Inside Fifa's shambolic and shameful World Cup draw

Full of bad jokes and highly politicised, the protracted ceremony was a glimpse into football's dystopian future

- Miguel Delaney

Right at the start of events in Washington’s Kennedy Center, Fifa president Gianni Infantino warned “it’s not a normal draw”.

That was saying something. It featured extremely politicised interpretations of the most grave situations in the world, from Gaza to Kosovo, which started to look a lot like propaganda.

It is a tragedy for football that Fifa - the body that is supposed to serve the game - has resorted to this. Somehow, another draw.

The 2026 World Cup draw ultimately formed an utterly dismal spectacle.

The description that was already spreading around the Kennedy Center and beyond was that “this was much worse than anything that Sepp Blatter could have dreamed up”.

Ronan Evain, the head of Football Supporters Europe, who had earlier criticised the disgraceful ticket pricing that Trump had praised, wondered how much longer “Infantino will be allowed to take football into the gutter”.

Will any federation speak out, given how their event was being used? The FA did not offer a comment when asked by The Independent.

These highly politicised portrayals were in the video explaining why Donald Trump had won Fifa’s inaugural Peace Prize – Infantino, of course, interjecting with the new slogan, “Football unites the world”.

“This is what we want from a leader, a leader that cares about the people,” Infantino gurgled.

All around Washington, you can see flags and banners proclaiming the exact opposite. At that exact time, reports were already emerging from eastern Congo that fighting had flared, mere hours after the announcement of the DR Congo-Rwanda peace deal.

That merely ensured that all seven conflicts that Fifa was claiming Trump had played a part in ending were anything but close to being solved.