chaos, a quizzical look on his face, remained bone dry: President Vladimir Putin, unruffled beneath an umbrella held by a soaked factotum. In 2022 Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar brought out a black bisht—a Qatari cloak which conferred high status—and placed it over the Argentinean captain’s shirt before Infantino handed him the trophy.
What can we expect in 2026? The trophy presentation at the Club World Cup last year offers some clues. President Trump outstayed his welcome but seemed to enjoy his moment in the sun with the winners—Chelsea—on the victory plinth. President Infantino made a gift of a winner’s medal to him, not to mention a replacement of the trophy that had sat on his desk in the Oval Office for months. Of course, we are rolling the dice with this boy, but he’ll be handing out the trophy for sure. Given that the world’s most important festival of a cosmopolitan humanity is being held, primarily, in a country conducting what appears to to be an illegal war, and a massive, wild, erratic, and clueless shaking of the fragile filaments of what passes for the global order, what it will all mean is likely to be, at best, macabre.