FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s fawning adoration of President Donald Trump, complete with the apparent creation of an award just for him, is now the subject of an ethics complaint.
The five-count complaint, filed Monday by the nonprofit FairSquare, alleges that Infantino’s friendly relationship with Trump violates Article 15 of FIFA’s code of ethics, which requires the governing body and its representatives to “remain politically neutral.”
“By providing clear support for President Trump’s political agenda at home and abroad, Mr Infantino has repeatedly breached his duty to remain politically neutral, and he has done so in a manner that clearly threatens the integrity and reputation of football and of FIFA itself,” FairSquare said.
Most visibly, Infantino last week awarded Trump the organization’s first-ever FIFA Peace Prize — an award, FairSquare notes, that Infantino appears to have created and awarded to Trump without input from the rest of FIFA.
The complaint cites two early December reports in The New York Times that the award was “so hastily arranged” that FIFA board members and vice presidents only learned of its existence through media reports.
“Multiple sources familiar with the process, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relations, said that the FIFA Council and Vice Presidents had not been consulted or involved in the establishment of a FIFA Peace Prize and that it had not been discussed at the previous FIFA Council,” the report said. “They also had no input into the selection criteria for determining a recipient.”
In November, Human Rights Watch asked FIFA to specify the criteria for awarding the prize, as well as details on how the winner would be selected. The letter went unanswered.
FIFA did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.
“If Mr. Infantino acted unilaterally and without any legal authority, this should be considered a blatant abuse of power,” the complaint said.
Annabelle Gordon/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In addition to the above, the complaint describes four clear violations of political neutrality by Infantino, including:
- Publicly lobbying for Trump to win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
- Endorsing Trump’s foreign policy during the FIFA Peace Prize presentation on December 5 itself.
- Encouraging people to support Trump’s political agenda during an appearance at the American Business Forum in Miami.
- After Trump’s inauguration in January, he proclaimed: “Together, we will not only make America great again, but the world.”
The complaint seeks a formal investigation into Infantino’s involvement in the FIFA Peace Prize and the decision to award it to Trump.
FairSquare program director Nicholas McGeehan told HuffPost that while the complaint focuses on Infantino and Trump, the bigger problem is FIFA itself.
“This complaint is about much more than Infantino’s support for President Donald Trump’s political agenda,” McGeehan said.
“More broadly, this is about how FIFA’s absurd governance structure has allowed Gianni Infantino to openly ignore the organization’s rules and act in a way that is both dangerous and directly contrary to the interests of the world’s most popular sport,” he added.
Indeed, FIFA has a long and less-than-stellar track record of representing the sport on the world stage.
In 2015, Swiss authorities, acting on behalf of the US Department of Justice, nine FIFA officials arrested on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies spanning 20 years.
The then FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, was not among those named in the indictment, although the scandal forced him to resign after 17 years at the top of FIFA.
(In a “fun” twist, the case began as an FBI investigation into an illegal gambling ring that the agency believed had ties to Russian organized crime and was operated from Trump Tower in New York City.)
Infantino took on the role of FIFA president in 2016, only for the Ministry of Justice to claim again the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Russia as a result of bribes, and the same goes for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
