The first awarding marked the apex of Gianni Infantino\u2019s hubris. A new version could highlight the good in the world of soccer<\/p>\n
Sign up for our free newsletter here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Poor Fifa peace prize. Unloved, unliked, mocked, tainted by association with its first winner. And now demoted, too, after Fifa president Gianni Infantino dumped the thing on the global governing body\u2019s \u201csocial responsibility committee\u201d to look after. To redeem it, rather than to ditch it, to spare Infantino the embarrassment<\/a> of acknowledging that his fake prize was really just a fake prize all along.<\/p>\n Here is where we should probably acknowledge that, as fake prizes go, and in the context of what it was intended to accomplish, the first awarding of the Fifa peace prize was an unqualified success. It achieved exactly what it was meant to, made by Infantino to flatter Donald Trump, the man he needed to keep on his side to safeguard the riches to be extracted from the North American market in order to consolidate his power base within Fifa. Trump, the gullible buffoon, was pleased as punch<\/a> \u2013 handed a big, golden bauble and a medal he placed around his own neck \u2013 and briefly forgot about the Nobel peace prize he desperately covets<\/a>.<\/p>\n Leander Schaerlaeckens<\/em> is the author of The Long Game: US Men\u2019s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now<\/a>. He teaches at Marist University.<\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first awarding marked the apex of Gianni Infantino\u2019s hubris. A new version could highlight the good in the world of soccer Sign up for our free newsletter here Poor Fifa peace prize. Unloved, unliked, mocked, tainted by association with its first winner. And now demoted, too, after Fifa president Gianni Infantino dumped the thing … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}