Gianni Infantino has had enough of your opinions. The FIFA president published an open letter on Sunday telling anyone critical of the 2026 World Cup to "reflect, meditate, pray, or watch a football match" — which is a remarkable thing to say when the tournament handed you several genuine scandals to answer for.
"While you divide, we unite," he wrote. It reads like a man who's decided the best defence is a sermon.
What Infantino actually needs to answer
The letter swats away the controversy over Folarin Balogun's lifted one-game suspension — a decision that came after direct intervention from President Donald Trump — by arguing that questionable disciplinary rulings happen in top leagues all the time. That's technically true. It's also not the point. The point is whether a sitting head of state phoning in a favour to FIFA is something the governing body should be accommodating. Infantino doesn't engage with that question. He just waves at precedent and moves on.
Then there's Iran. Infantino claimed FIFA "worked tirelessly" to get the Iranian squad into the United States "without incident or conflict." Iran's own head coach publicly described his team as "the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup," citing last-minute travel disruptions. Those two accounts don't square. One of them is wrong.
"We experienced no violence, no incidents, 100% safety and security, only joy and happiness!" Infantino wrote. The exclamation mark is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
The pattern is the problem
None of this is new behaviour. Infantino has spent years insulating FIFA from scrutiny with the same rhetorical playbook: frame criticism as hate, position FIFA as embattled heroes delivering joy to the world, and dare anyone to argue against happiness. It works well enough when the controversies are minor. It lands differently when the U.S. president is personally intervening in disciplinary decisions mid-tournament.
For anyone trying to read the competitive integrity of this World Cup — and that matters when tournament outcomes carry serious betting weight — the Balogun episode left a mark that an open letter full of rhetorical questions doesn't erase.
Iran's coach called his team the most oppressed at the tournament. FIFA's president called it joy and happiness. Someone is describing a completely different event.
