--- title: "The Prize That May Die With Its Only Winner" description: "Less than a year after Infantino crowned Trump in Washington, FIFA’s council wants the peace award gone" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-18T12:49:57Z modified: 2026-10-18T16:42:50Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-prize-that-may-die-with-its-only-winner-ee7485 language: en tags: ["fifa", "trump", "politics", "infantino", "gaza", "world"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The Prize That May Die With Its Only Winner *Less than a year after Infantino crowned Trump in Washington, FIFA’s council wants the peace award gone* By Jan Sokol · October 18, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-prize-that-may-die-with-its-only-winner-ee7485 ## In brief - FIFA is close to scrapping its Peace Prize, awarded to Donald Trump in December 2025 at the World Cup 2026 draw in Washington - Several FIFA Council members demanded changes including abolition; others want the award depoliticised - The Athletic reports the prize was never signed off on by the FIFA Council, FIFA’s decision-making body - A 22-person committee, with Javier Zanetti as deputy chairperson, will decide whether the award continues and in what form - Scrapping would leave Trump as the prize’s first and only winner In the beginning there was no prize. Then, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, on the fifth day of December last year, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, rose and bestowed one: the first FIFA Peace Prize in the organisation’s history, handed to Donald Trump, president of the United States, in the middle of the ceremony that drew the lots for the 2026 World Cup. Infantino extolled his man in the capital of his own country, six months before the tournament itself would begin, and the cameras drank it in. This week came the reckoning, [as Al Jazeera reported](https://aljazeera.com/sports/2026/10/18/fifa-peace-prize-football-us-president-donald-trump): the award is now close to being scrapped, a fate that would leave the American president as its first and only laureate — a laurel with no tree behind it. Less than a year after the honour was conferred, several members of the FIFA Council are questioning its merit and have demanded changes, scrapping included. ## An honour nobody approved The detail that gives this episode its true character is an administrative one, and [the Athletic’s reporting](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7695724/2026/10/16/fifa-peace-prize-scrapped-donald-trump) lays it bare: the prize was never signed off on by the FIFA Council, the organisation’s actual decision-making body. It was, in the manner of so many decorations handed down from the balconies of history, an act of the chief. The council was presented with a fait accompli, a medal already gleaming on another man’s chest, and for a while it swallowed the insult. Councils, like courts and like crowds around a throne, can wait. They did not wait forever. At Friday’s council meeting, [the Guardian has learned](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/oct/16/gianni-infantino-fifa-peace-prize-scrap-politicians-donald-trump), several members demanded that the award be abolished outright, while others called for it to be depoliticised — stripped of the company of presidents and strongmen, presumably, and returned to some quieter purpose. Infantino faced the pressure in person. The prize designed to celebrate peace had, within ten months, produced only a quarrel. ## Twenty-two judges of a trophy The machine now turns in the way it always turns. Infantino did not declare the prize dead, for the chief who created a thing rarely buries it himself. Instead, a committee of twenty-two persons will assess whether the award should continue and, if it should, in what guise. Among them sits Javier Zanetti, once a defender for Inter and for Argentina, now the deputy chairperson of this tribunal over a trophy. A man who spent his playing years not yielding ground has been asked to decide whether his organisation should yield it gracefully. There is a melancholy arithmetic here. An institution such as FIFA cannot simply confess that a peace prize was invented for one evening and one guest; that would be to say the decoration was the man. So the verdict will arrive dressed in procedure — a review, an assessment, a recommendation — and only then will the coffin be closed. If it is closed, the record books will show a curious entry: one winner, one ceremony, one sunset. The prize will have lived ten months, from Washington in December to its hour on the gallows in October. One can reflect, without cruelty, on the fragility of honours manufactured near power. The decorations of old regimes at least bore the weight of dynasties and wars; this one was minted for a draw of coloured balls and a photograph at the Kennedy Center, photographed by the agencies, applauded by the invited, and disowned by the unconsulted. The ordinary football supporter, whose devotion is the true coin of this whole empire, was asked neither in December nor in October. He rarely is. What remains is the question Al Jazeera’s headline posed and no one at FIFA has yet answered plainly: is the peace prize being scrapped because it honoured a politician, or because it honoured this politician? The committee of twenty-two will not say. Committees never do. But the prize, if it goes, will go quietly, the way gifts of the powerful usually go — not with an apology, but with a memo.