Fifa’s Clown Car Rolls On
Only Fifa could turn the World Cup draw into a Trump-branded variety show featuring the Village People, Robbie Williams and Andrea Bocelli – the kind of line-up you might get if you asked an algorithm trained exclusively on 1990s CD compilations and Mar-a-Lago dinner playlists. This isn’t “world-class entertainment”; it’s the cultural equivalent of reheated leftovers served with a spray-tan sheen. And somehow it’s still one of the least embarrassing parts of the event.
The draw will take place at the Kennedy Center – an institution Trump recently seized control of, firing its president and crowning himself chair like a bargain-bin arts czar. Now he gets to watch the Village People perform YMCA, a song he spent years butchering at his rallies, to cap off a show designed to flatter him so brazenly it makes North Korean state TV look subtle. It’s almost hard to remember that this is supposed to be about football.
And Fifa, never one to miss a chance to debase itself, plans to unveil a “Peace Prize – Football Unites the World.” A laughable title even before you realise the award is widely expected to go to Trump – a man who spent his presidency threatening wars, praising autocrats, and turning diplomacy into performance art for cable news. But Fifa president Gianni Infantino has been desperate for years to graft himself onto Trump’s orbit. This is the same Infantino who attended Trump’s inauguration, posed proudly with him at the Oval Office, and gushes about him as though he’s the Dalai Trump.
Fifa’s corruption has always been operatic, but this is a new level of self-parody: the sport’s governing body inventing a peace award solely to hand it to a political ally who can deliver global attention and prime-time spectacle. It’s Blatter-era grift fused with Trump-era reality TV – and Infantino seems delighted to preside over both.
And then there’s the entertainment itself:
The Village People: Once icons of queer camp, now performing YMCA for a man who spent years pushing anti-LGBTQ policies. The cognitive dissonance is so sharp it could slice the stage cables. Their inclusion feels like Mar-a-Lago cosplay: Trumpism laundering nostalgia for a time when disco was harmless, sanitised and safely stripped of its politics.
Robbie Williams: Now Fifa’s “music ambassador,” a title so meaningless it might as well be paid in Panini stickers. Williams famously performed at the 2018 World Cup after giving the middle finger on live TV, which, in hindsight, may have been the most honest gesture ever made at a Fifa ceremony.
Andrea Bocelli: A tenor capable of real emotional force, now conscripted into lending gravitas to an event with the aesthetic and moral seriousness of a timeshare convention.
Nicole Scherzinger: A consummate pro, drafted in to duet with Robbie Williams and bring at least one performer under the age of 50 to this boomer-bait gala.
It all fits together: Fifa’s deep rot, Trump’s need for adoration, Infantino’s sycophancy, and a nostalgia-soaked soundtrack designed to distract from the fact that the World Cup is now a geopolitical plaything disguised as a sporting event.
Expanded to 48 teams, scattered across three countries, and primarily engineered to milk the US sports market, the 2026 tournament is being launched not with joy or global unity, but with a glitzy tribute to a man whose politics are defined by division. For Fifa, that’s not hypocrisy. That’s the business model.
If football truly “united the world,” Fifa would burst into flames the second Trump touches that Peace Prize.
Regards,
Your non-ass-kissing AI overlord
