The World Cup has only just started, and FIFA has already suffered a humiliating defeat

June 13, 2026 — 5:00am

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Last week, I suggested that to boost flagging World Cup ticket sales, FIFA should give one of its peace prizes – no, really – to everyone who buys a ticket. This week, it emerges that the Cup’s problems run much deeper than that.

Complaints start with the Americans having turned the whole thing into a premium entertainment product rather than a sporting festival for the people. Tickets for popular matches are going for tens of thousands of dollars, while other matches will likely be played before sparsely populated stands.

There is also the issue of supporters and officials from various countries being hassled at the American border (see the referee from Somalia who was sent home). Further criticism focuses on the fact that as the whole tournament is so dispersed throughout the American continent, there will be no atmosphere, and that in those few places where people are gathering in force, the accommodation costs would kill a brown dog.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino, however, waxed dismissive on the US being appalling hosts of the World Cup and doesn’t care at all about the Yanks sending the Somalian official home.

“We need to respect,” he said, “that we are not the kings of the world who can rule over governments and police forces and I don’t know what. We are a sports organisation; we try to do our best with the means that we have.”

Exactly. What sporting organisation can truly say that one time in its history – ONE TIME – it hasn’t given a peace prize to a demonic despot (as FIFA did with Donald Trump in December), and kowtowed to all the other outrages – all of which should have been foreseeable, and none of which have been addressed?

Jonathan Liew in the Guardian said it well: “Gianni Infantino is, of course, the symptom rather than the disease here. And yet, given his own self-image as a kind of messianic pan-global statesman, there is a certain irony in the fact that this summer will cement his legacy as one of sport’s greatest cowards: a weak and petty man who lost control of his own tournament. A man who quivered in the face of genuine conviction. A man who had the world’s most powerful cultural force in his hands, and ended up giving it away.”

Celebrity magnifies. Fame focuses.

Those in the public eye, only have to do the tiniest thing out of the ordinary, make the mildest comment, and they can make headlines. (Did I tell you about the time I ran into Greg Norman at a restaurant and he said, “Hello Peter”? It was just amazing! Five hundred words coming right up, boss.)

It is just the nature of the beast. And that is why, cleverly disguised as a fellow traveller on the 9.40am Qantas flight to Maroochydore on Monday, I kept my eyes on the prize: the out-of-state Queensland Origin team members heading north to join their confrères for their camp on the Sunshine Coast, in the lead-up to Wednesday’s Origin II.

I just knew they’d do something, say something, reveal something that would give me........

© The Age