Lise Klaveness doesn't mince words. The Norwegian Football Association president wants FIFA's peace prize gone — abolished entirely — arguing the governing body has no business handing out political awards when it can barely maintain the appearance of independence from state power.
Her comments come four months after FIFA awarded its inaugural peace prize to Donald Trump at the 2026 World Cup draw in December. A prize widely read as a gesture of goodwill toward a sitting president whose country is co-hosting the tournament. FIFA scratching Trump's back. Trump hosting FIFA's party. The optics didn't require much squinting.
"It should be avoided also in the future"
Klaveness was direct in an online press briefing: "We don't think it's part of FIFA's mandate to give such a prize, we think we have a Nobel Institute that does that job independently already." She's not wrong. The Nobel Peace Prize has spent over a century building the credibility and the mechanisms — independent juries, transparent criteria, institutional insulation from political pressure — that FIFA built none of before handing one out.
"That is full-time work, it's so sensitive," Klaveness said. "From a resource angle, from a mandate angle, but most importantly from a governance angle I think it should be avoided also in the future."
The NFF board is now writing a formal letter supporting a complaint filed by non-profit organisation FairSquare, which alleges that Infantino and FIFA may have breached their own ethical guidelines on political impartiality. Klaveness is calling for a transparent investigation — published timeline, published reasoning, published conclusion.
Why this matters beyond the headline
FIFA's relationship with political power has always been complicated, but Infantino-era FIFA has leaned into proximity to world leaders in ways his predecessors might have at least tried to disguise. Awarding a peace prize to the president of a co-host nation — one who has publicly lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize — removes the last veneer of neutrality.
For anyone watching the 2026 World Cup governance with any scepticism, this isn't an isolated incident. It's a pattern. And the fact that it took a national federation president from Norway, not one of the game's traditional powerhouses, to say it out loud says something about how few people in football are willing to challenge Infantino directly.
"There should be checks and balances on these issues," Klaveness said. The complaint from FairSquare, she added, "should be treated with a transparent timeline, and the reasoning and the conclusion should be transparent."
Whether FIFA responds with anything resembling transparency is, given its record, genuinely unclear.
