The Führer's Playbook: How Trump's World Cup Became Football's Berlin 1936
How FIFA and Gianni Infantino are handing football's greatest stage to a war criminal, just as the IOC handed the 1936 Olympics to Hitler & the Nazis.
Ninety-one days. That is all that stands between us and the opening game of a World Cup that should never be played in the United States. Ninety-one days until the world’s most watched sporting event kicks off on American soil under the auspices of a man who assassinated a foreign head of state, kidnapped another, illegally bombed a sovereign nation with another rogue state, and whose administration is now openly warning the very nation it has attacked that attending could cost their footballers their lives. And still, FIFA President Gianni Infantino posts on his Instagram account and tells us that football unites the world.
It does not get more obscene than this. And yet here we are.
Let us be precise about what has just happened, because the speed of events risks normalising the extraordinary. The United States and Israel launched an illegal military bombing campaign on Iran - a sovereign nation, a FIFA member association, a country that qualified for the 2026 World Cup through legitimate sporting merit. In the course of that assault, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, was assassinated. This week, Iran’s Sports Minister Ahmad Donyamali delivered his nation’s response to the attacks with quiet dignity, “Considering that this corrupt regime [USA] has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup.” There is nothing ambiguous about that. A country has been attacked, its leader murdered, and its footballers are now expected to travel to the nation that did it, play football in its stadiums, and smile for the cameras.
The parallels to 1936 are not metaphorical. They are structural, institutional, and damning.
The Ghost of Berlin
When the International Olympic Committee handed the 1936 Games to Germany, Adolf Hitler had already been Chancellor for two years. The Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of citizenship had already been enacted. The concentration camps were already operating. Yet the IOC looked the other way, accepted the regime’s assurances, and delivered the world’s greatest sporting spectacle into the hands of a genocidal government. Joseph Goebbels understood exactly what was on offer as the Nazi Minister of Propaganda - a global stage, a legitimising spectacle, an opportunity to present the “New Germany” to a world that might otherwise recoil in horror.
The mechanism by which this was achieved involved compliant sporting administrators willing to prioritise commercial interests and organisational prestige over basic moral principle. Avery Brundage, the American who fought most ferociously against a US boycott, dismissed evidence of persecution and accepted Nazi assurances at face value. The IOC’s German members were either Nazi collaborators or committed supporters. The institution chose to believe Hitler’s promises rather than confront his regime.
Sound familiar?
Replace the IOC with FIFA. Replace Brundage with Infantino. The names change; the architecture of capitulation remains identical. This is a FIFA president who has visited the White House more than ten times since late 2024, who calls Donald Trump a “close friend,” who leased FIFA office space in Trump Tower, and who invented an entirely new FIFA “Peace Prize” and handed it to him at the World Cup draw in Washington - when Trump failed to secure the Nobel Peace Prize he openly craved and begged to be given. The prize was pushed through so quickly that many of FIFA’s own officials were caught off guard, further proving that the award was driven personally by Infantino himself, a lickspittle delivering the goods to his patron.
And now, 91 days out, with American bombs continuing to on Tehran [and the rest of the country] and the Iranian Supreme Leader dead, Infantino posts on Instagram celebrating a White House meeting and quotes Trump saying the Iranian team is “of course, welcome to compete.” This is not diplomacy. This is a man presenting his master’s latest statement for public approval, as if a warm welcome from the country that just assassinated your leader constitutes an adequate guarantee of safety.
Trump’s Forked Tongue
Let us examine the precise choreography of what Trump has done here, because it reveals exactly the kind of leader he is and exactly why the World Cup must be stripped from his hands.
First, when asked about Iran’s participation, Trump said he didn’t care whether they competed. Not a guarantee of welcome. Not a statement of safety. A shrug. Then, in a meeting with Infantino, he reversed and offered assurances that Iran was welcome the kind of performative statement that costs nothing and means less. And then, almost immediately, he took to Truth Social to clarify that while the Iranian national team was technically welcome, he did not believe it was appropriate for them to be there, for their own life and safety.
Read that again. The host nation’s president is publicly stating that the safety of a participating team cannot be guaranteed. He is saying it to justify Iran’s absence, to make their withdrawal appear voluntary, even sensible, rather than the direct consequence of his own administration’s illegal military aggression. This is psychological manipulation at the level of statecraft. Iran was bombed. Iran’s leader was murdered. Iran’s footballers are now told, by the man responsible, that attending the tournament he is hosting might cost them their lives as well. The conclusion we are meant to draw is that Iran chose not to come, not that they were driven away.
This is precisely the kind of political theatre that gave 1936 its power. The Nazis did not ban Jewish athletes from the Games outright, that would have been too obvious, too likely to provoke a boycott. Instead they created conditions that made their participation practically impossible while maintaining a surface of procedural correctness. The mechanisms of exclusion are always dressed in the language of invitation.
The FIFA Peace Prize: A Trophy for a War Criminal
I wrote back in November 2025, when the FIFA Peace Prize was first announced and Trump was its obvious recipient, that it exposed the uncomfortable reality of FIFA’s governance that for Infantino, peace is secondary to power, prestige, and politics. Nothing that has happened since has changed that assessment. Everything that has happened since has confirmed it.
Trump has received this prize - which was supposedly celebrating football’s power to unite humanity - before overseeing the illegal bombing of Iran, the assassination of the Iranian Supreme Leader, the attack on Venezuelan sovereignty including the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, and the sustained brutalisation of migrants through an immigration enforcement apparatus that his own administration has deployed across the country and will do so at football stadiums this summer. The FIFA Peace Prize now stands as one of the most obscene and sickening awards in the history of sport, a trophy presented to a man whose actions have directly caused this World Cup to lose a qualified nation, and whose rhetoric about the safety of Iranian footballers reads less like concern than like a threat.
