FIFA has agreed to pay $4 million for a seven-year lease on a 17th-floor office in Trump Tower — a space that, according to documents obtained by Le Monde and the New York Times, is almost never used.
The governing body of world football already has its main U.S. office in Coral Gables, Florida. The Trump Tower space, signed in June 2025 and spanning nearly 5,000 square feet, exists for "special events." Its most notable deployment so far: providing a base during Gianni Infantino's visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where he held meetings with the presidents and prime ministers of Kenya and Bhutan, among others.
That's a lot of rent for a meeting room.
Another entry in the Infantino-Trump ledger
This isn't happening in a vacuum. The 2026 World Cup draw was held at the Kennedy Center — an institution Trump became chairman of in 2025. At the event, Infantino handed Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Now FIFA is writing checks to a Trump-branded property for office space it barely occupies.
FIFA's response to the Times was a masterclass in saying nothing: the lease "was signed in accordance with FIFA's standard internal processes." Standard process or not, the optics are what they are.
Infantino is up for re-election at the FIFA Congress in March, and the timing matters. After a proposal to hand private investors control of portions of World Cup revenues went down in flames — killing off what had looked like a smooth path to another term — he's been in full damage-control mode. The 54 member associations of CAF have publicly pledged their support. His only declared challenger, Swiss ex-defender Ramon Vega, has until November 18 to secure backing from at least five FIFA member associations.
The Trump Tower lease won't derail Infantino's re-election bid. But for anyone tracking the relationship between football's most powerful administrator and the current U.S. president, the $4 million paper trail is hard to ignore.
