TRUMP—AND TWO MEANINGS OF THE WORD “PITCH” PART 1

THIS TALE WAS PROMPTED INITIALLY BY Simon Skinner’s giant (15,601 words!) “ ‘I Wouldn’t Pay It Either,’ ” his June 25, 2026, London Review of Books review of Jonathan Wilson’s (608-page!) The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup. Both book and review were composed well before Trump butted his way into the already complex world of international football. Needless to say, Trump did not contribute clarity.

The Power and the Glory: A New World History of the World Cup, by Jonathan Wilson, Abacus Little and Brown, 2025. 

What’s the buzz? After having read all of Skinner’s 15,601 words, plus the latest Trump/Fifa interaction, plus watching the Belgium-U.S. match, I have come to appreciate the complexity of the entire affair.

Nevertheless, I enjoy Skinner’s writing (and trust his commentary). I’m confident, here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, with tidbits gleaned from Skinner’s article, together with those from my Internet sleuthing of subsequent intrigue.

Skinner’s Football Fervor: Simon Skinner describes, “It is a global soap opera with a cast of geographically varying heroes and villains and imperishable stereotypes…. ah, those samba Brazilians, possessional Spaniards, disciplined Germans, elite French not considered French by many French, joyous Senegalese, inexhaustible South Koreans, tragic Dutch, hapless English, even more hapless Scots and inexplicably absent Italians. The stakes are so high that the spectacle is compelling even if much of the actual football is not.”

“We will bear witness to sporting immortality,” Skinner observes, “but also sporting infamy: the fluffed shots, missed penalties and red cards that in a nanosecond condemn men of inestimable talent, accomplishment and wealth to the status of eternal losers.”

Fifa’s Founding, 1904. Skinner describes that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association “was founded in 1904 as an alliance of national football associations. Its third and longest serving president (1921-54), and the architect of the World Cup, was Jules Rimet. A devout Catholic who had been influenced by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, on the ‘Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour’, in 1897 Rimet founded Red Star Club Français in Paris, where class distinctions were repudiated, poetry readings organised to help educate players and amateurism presciently condemned as ‘the antisocial pretension of a privileged oligarchy.’ ” Lofty ideals indeed.

The First Fifa World Cup, 1930.  Wikipedia notes, “The world’s first championship for men’s national football teams took place in Uruguay July 13–30, 1930. Thirteen teams (seven from South America, four from Europe, and two from North America) entered the tournament. Only a handful of European teams chose to participate because of the difficulty of traveling to South America during the Great Depression“

Official poster, designed by Guillermo Laborde . 

“In the final,” Wikipedia recounts, “hosts and pre-tournament favourites Uruguay defeated Argentina 4–2 in front of 68,346 people to become the first nation to win the World Cup.”

The World Cup and Politics. Skinner recounts, “If it didn’t take long for football itself to subvert Rimet’s founding idealism, politics was quick to put the other boot in. When the tournament was awarded to Italy for 1934, the president of the FIGC, Giorgio Vaccaro, declared it an opportunity to demonstrate ‘the organisational efficiency of fascist sport in general and football in particular….”

Skinner continues, “Souvenirs and match tickets were festooned with fasces, and Mussolini—who made much of paying for his own seats—commissioned a Coppa del Duce, six times taller than the World Cup trophy, as a supplementary prize for the winner. That winner was Italy: Victory, the Florentine weekly Il Bargello said, was ‘the affirmation of an entire people, an indication of its virile and moral strength.’ ” 

“This,” Skinner observes, “was two years before the more notorious, Riefenstahl-curated 1936 Berlin Olympics (where Hitler was to attend the only football match of his life, Germany’s 2-0 defeat to, phew, Norway). The second World Cup was therefore an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts.”

Fifa and Corruption. Skinner notes, “In the index of Wilson’s book, the two most populous sub-entries under ‘Fifa’ are ‘bribes’ and ‘corruption.’ Ever since the fiefdoms of Havelange and his successor, Sepp Blatter, Fifa’s conjuring trick has been to justify a boundless cupidity in terms of its service to growing the game. When lobbying to succeed Havelange in 1998, Blatter toured the world in a private jet…. With the ballot, against the Swede Lennart Johansson, looking tight, delegates in Paris were approached by smartly dressed men speaking Arabic and offering briefcases containing $50,000 in cash in exchange for a vote for Blatter. He won….”

Eventually, Blatter would be banned from football for eight years.

Along Comes Gianni Infantino. Skinner describes, “Gianni Infantino ran as the clean-up candidate, but these things are relative: within months of assuming office he was interviewed by the investigatory chamber of Fifa’s ethics committee (don’t laugh) on suspicion of breaches of the Fifa code of ethics (don’t laugh) for multiple expenses abuses.”

“Having been re-elected unopposed in 2019 and 2023,” Skinner recounts, “Infantino has just announced his intention to stand again. His victory seems a formality—both CAF, the Confederation of African Football, and Conmebol, South America’s governing body, have already backed him. Last year he was paid more than $6 million.”

Tomorrow in Part 2 we’ll see Infantino interact with a Queens felon. It gets worse. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026