Trump-FIFA Relationship Mars Thrilling World Cup, Sports Integrity Expert Says
While throngs of joyous fans filled stadiums and U.S. television audiences set records, Declan Hill opines that President Trump's influence on FIFA was among the factors that detracted from the success of World Cup 2026.
The perception of the just-concluded FIFA World Cup is of a tournament awash in corruption. Political, not gambling. Not yet, anyway. And not that it really matters if match-fixing is eventually discovered.
These are the thoughts of sports integrity expert Declan Hill.
Hill, an author and Associate Professor of Investigations at the University of New Haven, told Gambling Insider that global soccer is “sailing in the gray area” of credibility and enforcement.
“The decisions in this World Cup really challenged the credibility of FIFA,” Hill said.
Hill is not alone in his beliefs. UEFA president Aleksandr Ceferin boycotted the World Cup final over the process FIFA used in rescinding a disputed red card to American Folarin Balogun, under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, that erased a mandated one-game suspension in the knockout round. Hues and cries came from media and participants over controversial uses of VAR technology and perceived special treatment of the runner-up Argentinians – the 2022 champions – and star Lionel Messi, in particular.
There were fewer cynical speculations over piles of cash and players and officials on the take at the behest of gamblers than there were for political agendas and scripted, made-for-television dramas. Both are corrosive, however.
“What we’re dealing with is the perception of credibility, which is more important than actual credibility itself,” Hill observed. “It’s that you could be a good faith fan and watching that game – not a conspiracy theorist, not a person with a bet that didn’t go right – and be looking at this tournament and going, ‘What am I watching? Is this just theater? Is there something going on here, which I just can’t believe in the credibility of the sport?’ And that’s a major problem for FIFA.”
Soccer Fans: Addicted, Rapt, Cynical, Faithful
The World Cup, claimed by Spain in a dramatic and emotional extra time final on Sunday, ended as a contradiction.
The 104 games games stretched across 16 cities in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. were joyously attended by throngs of foreign fans – the Norwegians and Scots becoming social media darlings. Spain’s coronation was viewed domestically by 66.4 million, marking the most-watched soccer game in U.S. television history, while the 38.9 million average viewership for Fox’s English-language broadcast was the largest audience for any non-NFL telecast since 2016.
The tournament, though, was also marred by a barrage of contentious rulings involving on-field officials, intrusive and inconsistent application of VAR, and, crucially for Hill, an exploitation of the chummy relationship between Trump and FIFA, which invented a peace prize to award him before the tournament began.
Soccer has always been perceived as political, but Trump reveled in the fact that his influence helped lift a ban on Balogun, whose second yellow and thus automatic red against Bosnia-Herzegovina was also widely considered an officiating overreach. After vociferous complaints about the reversal of Balogun’s suspension from Belgian coach Rudi Garcia, the Red Devils ousted the apparently distracted Americans, 4-1, in the Round of 16, and celebrated with Trump’s signature dance afterwards.
It was a lot for passionate fans to reconcile, even those who’ve witnessed decades of outside events coloring the sport, Hill said.
“I think a good faith fan, and I would count myself as one, could watch a number of those controversial calls and just be completely bewildered by why they were called and why they were not called against other teams,” he said. “And I think Trump’s and [U.S. Secretary of Commerce] Howard Lutnick‘s intervention for the American team was a disaster in terms of the American team’s performance, and it also clearly set up a marker that FIFA was open to external influence.
“I’m carefully not saying that there was external influence in the games, but there were so many eyebrow-raising moments,” Hill said. With FIFA “openly showing that it’s under political influence,” he added, “… I think people can have very good reasons for doubting what was happening at that tournament.”
Gambling Patterns Studied Over Extent of World Cup
U.S. sportsbooks reported spikes in activity, but with the bulk of betting handle on the World Cup being conducted with offshore platforms, anti-corruption investigations are difficult.
The Group of Copenhagen, an international advisory board tasked with monitoring manipulation of sports events, flagged seven instances related to irregular betting patterns, according to a report in the New York Times.
Hill and the New Haven integrity team studied possible “suspicious gambling movements” during the entirety of the World Cup, which he plans to dissect in an upcoming blog post. Though Hill wrote in the The Telegraph before the World Cup that there was likely to be some sort of malfeasance afoot, and how it could happen, he won’t make any declarations of impropriety in the aftermath.
But he’s adamant that no American policing force would act if any is eventually unearthed in the next two years. That’s partly the fault of FIFA, he said, and the current political climate in the U.S., where the Trump Administration foisted the success of the World Cup to counterbalance less jolly news about the economy and a ceaseless war with Iran. The fact that the FBI was involved in overseeing security for the tournament, Hill said, would make a post-tournament revelation of impropriety embarrassing to the organization and the Administration.
“There’s no agency that is protecting or protected the credibility of this tournament,” Hill said. “No intelligent, self-surviving FBI investigator was going to blow a whistle on anything corrupt or potentially corrupt in this tournament. This was a tournament that Donald Trump needed for his electoral hopes in the mid-term elections in November to go well.
“He could not afford this to be a disaster. His first term or the first part of this term has been such a disaster for him in terms of the polls that he needed a successful FIFA World Cup. And he’s shown with the [former FBI director James] Comey prosecution that he’s willing to get tough with FBI investigators or former FBI investigators that don’t do what he wants.
“So this is a major issue in terms of the FBI’s credibility, in terms of agencies watching the odds movements. That’s a walking, talking conflict of interest.”
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