The FIFA Peace Prize has barely had time to exist, and already it looks like a problem FIFA would quite happily erase. That is the uncomfortable truth after Gianni Infantino was told at Thursday’s FIFA council meeting that the award may need major changes — or may simply need to go.
Last November, FIFA announced the creation of its peace prize with all the usual high-minded language. It would, FIFA said, “reward individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and by doing so have united people across the world.” A noble idea. A clean idea. In theory, at least. But then last December came the first recipient: Donald Trump, handed the award at the men’s World Cup draw in Washington. The backlash was immediate, and the prize has been carrying that baggage ever since.
A prize already weighed down by its first winner
The problem is not simply that the choice caused controversy. It is that the selection process for Trump was not made public, which makes the whole thing look less like a serious honour and more like an exercise in opacity wrapped in branding. FIFA’s own statutes prohibit political or governmental interference in football, yet this prize has now dragged FIFA directly into the kind of political argument it supposedly wants to rise above.
That contradiction is why Thursday’s meeting matters. On that occasion, Infantino announced that the peace prize had been handed to FIFA’s football social responsibility committee. That committee is now expected to make a recommendation before the next council meeting in Doha on 16 December. And the options are stark: several council members demanded the award be abolished, while others called for it to be depoliticised.
Scrap it or strip it back
Both responses make sense, which is exactly why FIFA has put itself in such a mess. If the prize is kept in its current form, every future recipient will be judged through the prism of Trump. If it is restricted so that politicians are excluded, that would be an implicit admission that the first award was a misfire. And if it is scrapped altogether, then FIFA will have created a peace prize only to discover, almost immediately, that it could not survive contact with reality.
The wider issue is credibility. FIFA does not need another symbolic initiative that sounds lofty but cannot withstand scrutiny. If it wants this prize to mean anything, it has to explain who qualifies, how they are chosen and why the process is not hidden from view. Otherwise the FIFA Peace Prize becomes exactly what its critics already suspect: a headline generator, not a serious honour.
For now, the future of the award is unsettled. That is not a minor administrative wrinkle. It is the clearest sign yet that FIFA may have launched a trophy it does not know how to defend.
