In light of the latest World Cup controversies, Professor Dan Hough of the Centre for the Study of Corruption explores integrity in football and FIFA.

Power, money and football have always been uneasy bedfellows. But never has that been more apparent than in during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It’s time to have a discussion about what football as a game is actually there for. Does the football ecosystem need to generate funds in order to help the game flourish? Or does football exist to help those who are well placed and influential become ever more so? Is football, in other words, just a business like any other, or is it something bigger than that? The recent behaviour of Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino makes it pretty clear what they think the answers to those questions are.

Despite the seemingly never-ending scent of scandal that wafts around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, there has been much to enjoy about this year’s tournament. Cape Verde not only drew with footballing heavyweights Spain and Uruguay, they also gave current World Cup holders Argentina the shock of their lives in the round of 32.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo shocked Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal by holding them to a draw, and indeed Yoane Wissa and co gave England a run for their money in the knockout stages. The age-old attraction of Davids potentially slaying Goliaths remains alive and strong.

Plus, some of the very biggest names – Kilian Mbappe, Lionel Messi, Erwin Haaland and Harry Kane – have also come to the party and scored goals aplenty. There’ll be more to come there as the tournament heads towards what could well be a gripping climax.

Whinging, whining, diving, cheating

Yet, those gripping sporting stories cannot mask some of the more unedifying incidents that have also been all too apparent at this World Cup.

On the field, players have again been behaving badly. Moaning, whinging, whining, diving, never-ending-grappling at set pieces plus a whole array of other actions that could all quite easily fit into a broadly understood ‘cheating’ category have flourished. Players from Uruguay and Paraguay covered themselves in varying degrees of ignominy as their sides left the tournament. For a sport that prides itself on being ‘The Beautiful Game’ an awful lot of what’s been on show has been quite a long way from beautiful.

That, however, pales into insignificance when compared with how FIFA itself has run its own tournament. Disrupting the games by forcing rehydration breaks into matches taking place in perfectly air-conditioned stadiums (such as those in Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles) has gone down more or less universally badly among spectators. Why? As it disrupts the flow of the game and those spectators are not daft; they know that the reason for the existence of these breaks in settings has much more to do with advertising revenue than it does the health of the players.

Things nonetheless become more serious when FIFA appears unwilling to stand up for those who are taking part in the tournament. FIFA’s silence when one of the competition’s referees (Omar Artan from Somalia) was turned away at the immigration gate was instructive. FIFA does not and should not dictate US immigration policy, but public backing of an official who was the 2025 Confederation of African Football men’s referee of the year and indeed had what appeared to be a perfectly valid set of entry papers still feels like it would have been the least Artan deserved.

Infantino, Trump, Integrity and Ethics

It has been the very public bromance between FIFA President Gianni Infantino and US President Donald Trump that has caused the most consternation.

That came to a head when Trump called Infantino asking for the red card of a US player, Folarin Balogun, to be reviewed. Balogun had been – unluckily – sent from the field in the USA’s last 32 victory against Bosnia. Unlucky or not, that brings with it an automatic one game suspension. With the sending off of England’s Jarrell Quansah against Mexico, 188 people have been sent off in the history World Cup finals, dating back nearly 100 years. Balogun’s case aside, only one case had ever seen a player escape a suspension. That was back in 1962 when the rules surrounding such things were very different.

What made Balogun’s case buck that trend? Donald Trump decided he didn’t like it. He called Infantino, and suddenly the ban was ‘suspended’ for 12 months. Formal process? None of note.

The response to FIFA’s decision was unequivocal. The Belgian Football Federation were “astonished” at the decision, and they made it clear that they were “investigating all potential options” in terms of whether Balogun should indeed be allowed to play against the Belgian team in the last 16. Even UEFA, an organisation that knows a thing or two about corruption challenges, called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”. UEFA clearly has a point.

Is there a case that this is all background noise and football fans should perhaps not take themselves and their game quite so seriously? Well, maybe, but the statements most clearly reflecting why that’s not the case again came from the Belgian football authorities. “The Federation does not” they claimed “defend itself. It does not defend the national team – it defends football in general”. They then continued by arguing that the Belgian football federation “defends [the game’s] integrity, it defends its ethics”.

Sleeping walking into integrity free zones

Will the behaviour of Trump and Infantino be the ruin of football? No. Football will continue for at least the foreseeable future to be the global game. That is despite their behaviours and not because of them.

But there will come a time when players and supporters, plus those on the outside looking in, will need to be clear-eyed about what football is becoming. Integrity? Principles? Not in any meaningful sense.

Football is perilously close to being a vehicle for those in power and with influence to achieve their own aims over and beyond what the broader football community may want or indeed expect. That’s as true in terms of the details (such as the integrity-free antics of many participants or suspending the punishment of a player for being sent off) as it is in deciding which states host World Cup finals (and under which conditions), how money is distributed and increasingly how the game is regulated.

Football is a magnificent game. But it is becoming ever clearer what football is becoming; a tool for the rich, powerful and influential to achieve their own aims over and beyond the interests and sentiments of the game’s billions of broader stakeholders (or ‘supporters’ if you’re old skool). Sometimes you really don’t realise what you’ve lost until it’s well and truly gone….