The Trump World Cup
How bad actors turn sport into authoritarian spectacle.
Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
The World Cup is kicking off today. The first matches will be held in Mexico before the competition comes stateside—tomorrow in Los Angeles, and on Friday in New Jersey. This is only the second time FIFA’s premier football tournament (or “soccer,” for you Americans) has graced US soil.
Millions of American soccer fans are surely excited for the event (if they can overcome congestion and eye-popping ticket prices). Yet the discerning viewer needs to be able to tell when sport is being hijacked for authoritarian spectacle.
Twelve years ago, when Moscow seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, I called out FIFA for not revoking the Russian regime’s bid to host the then-upcoming 2018 World Cup.
“Would anything cancel it?!” I asked incredulously. “It’s war!”
The 2018 World Cup gave the Kremlin an opportunity to project normalcy to the world while it waged a campaign of military aggression against neighboring Ukraine. The dead and disappeared in the Donbas and Crimea were buried under sleek modern stadiums. It evoked the 1980 Moscow Olympics, held in the shadow of the USSR’s brutal war in Afghanistan. At least back then, there was a well-organized boycott of the games.
For Vladimir Putin, the World Cup was the apex of his international position, truly having his medovik and eating it too.
America today is not Russia, but the train is moving rapidly in the wrong direction.
The massive soccer competition will edge out stories of marauding ICE agents and blatant corruption. President Donald Trump is expected to present the World Cup trophy in July. He will be sure to put his distinctive personal stamp on the whole affair, like Napoleon taking the crown from Pope Pius VII.
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FIFA has been a willing accomplice in all of this. It is a famously amoral institution. The football federation has long been courting Trump personally, awarding the president the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” earlier this year to soothe his bruised ego after being denied a Nobel. The news was not that FIFA was effectively bribing a world leader (corruption is standard fare among most international sporting committees)—the shock was that the leader being bribed was the president of the United States.
Trump is happy to log the World Cup as another piece of evidence that “America is back” on his watch—a vindication of MAGA’s fundamental premise that the US was a nation in need of a strongman to wrench it out of its supposed terminal decline.
Upon receiving the FIFA Peace Prize last December, Trump declared that “the United States, one year ago [under Joe Biden], was not doing too well.”
“Now, I have to say, we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
In the first half of my chess career, I competed internationally under the Soviet flag. While I was hardly the Communist Party favorite, my victories—like those of other Soviet athletes—were nevertheless leveraged as proof of the socialist system’s superiority.
Such propaganda was a farce then. It remains so now. Talented athletes often succeed in spite of authoritarian regimes, not because of them. That’s why I eventually abandoned not only the Soviet flag, but the Russian tricolor too. I played under white-blue-red flag for 15 years, but I decided that I was not going to give Putin any more free legitimacy.
While fans enjoy the “beautiful game” over the coming weeks, they should remember that hosting a World Cup or winning a chess match proves nothing about the health of a country’s politics.
To host a World Cup, a nation need only be as democratic as the Argentine junta (1978), as transparent as Qatar (2022), and as peaceful as Russia (2018). That might be enough for Donald Trump. The American people should aspire to something better.
The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.
"Fútbol is life!" Just only for some.
The FIFA F A K E Peace Prize