Gianni Infantino has spent much of the last two years touring the convention circuit and selling the World Cup to the Americans. His stump speech carefully avoids overestimating the intelligence of his audience. He opens with some light twinkly pandering, never tiring of riffs on the theme of: “Football – well, we call it football, you call it soccer.” He teases the Americans with their funny way of speaking: “We call football a game we play with our feet! You, in this beautiful country, you call football a game you play with your hands!” Then he unveils what you could call “The Prestige”. From somewhere, a football is produced. Infantino holds it up and says solemnly: “This ... is not a ball.” He pauses to allow the effect of this extraordinary claim to ripple through the audience. “Let me show you,” he says. He throws the ball to somebody and points at them. “You see? Look the smile, look the smile!” The audience chuckles politely. “So, this is not a ball. It is a magic object, that transforms people, children – into happy people, happy children!” From here he veers into messianic rhetoric about the vast scale and spiritual power of this magic game he calls football but that it is also okay to call soccer. The 2026 World Cup, he claims, will be “simply the greatest event that humanity, that mankind, has ever seen and will ever see”. “Football unites the world” is his long-time personal slogan, appearing as a hashtag on most of his Instagram posts. Such is the power of football there will even be no crime in Brazil during the World Cup, because the criminals will all be watching the games. Are you getting the picture?Finally, he talks to them about money. Infantino has translated the term “World Cup” into American as “104 Super Bowls”. He calculates that the image of more Super Bowls than you can shake a stick at, each making it rain to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, will arouse even those who were unmoved by the earlier “magic object” bit. Fifa president Gianni Infantino has effectively argued that by gouging the customer base, he is simply honouring American culture. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The World Cup, he claims, will add $80 billion (€69 billion) to “gross global output”, $40 billion to US GDP, and create close to a million jobs. This, he urges, is “not only the biggest sporting event on the planet, it is a chance to invest in something that connects and inspires with a truly global audience”. Since the start of his presidency 10 years ago, Infantino has been the “line goes up” guy. Increasing revenue is the only metric of success. This World Cup is projected to make as much as $11 billion, which would be $3.5 billion more than the last one. How has he made the line go up so much in four years?To be clear: expanding the World Cup to 48 teams is an act of sporting vandalismSimply, by ramping up production, and jacking up prices. Part of the reason for billing it as “104 Super Bowls” may have been to prime the market for Super Bowl ticket prices. World Cup tickets in 2026 are between four and 10 times as expensive as they were in the Qatar World Cup four years ago. Fifa’s ticket prices provoked howls of outrage from football fans around the world, but Infantino has argued that by gouging the customer base, he is simply honouring American culture.“We have to look at the market,” he said last month. “We are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates.” (Nobody can remember him making this argument when the World Cup was in Russia). “You cannot go to watch in the US a college game, not even speaking about a top professional game of a certain level, for less than $300.” (According to Ticketmaster data, the average price of a ticket to a Major League Soccer game is $45-50.)Preparations last month around the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachussets, as the signage is transitioned to become Boston Stadium in advance of the World Cup. Photograph: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images In April he told a CNBC forum: “What is interesting is that the American entertainment industry, which everyone – I mean, nobody disputes it is number one in the world, right? Every entertainment comes and is led by America, with the exception of football – soccer ...”Actually, the interesting thing here is that the Fifa president now openly speaks about football as an entertainment product rather than a sport. He has always made an effort to blend in with his surroundings. In Qatar, in 2022, he became a Third Worldist firebrand berating the arrogance of the colonial West: “I think for what we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years around the world we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”Fifa is now ensconced in the post-woke United States, with offices in Miami and Trump Tower, and we don’t hear much from Anticolonial Gianni any more. President Trump calls Infantino “Johnny” and “the King of Soccer” – and to Johnny it is clear and obvious that football is a private commercial property, to be milked by its king as he sees fit.Whether in Doha or Miami, it is clear Infantino, who never stops babbling about the unique power of football, has little reverence, respect or even feeling for the game itself. Not really caring about the game allows him to blithely embrace all kinds of changes his predecessors baulked at. His Fifa presidency has given us VAR, the five-substitute rule, the Saudi-sponsored Club World Cup, half-time shows, three-minute quarterly drinks/advertising breaks and now a 48-team World Cup. To be clear: expanding the World Cup to 48 teams is an act of sporting vandalism. Fifa president Gianni Infantino has made it clear he views the World Cup as a private commercial property, to be milked by its king as he sees fit. