There are gestures of sportsmanship and there are gestures of sportsmanship that occur the same week the team receiving them was caught trying to smuggle an unauthorized individual into the country disguised as one of its own players, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino managed to deliver the first while remaining apparently unaware of the second.
According to Breitbart’s ongoing World Cup coverage, Infantino made a surprise appearance in the Iranian national team’s locker room Monday night to offer “words of support and comfort” following a 2-2 tie against New Zealand, a gesture of personal warmth from the man who runs global soccer toward a team whose government was separately, per Breitbart, “caught trying to sneak a terrorist into the U.S.A. as a fake member of its World Cup national men’s soccer team.” Both of these things are reportedly true. They occurred in the same tournament, involving the same national federation, within the same general timeframe, and Infantino’s locker room visit proceeded as though only one of them was happening.
The tournament has produced a genuinely remarkable string of these juxtapositions. Iranian striker Mohammad Mohebi celebrated a goal against New Zealand with a finger-gun gesture that traveled globally within hours, in a tournament being played in a country whose administration is simultaneously managing a ceasefire with the team’s home government following a war that closed the Strait of Hormuz for several days in March. Iran’s team has had to fly from Mexico to the United States for its three guaranteed matches because U.S. authorities declined to host them directly, which is the scheduling solution for a geopolitical situation that nobody involved in organizing the World Cup anticipated when the hosting rights were awarded in 2018.
A single gambler on the prediction market Polymarket lost $4.2 million on World Cup bets in less than a day, which is either a remarkable demonstration of risk tolerance or a cautionary tale that the tournament has not yet finished writing. Two New Jersey women were killed in a hit-and-run walking home from a World Cup watch party. Ticket sales have been declining in host cities even as the tournament breaks attendance records in aggregate, the same contradiction that has defined nearly every metric FIFA has tried to celebrate this summer.
Infantino’s locker room visit was, by every account, a kind gesture toward athletes who had just suffered a disappointing result. It happened to occur in a tournament where kindness and crisis are arriving in the same news cycle with a regularity that has stopped being notable and started being the format.
When the head of FIFA is personally consoling a team whose government just got caught trying to smuggle someone into the country under cover of that team’s own roster, what exactly is being managed: the tournament, or the geopolitics?
Sources
Breitbart: World Cup coverage
Breitbart: FIFA Boss Gianni Infantino Comforts Iran Team After World Cup Tie Against New Zealand
Breitbart: So Sad: Iran Coach Cries ‘Most Oppressed Team in Whole World Cup’
