Opinion

FIFA Invents a Peace Prize for Trump After He Fails to Win the Real One

FIFA has awarded Donald Trump a newly created “Peace Prize” at a lavish ceremony in Washington, a move critics say has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with flattery. Announced just weeks before the event and handed to Trump after his failed bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, the award has been derided as an invented honour designed to soothe a bruised ego. FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s effusive praise, Trump’s self-congratulatory acceptance speech, and the moment he placed the medal around his own neck have fuelled accusations that the organisation has turned peace into a performative accessory, cheapening both the concept and its own claims of political neutrality.

Photo: Gianni Infantino, 2020; Credit: © UNIS Vienna / Nikoleta Haffar, via United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); Source: 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/unodc/50341553588/

; Licence: CC BY 2.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Photo: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2013; Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons; Source: 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/8567813820/

; Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

After Donald Trump failed to secure the Nobel Peace Prize, FIFA quietly created its own “Peace Prize” and gave it to him anyway. The move has been widely mocked as a consolation award masquerading as global virtue.

Oslo Doesn’t Negotiate with Narcissists

From Shinzo Abe’s 2018 nomination to phone calls with Norwegian officials and endless cable-news altar calls, Trump turned the Nobel into a personal brand ambition. The 2025 prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado “for her tireless work defending democratic rights” (NobelPrize.org). Trump ripped the lid off the script: he claimed Machado had called to say she accepted the prize “in honour of you, because you really deserved it” (Trump, quoted by Reuters, 10 Oct 2025), while the White House accused the committee of “placing politics over peace” (Steven Cheung, Reuters). This was not merely another celeb-scale gripe; it was the moment a man who built his life on applause discovered an accolade that ignores volume.

Donald Trump spent almost a decade treating the Nobel Peace Prize like something he could cash in on. When the committee handed the 2025 prize to María Corina Machado, the result was predictable: fury, fantasy and the kind of self-pity that sounds loudest on a national stage.

Annual international award recognising contributions to peace and diplomacy