FIFA's Controversial Peace Prize and Political Backlash
With six weeks to go until the World Cup kicks off in North America, FIFA finds itself fighting a very different kind of pressure – not from high presses or tactical traps, but from accusations that it has dragged football deeper into politics and shredded its own credibility as a “force for good”.
At the centre of the storm is a prize that barely existed a few months ago.
Infantino’s peace prize gamble
Led by president Gianni Infantino, FIFA chose the World Cup draw in December as the stage for its inaugural peace award. The first recipient: United States President Donald Trump, whose country will co-host the tournament with Canada and Mexico.
The symbolism was impossible to miss. Trump has repeatedly claimed he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. FIFA’s new honour looked, to many, like a made-to-measure consolation.
That decision has detonated a backlash that now stretches from Oslo to Australia.
Norwegian Football Association (NFF) president Lise Klaveness has gone further than most. She does not just want the award questioned. She wants it gone.
“We [the NFF] want to see it [the FIFA peace prize] abolished. We don’t think it’s part of FIFA’s mandate to give such a prize; we think we have a Nobel Institute that does that job independently already,” she said in an online briefing.
For Klaveness, a 45-year-old lawyer who has become one of the most outspoken voices in global football politics, this is about more than optics. It is about distance – the distance football’s institutions are supposed to keep from heads of state.
“We think it’s important for football federations, confederations and also FIFA to try to avoid situations where this arm’s-length distance to state leaders is challenged,” she argued, warning that such awards “will typically be very political” unless backed by serious, independent structures: juries, criteria, and the kind of expertise that takes years to build.
“That is full-time work; it’s so sensitive,” she said. “I think from a resource angle, from a mandate angle, but most importantly from a governance angle, I think it should be avoided also in the future.”
Calls for an investigation
The pushback is not just rhetorical. Klaveness revealed that the NFF board will write to support a complaint already filed by nonprofit organisation FairSquare, which has alleged that Infantino and FIFA may have breached their own rules on political neutrality when they handed Trump the prize.
“There should be checks and balances on these issues, and this complaint from FairSquare should be treated with a transparent timeline, and the reasoning and the conclusion should be transparent,” she said.
The message is clear: if FIFA wants to play in the world of peace prizes, it must also play by its own governance rulebook.
For now, the governing body has gone quiet. FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Mockery’ of human rights charter
From the pitch, the criticism sounds no softer.
Australian international Jackson Irvine, long involved in social and human rights causes, believes the award has undercut years of work to present football as a platform for positive change.
“As an organisation, you would have to say decisions like the one that we saw awarding this peace prize make a mockery of what they’re trying to do with the human rights charter and trying to use football as a global driving force for good and positive change in the world,” he told Reuters.
His frustration is sharpened by events that followed the ceremony. The US launched a military strike on Venezuela a month after the draw and began joint air attacks with Israel on Iran on February 28. Against that backdrop, a FIFA “peace” honour for the US president has landed like a provocation.
“Decisions like that feel like they just set us back in the perceived market of what football currently is, especially at the top level, where it’s becoming so disconnected from society and the grassroots of what the game actually is and means in our communities and in the world,” Irvine said.
Human rights promises under strain
FIFA is not operating in a vacuum. It has spent the last decade insisting that human rights now sit at the heart of its major events.
In 2017, it published its first Human Rights Policy. For the 2026 World Cup, its Human Rights Framework for host cities includes commitments to promote inclusion, safeguard freedom of expression and ban discrimination across the tournament, scheduled from June 11 to July 19.
On paper, it is a modern, progressive blueprint.
Rights groups say the reality is more complicated. They argue FIFA must do more to push the US on risks facing athletes, fans and workers, highlighting a hardline immigration crackdown and deportation drive under the Trump administration as a serious threat to those protections.
That tension – between the lofty language of charters and the hard edges of politics and power – is exactly why critics see the Trump peace prize as so damaging. It is not just a one-off misstep. It is a symbol.
A symbol that, just as football prepares for its biggest, most ambitious World Cup, the game’s rulers still cannot decide whether they are guardians of a global sport or players in a geopolitical game.