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Fifa/Fifa via Getty Images This tournament was once the pinnacle of the world’s most popular sport – the only place where the world’s best players came together to play a competition all the fans of the game would watch. That has changed over the last 25 years, as the economic power of big European clubs and their ability to attract the best talent from all over the world means the highest level of football is now to be found in the Champions League. Sporting excellence, though, is still part of the mystique of the World Cup. These players are walking in the footsteps of Maradona and Pelé. But Infantino’s singular focus on increasing revenue risks turning the World Cup into a hollowed-out brand trading on past glories. Next weekend you can turn on the group stage and watch Germany and Curaçao contesting what Infantino has billed as a Super Bowl. Another Super Bowl pits Austria against Jordan in San Francisco. Houston hosts a Super Bowl between Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde.[ Irish soccer fans – who are you supporting for the World Cup?Opens in new window ]These Super Bowls are part of a group stage in which eight of 12 third-placed teams get through to the knockouts. The forgiving structure means you could lose your first two matches and still qualify. The element of jeopardy, which can transform even poor matches into gripping contests, has been diluted. Infantino was irritated by the evident glee with which Canadian media reported on the city of Vancouver’s refusal to grant Fifa’s request for him to be given ... a grade of VIP treatment that would have put the Fifa president on a par with the popeNone of this is good for the World Cup as a sporting event. Fifa’s approach contrasts with the Olympics, which also keeps expanding and commercialising, but still insists competitors meet exacting objective standards. For Infantino, the issue of “sporting quality” is down there with “fairness” at the very bottom of the priorities list. Line goes up is all that matters. Probably he spends too much of his time on private aircraft to think any other way. [ Michael Walker: Who is going to stand up for football against Gianni Infantino?Opens in new window ]Even aboard Air Johnny, Infantino cannot be unaware that fans have been complaining about prices, hotels have been complaining about underwhelming demand, and many politicians have been complaining about Fifa’s refusal to help with fan transport costs for the event that’s making them billions of dollars.Kaká, Hugh Evans, founder of the Global Citizen organisation, singer Shakira and Fifa president Gianni Infantino at the announcement of the World Cup Final half-time show, in New York in May. Photograph: Noam Galai/Getty Images for Global Citizen Experience will reassure him that the build-up to World Cups is invariably dominated by anxiety and criticism about bad things that have happened and the things that might go wrong. In South Africa and Brazil the preoccupations centred on violent crime, corruption and white elephants. In Russia, sportswashing, human rights abuses and creeping fascism. In Qatar, sportswashing again, mainly of human rights abuses and slave labour.Infantino remembers that when the football got going everyone immediately got swept up in the excitement and forgot about the violent crime and the sportswashing and the fascism. Will the same thing happen here? It’s quite likely. We know that World Cup football, especially knockout football, is a helluva drug. Yet 2026 is already unusual, in that while previous hosts seemed excited about hosting and eager to make a good impression, the US has been lashing out at the world. Launching wars, imposing sanctions, issuing threats, announcing tariffs, declaring travel bans and so on. The things we have come to regard as normal behaviour for the United States. Infantino’s two previous World Cups were in Russia and Qatar, autocratic states where the World Cup was the pet project of a government that could not be openly attacked or ridiculed. A billboard in Enghelab Square, Tehran, showing support for Iran's national football team for the World Cup. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images America’s bitterly divided politics present a more challenging terrain, especially as Infantino made the choice early on to identify himself so tightly with Trump, now ailing and increasingly unpopular. Inventing the Fifa Peace Prize to present it to Trump, just months before he attacked Iran, has already made Infantino a joke figure in America. He was irritated by the evident glee with which Canadian media reported on the city of Vancouver’s refusal to grant Fifa’s request for him to be given a level-four motorcade escort in the city, a grade of VIP treatment that would have put the Fifa president on a par with the pope. Infantino needs the football to dazzle ... but the last two summers have seen the US host major tournaments that did not dazzle. The 2024 Copa America saw pitches so bad that Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa nearly lost his mind. Bielsa also complained about the security arrangements in what he sarcastically referred to as “the land of security”. Now homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin is saying, “we have basically 78 Super Bowls in 11 cities [in the US] ... we feel like that threat level is extremely high especially in soft areas outside the stadiums”. At the 2025 Club World Cup, Fifa sold 62 per cent of the available seats. There were more complaints from coaches about the pitches, including the one at the 2026 final venue MetLife Stadium, and almost everyone complained about brutal summer heat that made it difficult for players to move.The winning coach, Enzo Maresca, was even more annoyed by the frequent compulsory delays for nearby lightning strikes: “For me personally, it’s not football. It’s already seven, eight, nine games that they suspended here. I think it’s a joke ... If you suspend seven or eight games, that means that probably this is not the right place to do this competition.”As the guests arrive for what he has promised will be the greatest party in the history of humanity, Johnny nervously eyes the gathering storm clouds. Nothing for it now but to close his eyes and trust once more in the magical powers of the ball.