In late April, FIFA president Gianni Infantino convened soccer potentates from six continents in the Canadian city of Vancouver for a grandiose event, his organization’s annual congress. Over several days, the delegates engaged in multilateral discussions of weighty matters: racism on the pitch, the disruptions of war, and the many controversies surrounding the World Cup, which will soon be held in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. One afternoon, though, they all took a break to play a little tournament of their own on a pair of youth-size turf fields.

Infantino took the pitch for the first match in a royal-blue jersey and a pair of black Adidas cleats. The sun glinted off his bald head as he stretched. His team, representing FIFA’s administration in Zurich, was taking on the African football confederation.

“How are you feeling about your chances?” I asked him on the sideline.

Infantino, who is wary of unstructured interactions with the press, narrowed his eyes and considered.

“Very good,” he replied.

He had reason to feel confident. An attorney by profession, Infantino had reinforced his roster of sports bureaucrats with several very fit-looking retired stars, including three World Cup winners: Cafu (Brazil, 1994, 2002), Youri Djorkaeff (France, 1998), and Marco Materazzi (Italy, 2006). As coach, there was the familiar hawkish face of former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, who now works for Infantino as a FIFA executive. Having assembled all this firepower behind him, Infantino took his position at center forward for the opening kickoff. The African delegation’s team, a comparatively portly bunch, passed the ball back to a midfielder, who then waited a deferential interval as Infantino trotted forward to very gingerly attempt a tackle.

Infantino had first staged one of these fantasy matches in Zurich, in the snow, immediately after his surprising ascension to FIFA’s presidency in February 2016. At the time, the organization was reeling from the FBI bribery investigation that had brought down its previous leadership, and innocently kicking a ball around with a group of untarnished heroes was one way to show he was playing a new game. Since then, the exhibitions have become a regular event at FIFA gatherings — a ritual one British sports journalist described to me as “one of Infantino’s cringeworthy innovations.”

Those football purists with a grumpy view of Infantino — that is, most of them — cite a long list of his alleged offenses against the beautiful game. They say that during his presidency, Infantino has replaced one form of corruption — the kind that used to come in fat brown envelopes — with another form of compromise: a willingness to bow and scrape and debase his organization and the sport it represents in order to flatter power and gather it for himself. He has cozied up to Vladimir Putin, the host of the 2018 World Cup, proudly accepting the Russian Order of Friendship. He has courted the autocratic monarchs of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf petrodollars that have transformed professional soccer, overseeing the prior World Cup in Qatar and setting up the award of a future one to Saudi Arabia. And while this summer’s matches, which begin on June 11, are spread across three nations, Infantino has latched himself tightly to one of his hosts in particular: Donald Trump.

For Trump’s inauguration last year, Infantino was at a MAGA rally the day before, wearing a low-hanging red tie; and he was there, positioned over Trump’s left shoulder, as he took the oath of office; and then there he was on Instagram, dressed in his tuxedo and thanking Trump for the hospitality, his bushy eyebrows dancing with delight. “This is FIFA at the maximum of its respect,” Infantino said. Since then, he has reportedly visited the White House more than any actual head of state during this term, appearing at Trump’s side at events large and small: a Gaza peace summit in Egypt, the premiere of the documentary Melania, a UFC fight in Miami. Infantino took part in the first meeting of Trump’s amorphously defined Board of Peace, where he made sure to be photographed wearing a red baseball cap that read USA. After Trump complained about being spurned by the Nobel Committee, Infantino created a FIFA “Peace Prize” and awarded it in December to … guess who? A few weeks later, Trump sent troops to Venezuela. Then he started a war with Iran.

On the surface, the alliance between MAGA and FIFA looks like an odd coupling. Infantino runs a globalist NGO that’s bringing a horde of foreigners here to play a game many red-blooded Americans find boring and effete. By some measures, this World Cup is likely to be the most profitable sporting event in history, but a large portion of the cost of staging it is being borne by the host nations and their taxpayers, while most of the revenues are flowing back to FIFA in Switzerland. Infantino often says that “football unites the world,” and you would think that Trump, a divider who always accuses international organizations of ripping us off, would absolutely hate all this. But Infantino has found a previously undiscovered place for soccer in Trump’s heart. The president refers to Infantino chummily by his first name, which he renders as “Johnny,” as if talking to Carson on the Tonight Show couch. Trump has shown himself capable of crushing the dreams of others with the flick of a thumb. But so far, what Johnny has asked for, Johnny has mostly received.

