Gianni Infantino is all over the place at the Club World Cup. Peruse his Instagram feed, and you’ll see a steady drumbeat of images from across the United States as he and his handlers barnstorm the tournament, which concludes with Sunday’s championship final between Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea at Metlife Stadium in New Jersey.
FIFA’s president has been turning up at the stadiums themselves, usually catching the highest-profile matches, and often more than one game in a day during the busy matchdays early on. He’s also hitting promotional events and grip-and-grin appearances with a who’s-who of retired players, executives, politicians and the like, hyping up an event that’s become his personal mission.
“This truly global and epic club competition is already a success, and it’s going to get even more exciting as we enter the knockout phase,” he said in one reel. “It is epic and it's getting better and better, match by match.”
In another, he vowed, “the FIFA Club World Cup is there, it is there to stay, it is already epic, it will become even better.”
Who: PSG vs. Chelsea
Time: Noon
TV: TBS; Streaming: DAZN
It’s fair to say Infantino raised a few extra eyebrows that week, with a flurry of content from Washington, D.C. Most notable: a June 18 post from the White House, when he and several Juventus players, staff and executives posed for photos with Donald Trump and gifted the U.S. president customized jerseys in the Oval Office a few hours before the Italian powerhouse’s CWC group-stage match vs. Al Ain of the United Arab Emirates.
“POTUS has always been a friend of football,” wrote Team Infantino.
Trump’s decision to field questions from White House press pool reporters during the visit, which The Athletic later reported was a surprise to the Juventus contingent, turned the occasion into a major international news story that rumbled on for days.
The president’s use of Weston McKennie, Tim Weah and their club teammates as a backdrop for his typically combative answers about the Iran-Israel conflict, his administration’s new travel bans on a long list of foreign nations and his opposition to transgender participation in women’s sports shined an even brighter spotlight than these superstar athletes are accustomed to.
Infantino was notably not on hand at Audi Field that night to help Weah explain why he and his teammates were standing behind the Resolute desk, the 145-year-old, 1,300-pound piece of office furniture that’s come to signify the gravitas of the U.S. executive branch, as Trump held forth.
“It was all a surprise to me. Honestly, they just told us that, you know, we have to go. And I had no choice but to go,” Weah said postgame. “I mean, I guess it was a cool experience, obviously, I mean, being in the White House as a first time, it's always wonderful. But you know, I'm not one for the politics, so it wasn't that exciting.
“Yeah, it was weird. I was caught by surprise. A bit weird. I was caught by surprise, honestly, when he started talking politics with Iran and everything,” he added when this correspondent asked about the surreal experience of being roped into a POTUS media scrum. “I was kind of like, I just want to play football, man.”
