'FIFA is a dictatorship': A former FIFA president lashes out at his successor's Trump ties
On May 27, 2015, plainclothes Swiss police working at the behest of the FBI entered a Zurich luxury hotel and walked out with some of the most powerful people in global soccer. Subsequent indictments by the U.S. Justice Department, built off a multi-year FBI investigation of corruption in soccer, led within months to the downfall of FIFA President Sepp Blatter after 17 years in the post.
Now 89 and suspended by FIFA from official soccer, Blatter has emerged in a new role: as a gadfly critic of his successor, Gianni Infantino, who has assiduously courted President Donald Trump ahead of the first World Cup that will be spread across three countries. Last week Infantino participated in the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace while wearing a red USA baseball cap, not long after awarding Trump a specially invented FIFA Peace Prize — activities that Infantino’s opponents both inside and outside FIFA say violate the organization’s rules about political neutrality. (The International Olympic Committee, of which Infantino is a member, has cleared him of wrongdoing.).
The Swiss-born Blatter, who was acquitted of fraud charges in a ruling upheld last year by a Swiss court, spoke recently to the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, to which POLITICO belongs.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/27/fifa-is-a-dictatorship-a-former-fifa-president-lashes-out-at-his-successors-trump-ties-00802745