Infantino Tells World Cup Critics to ‘Meditate and Pray’ — and Answers None of Their Questions

Meditate, pray, or watch a football match. That is the instruction Gianni Infantino handed his critics as the World Cup wound down — a broadside pushed out under his own name and amplified across FIFA’s channels, aimed at “those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours.” Read it once and it looks like a man losing his composure in public. Read it the way you would read a match, and it looks like something colder: a designed move.

Because the striking thing about the post is not its temper. It is its shape. Every governance question raised against this tournament gets folded into a single word — hate — and answered with a different word entirely: joy. Infantino does not rebut his critics. He relocates the argument. He takes a dispute about how FIFA ran its competition and turns it into a dispute about the moral condition of the people asking. In football terms, he stops defending the ball and starts playing the man.

The tell is what the message leaves out. The Somali referee Omar Artan was refused entry to the host country and never got to officiate. Supporters and officials from Iran, Haiti, Senegal and Ivory Coast ran into visa restrictions; an Iranian squad’s staff were held up long enough that preparation shifted across the border to Mexico. A red card shown to the United States forward Folarin Balogun was overturned after the American president weighed in. Ticket pricing drew investigations; the heat pushed hydration breaks into the schedule. Each of these is specific, separable, and answerable. Not one of them is named in the post.

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What Infantino offers instead is a scoreboard: seven million spectators, more than two hundred countries, sixteen host cities, and the phrase he keeps returning to — “100 per cent safety and security, only joy and happiness.” “While you divide,” he writes, “we unite.” It is a real claim and, on its own terms, perhaps a true one. But it answers a question nobody serious was asking. The loudest criticism of this World Cup was never that the stadiums were unsafe. It was about access and due process — who was let in, who was kept out, and who had the power to reverse a referee. A safety statistic does not touch any of that. It is the right answer to the wrong question, and the mismatch is not sloppy. It is the point.

This is a familiar pattern from a president who has long preferred the language of persecution to the language of accountability. The “hate” here does the work his old “today I feel” speeches once did: it collapses a plural, specific set of complaints into one hostile bloc he can line up against. And it is effective precisely because it cannot be disproved. You cannot demonstrate that you are not motivated by hate. You can only be sorted, as the post sorts you, into those who watched the football and those who missed it — “Sorry that you were so consumed by hate and criticism that you missed it all.”

The trouble is that meditation was never on offer to Omar Artan; he was refused a visa. Prayer is not a substitute for an answer. A governing body that can respond to its questioners only by telling them to go quiet and feel the joy has told you, in fifteen slides, exactly which questions it would rather you stopped asking.

Tags: FIFA World Cup 2026, FIFA, Gianni Infantino, Omar Artan

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