Infantino has billions of reasons to keep Trump on his team: As long as nothing too seriously disrupts FIFA’s plans, he can expect a cash bonanza from this tournament. The U.S. has not hosted a men’s World Cup since 1994, when we didn’t even have a real professional soccer league. The growth of the sport’s popularity here, along with our giant NFL stadiums stuffed with luxury-box amenities, presents FIFA with an unprecedented economic opportunity — one Infantino has shamelessly sought to exploit. He has enlarged the field for this tournament, going from 32 to 48 teams, which gives him 104 games to sell tickets to, ignoring warnings that it will result in mismatches. (Tiny nations like Cabo Verde and Curaçao have qualified and will meet Spain and Germany, respectively, in the group stages.) He has taken advantage of permissive laws on ticket reselling in the U.S., setting up a FIFA-authorized secondary market where the asking prices for the cheapest seats at many matches are more than $1,000. He has outraged traditionalists by adding features that seem designed for an American audience, like a Super Bowl–style halftime show that will interrupt the final, to be played in July at the Meadowlands. He has steamrollered over complaints that he is watering down the quality of the tournament, screwing normal fans and servicing oligarchs, and humiliating himself and his organization with his fawning behavior toward Trump. “There is no doubt that there are those within FIFA — and I’ve heard this in multiple places — that are very uncomfortable with how far he’s leaned into this administration,” said a former U.S. Soccer Federation official who is familiar with the inner workings of FIFA. “But if there is no meltdown, he is going to be untouchable.”

The men’s World Cup comes only once every four years, and FIFA’s fortunes depend on its success. Its revenues for this four-year budget cycle are projected to reach $13 billion. And because the organization is — incredibly, to critics — incorporated as a nonprofit, much of that money will slosh downward through its 211 member national associations, each of which has an equal vote to elect FIFA’s president. This, Infantino’s allies say, is his vision of global equity: taking from the wealthy host nations, the thousand-dollar-ticket holders, the corporate sponsors, and the platforms that bring the action to 5 billion viewers and then redistributing the proceeds around the world, with a particular focus on smaller and poorer countries. His power center is among the people who run the sport in developing nations, who depend on FIFA’s subsidies, which Infantino has greatly increased. So his African opponents in the friendly match were very friendly indeed.

Still, Team FIFA had to win the game on the field, and the Africans, uniformed in yellow, had a few retired players themselves. They scored first, and FIFA countered with Djorkaeff and Cafu testing the right side of the defense. The pros would occasionally work the ball to Infantino. (“He’s our president and our friend,” Materazzi, the standout defender and Zidane head-butt recipient, told me in a post-match interview. “We try to get him into the box. Why not?”) Djorkaeff passed to his president on the left, and Infantino poked a shot that reached the keeper on about six bounces. After another FIFA player scored an equalizer, Infantino subbed off and squeezed a big swig from a water bottle, then posed for selfies with other dignitaries.

FIFA ended up being eliminated from the tournament and the host nation, Canada, won the final, beating a South American side that included a couple of famous Argentines. Afterward, the champions posed with a maple-leaf flag, and there at the center of the picture was Infantino, who had made a quick change into a red Canadian jersey. He was unabashed about putting himself in the middle of another team’s victory celebration. When you’re the president of world football, you can’t lose.

The first World Cup, in 1930, was staged in the only nation willing to take on its expense: Uruguay. The FIFA president who put it on, a Parisian named Jules Rimet, was a decorated veteran of the trenches of the First World War whose ideal of nonviolent national competition remains one of the founding principles of the tournament. Another, journalist Simon Kuper writes in his recent book World Cup Fever, is “The host pays.” Starting in the 1970s, the tournament began to evolve into a revenue-generating commercial juggernaut. FIFA forged relationships with sponsors including Adidas and Coca-Cola and plastered the FIFA World Cup™ branding on all sorts of products you can now find crammed onto drugstore shelves. But as a Swiss nonprofit, the organization paid little tax. It operated in extreme secrecy. Major decisions were made by a multinational group of soccer bosses, known as the ExCo, that met in a windowless bunker inside FIFA’s hilltop headquarters. “Places where people make decisions should only contain indirect light,” explained Sepp Blatter, Infantino’s immediate predecessor as president.

Blatter, a bumptious former public-relations executive, ruled FIFA for nearly two decades before he was brought down by a corruption scandal. He has voiced........

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