Venezuela is a FIFA member association. Its president was kidnapped in an operation involving US forces - an act of regime change that violates the UN Charter’s most fundamental prohibitions. But as they didn’t qualify for the World Cup, they don’t face the same situation as Iran. But how can any nation that has been targeted by Trump’s transactional foreign policy - through sanctions, tariffs, threats, or direct military action - feel safe within his borders? The tournament that was meant to be a festival of football has become, through Trump’s own actions and Infantino’s pandering, a test of political loyalty.
This is the 1978 Argentina template grafted onto a nuclear-armed democracy. General Videla called his World Cup the World Cup of Peace too. The torture chambers at ESMA ran throughout.
FIFA’s Own Precedent Condemns It
I have argued before, and I argue again now, that FIFA has set itself a trap from which only one principled exit exists. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, FIFA’s Congress expelled Russian teams from its competitions. The justification was explicit, Russia’s aggression had created a scenario that “endangered the security and integrity of football.” This was not a political statement. It was an invocation of FIFA’s own foundational principles - its statutes, its human rights policy, its ethical code.
The United States has now committed acts of military aggression that are, by any objective legal standard, equivalent to what Russia did in Ukraine. The US and Israel launched an illegal assault on a sovereign nation. They assassinated its head of state. A qualified World Cup nation has withdrawn as a direct result, citing the murder of its leader by the host nation. The logic that expelled Russia demands the expulsion of the United States.
Yet Infantino posts on Instagram.
The counter-argument that it is “too late” that with 91 days to go, removing the US as host is logistically impossible, is both a practical challenge and a moral evasion. Canada and Mexico are co-hosts. Their infrastructure is in place. The transition would be complex, costly, and necessary. FIFA has used the “paramount interest” clause in its statutes before to override host agreements when circumstances demand. The circumstances have never demanded it more urgently. And if Infantino truly cannot bring himself to act against his benefactor, then the member associations of FIFA must force the issue. The precedent is there. The justification is there. Only the will is absent.
Trump’s own statement, that it would not be appropriate for Iran to attend the tournament for their own safety, should be treated as a formal admission of FIFA disqualification. A host nation has a legal and contractual obligation to guarantee the safety and dignity of all participating nations, their players, officials, and fans. If the host nation’s own president publicly states that the safety of a specific team cannot be assured, the hosting agreement is void. FIFA does not need a new rule. It already has one. It just needs to enforce it.
The Iranian Team Deserves Protection, Not Platitudes
There is one final point that must be stated with absolute clarity. Iran qualified for this World Cup through their footballers’ skill and effort on the pitch. Those players, who had nothing to do with the political decisions of their government, just as no Russian footballer individually started the war in Ukraine are the victims here. They trained for years, qualified through competition, and have now been robbed of their World Cup by the illegal actions of the country that is hosting it.
FIFA protected Ukraine by establishing special dispensations, transfer accommodations, and solidarity payments following Russia’s invasion. It treated Ukrainian footballers as victims of aggression deserving of protection and support. Iranian footballers are now in an identical position, the victims of aggression from a host nation conducting an illegal war. Their place in FIFA competitions must be safeguarded. Their right to play, even if not in the United States, must be defended. FIFA cannot extend solidarity to Ukrainian athletes while abandoning Iranian ones. That would not just be hypocrisy. It would be racism dressed in sporting colours.
The Reckoning That Must Come
The 2026 World Cup is 91 days away. The stadiums have been selected, the tickets are sold, the television rights are signed. The commercial machinery is too vast and too profitable to stop, or so Infantino would have us believe. This is exactly what was said about 1936. The Games were too close. The investment was too great. The disruption would be too severe. And so the world’s sporting bodies handed Adolf Hitler the most powerful propaganda platform in human history, and the games went ahead, and three years later Europe was at war.
History does not repeat with perfect fidelity. Trump is not Hitler. The United States is not Nazi Germany - yet. But the functional parallel, a governing body of global sport choosing commercialism over moral principle, lending the legitimacy of the world’s greatest tournament to a government engaged in illegal military aggression, in breach of international law, and in violation of the governing body’s own stated standards - is not a metaphor. It is a documented institutional failure happening in real time.
Infantino must strip the United States of the 2026 World Cup and relocate their games to Canada and Mexico. He will not. His relationship with Trump, his Peace Prize, his Trump Tower office lease, his Instagram enthusiasm, all of it tells us he will not. So the question becomes whether the 210 member associations of FIFA will compel him to do what he lacks either the courage or the integrity to do himself. It’s very doubtful as Trump would turn his sights on those nations and impose whatever sanctions or tariffs he sees fit to dish out.
The alternative is to allow a man who assassinated one foreign leader, kidnapped another, and bombed two sovereign nations to stand on the biggest stage in global sport and claim football as his. To allow the same man to warn visiting nations that their players’ lives cannot be guaranteed and to treat that warning as an acceptable condition for competition. To pretend that a tournament from which Iran has been driven by US military aggression is a celebration of the beautiful game.
That is not a World Cup. That is a propaganda spectacle. And we have seen this story before. We know how it ends.
It was already going to be a weird tournament but now that Iran is firing rockets etc at Qatar and Saudi Arabia all of whom have qualified it’s got even weirder. Apart from anything else aviation fuel will probably become very scarce.
It's hard not to keep politics out of sporting events, but it really does the World Cup a disservice.
Lets hope the World Cup is conducted in a good sense of friendship, concord and tolerance, and that Scotland do us proud on the world stage.