The image of Donald Trump grinning while Chelsea celebrated their Club World Cup victory in New York was an enduring one. It certainly wasn’t what anyone, not least club captain Reece James, expected to see next to him as he lifted the trophy.
“I thought he was going to exit the stage but he wanted to stay,” James said afterwards. James wasn’t overly bothered. He had his medal. And Trump had his trophy.
But if Trump tries to pull the same stunt in a year’s time with the 2026 World Cup winning captain, he cannot be assured of such a jovial reception.
A global stage for Trump to sportswash
Before the next election, Trump’s America will host the two biggest sport events in the world, the World Cup in 2026 and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 and those will not be the first time Trump has waded into sporting matters for political capital.
As well as owning a number of golf resorts around the world, opening another in Scotland this very week, and his appearance at the Club World Cup, Trump recently threatened to block a new stadium deal for NFL franchise Washington Commanders if they did not change their name back to the Redskins, dropped in 2020 after it was deemed racist and offensive to native Americans.
The US will not win the World Cup. No one, not even Trump, believes that. But Trump will hope he can win the World Cup. And with his approval rating in the US reaching its lowest ever ebb, he needs a win.
“For me, it fits squarely within the definition of sportswashing,” says Dr Jules Boykoff, professor of political science and former Under-23 international footballer for the US. Boykoff was also the first to use the term in a peer-reviewed academic paper.
“If sportswashing is when leaders use sports and sports mega-events to try to deflect attention from domestic social problems while trying to burnish their reputation on the world stage and thereby legitimising themselves in the public eye, then yeah, sure. It looks like it to me.
“In fact, I would say that’s one of the blind spots of a lot of the discussions around sportswashing, is that it is easy to waggle a finger at them [other countries] and not point a finger back at ourselves.”
This is not just an ego trip or Trump hoping to launder his reputation. Increasingly experts are refusing to rule out the president using his “double-barrelled sportswashing opportunity” of the World Cup and the Olympics to overthrow the constitution and run for an unprecedented third term. As recently as March, Trump insisted “there are methods” that would allow him to do so and “was not joking” about the prospect.
And even if he does not choose to rewrite the 22nd Amendment, which expressly forbids a president serving more than eight years, he will have a Republican candidate he wishes to put on a pedestal, perhaps even one of his own family.
‘Trump has no shame’
Many believe it also presents a ripe opportunity for him to blunder his way through a complex sporting environment to which he is unsuited and unfamiliar.
However, Dr Andrei Markovits, political science professor at the University of Michigan, believes there’s “zero downside” for the US president to whom nothing seems to stick.
“Trump is a guy, and this is an immense advantage, who has no shame. Ignorance is not shameful. Incompetence is not shameful. Saying outrageous things is not shameful,” Markovits tells The i Paper.
“He’s not worried about missteps that are not costly to him. The World Cup, there’s zero downside to it. Shy of punching Lionel Messi or something, there is nothing that he can do that really would harm him.”
Trump should fear ‘the boomerang effect’
But the World Cup does also present a risk of alienating his core voter base.
“Trump identifies with Joe Six Pack, who hates soccer and sees it as a completely sissy sport,” adds Markovits, referring to the political shorthand for an average, working-class American.
“Soccer’s existence in the United States is bifurcated. Yes, it’s Latino which, of course, Trump hates, but it’s also upper middle-class white.”
It’s gender diverse too, with the US women’s team hitting heights of fame long before their counterparts.
But no one can deny the scale of the event which, barring the Olympics he will host two years later, is unrivalled.
“The Super Bowl [which Trump became the first sitting president to attend], or any of these things, is basically a forum for him to be centre stage,” says Markovits, who has also written multiple books on the intersection of sport and politics.
“This is different: the World Cup is literally a global forum, a global stage, which will enhance it even more.”
Trump’s regime is hardly the first to realise this. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China and Russia have all made good use of football’s reputation-bolstering qualities in the last decade. But those states also provide cautionary tales for Trump, should he wish to heed them.
“Not that many people were following the internal politics and labour strategies around Qatar ahead of that World Cup,” says Boykoff.
“So when it arrived, it actually did have sort of a boomerang effect, where the world woke up to the horrific labour practices that were happening in that country.
“When it comes to sportswashing, nothing is guaranteed whatsoever.”
Expect a lot of photo-bombing
And in Fifa president Gianni Infantino, he has a willing accomplice who has just opened an office at Trump Tower in New York and who had a VIP invite to Trump’s inauguration.
And the US president will need Infantino to guide him safely through the world of football, which is not his natural stamping ground. The 79-year-old has been roared into the Octagon at a UFC event and appeared as part of WWE shows, but “soccer” is distinctly off-patch.
“We’ll expect to see Trump photo-bombing, won’t we?” says Ed Warner, the former head of UK Athletics who wrote Sport Inc: Why money is the winner in the business of sport.
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“He doesn’t need to give the World Cup winning captain a red MAGA cap. He just needs to be in the photo wearing a red tie.
“And no player in the winning team in the final is going to create a global incident by snubbing the president or saying something inappropriate. I don’t think we’re going to get the Black Power salutes or anything like that.
“Why divide your personal fan base, if you’re a global superstar footballer, by aligning yourself on either side of a political divide?”
As Michael Jordan once put it, Republicans buy sneakers too.
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