WHEN Fifa president Gianni Infantino announced that his organisation would award a peace prize on the occasion of the 2026 men’s World Cup draw, all the headlines immediately speculated on US President Donald Trump as the likely recipient.

Absent any information on who would choose the winner, or what the criteria for selection even are, the Trump rumours were largely based on the chummy relationship between Infantino and the US president.

Infantino neither confirmed nor denied that Trump could be the first winner of the Fifa peace prize, but it’s hard to imagine how Trump has personally benefitted the sport, let alone peace. Trump’s candidacy therefore suggests that the recipient may not need to have contributed in any meaningful way to either.

As former Time magazine business and sports editor Bill Saporito wrote in a column for the Washington Post, “the only ball Trump has probably ever kicked is his golf ball — when he’s moving it to cheat.”

Trump does not have much of a record as a peacemaker either, given his hollow truce in Gaza where Israel is still killing Palestinians and denying aid entry. Trump has equally failed to end Russia’s war in Ukraine and is now threatening Venezuela after moving the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, into Caribbean waters.

And yet, in all of the coverage of the Fifa peace prize announcement, I could not find a single article speculating on other potential recipients. Maybe there’s someone out there who has come up with other names, but neither Google nor its eager but sometimes erroneous AI overview could find one.

There are certainly some deserving candidates inside the sport itself who won’t win it. Gary Lineker’s name springs quickly to mind. Lineker, the former England striker turned broadcaster, first drew ire from his then employer at the BBC when he protested at the Conservative government’s “We must stop the boats” policy, in early 2023.

After posting on his personal Twitter (now X) page that “this is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used in Germany in the 30s,” the BBC suspended Lineker from his host role on Match of the Day.

Undeterred, Lineker has since become an outspoken opponent of the genocide in Gaza, which further rocked boats at the BBC, eventually leading to his departure for a new role at ITV.

A number of football players and managers have also spoken out on Gaza. They include Manchester City manager, Pep Guardiola; former Manchester United player and actor Eric Cantona, who called for Fifa and Uefa to suspend Israel; Liverpool forward and Egyptian captain Mohamed Salah, who criticised Uefa for its silence on the killing by Israeli forces of Palestinian footballer Suleiman al-Obeid; and Anwar El Ghazi, the Dutch forward whose contract was terminated by Bundesliga club Mainz due to his pro-Palestinian activism.

None of them will win, nor the many others in football and other areas of public life who have spoken out on Palestine. The silencing of anyone calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza and voicing support for its Palestinian victims is prevalent in many quarters.

Fifa is no exception, especially given Infantino’s rather baffling high-profile presence at the Gaza peace summit in Egypt in October where he hobnobbed with Trump and Netanyahu.

The World Cup draw will be held in Washington DC on December 5 at the Kennedy Centre, the prestigious performing arts venue named after president John F Kennedy and whose leadership Trump abruptly dismissed, putting himself at its helm as board chair.

That has led to a precipitous drop in ticket sales due to boycotts by both performers and customers. To make matters worse, Fifa is getting the venue rent-free while bumping other Kennedy Centre events off the schedule.

Fifa will be allowed to occupy the Kennedy Centre for a full three weeks to prepare for the draw, further curtailing revenue. The last time I attended a draw for a sporting event, it involved pulling names out of a hat and placing them on a designated grid. It did not take three weeks or even three hours.

The most protracted rendition of a draw I experienced was in the hands of consummate US tennis showman, Jim Westhall, whose draws for his men’s professional tennis tournament were legendary for their flashy stunts.

In 1985, that involved a skydiver who was supposed to land on the stadium court at the Vermont event with his position on one side of the net or the other determining whether the number one seed would be placed at the top or bottom of the draw.

The parachutist caught a thermal at the last minute and missed the stadium altogether. As officials debated whether his apparent crash landing elsewhere constituted north or south of the net, I raced to check if he was in fact still actually alive. (He was.)

The draw proceeded, only to erupt in more controversy when then top star, John McEnroe, was drawn to play his younger brother Patrick in the first round. The brothers’ sometimes irascible father, John McEnroe Snr, then accused the organisers of rigging the draw to attract a crowd, an accusation that quickly collapsed given the tournament routinely sold out a year in advance. John beat Patrick and won the tournament.

These kinds of dramas make draws more suspenseful and entertaining. By all accounts, Fifa’s World Cup draw will once again be a celebrity-laden extravaganza, although it’s not clear who might show up next month in DC.

As the Washington Post reported, “the draw for the 1994 World Cup, the last time the men’s tournament was held in the United States, was a glitzy production held in Las Vegas.”

Indeed, Las Vegas was expecting a repeat performance until recently, when the draw was moved to DC due to Trump’s intervention.

We will have to wait until December 5 to see if Infantino is truly going to indulge in such blatant toadyism by awarding the Fifa peace prize to Trump.

But, as Saporito wrote, “None of this benefits the players or the fans or Fifa’s abominable reputation. The possibility even exists that the US president could be accepting the Fifa Peace Prize while the US Air Force is bombing Caracas.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a US-based writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.