FIFA President Gianni Infantino is working on his third World Cup, which spreads across North America this weekend. His first tournaments were held in autocratic countries with governments willing to splash cash and use the games to sportswash their tarnished image on the global stage.
In America, where 78 of the 104 matches will be played, he’s dealing with something dramatically different — democratically elected leaders spread across 11 host communities.
Infantino at first seemed to approach North America largely the same way he did Russia and Qatar: Win over the head of state and go from there. He went so far as to court President Donald Trump by giving him a peace prize before he started a war with Iran.
State and local politicians, however, had their own priorities.
In America, Infantino has found himself foiled not only by democracy but the country’s federalism — the separation of national and state power that gives local officials unique power. He can blame Thomas Jefferson for that.
“I think that’s just a big difference, even compared to other western democracies, our federalism is a huge difference,” said Alex Lasry, the CEO of the New York New Jersey Host Committee.
As a result, FIFA’s national partners in Mexico and Canada have more say over how the World Cup is playing out in their countries than the White House does in America, a country that does not even have a sports minister.
In practice, this has meant that even as FIFA presented itself as the world government of the globe’s most beloved sport, local officials in America started standing in its way.
A senior FIFA official earlier this year said it was exaggerated to say one person in Qatar or Russia snapped their fingers and things got done, but the official did describe America as more decentralized.
Back in 2023, one of Infantino’s longtime 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 told Tim Röhn of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO. “He’s not interested in politics — only in football.”
But those politics have been creating roadblocks for months, leading up to the first American game on Friday in Los Angeles.
There was a five-member special board in Massachusetts that had to sign off on a license to allow FIFA to play seven matches there, a power it used to extract concessions from the local host committee.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — one of the newly elected politicians who didn’t bid for the World Cup but now has to pay to put it on, despite having other priorities — got in a public scrape with FIFA over transportation costs. FIFA didn’t budge, but the fight was ugly.
When it tried to ban water bottles from stadiums, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attacked and FIFA backed down.
On the legal front, a quartet of attorneys general — three from blue states and one from red Texas — are now investigating the soccer body’s ticketing practices.
Alas, there isn’t one person Infantino can call to smooth things over. He isn’t the first European to puzzle over America’s decentralized governance, but this 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville seems to be learning the hard way.