“Part of FIFA’s American experiment is the understanding we can’t just deal with Trump alone, actually. It may seem like Trump is the key to everything because that is his own self-image, but wait a minute, these states and cities, you got to go through them too. And this is something that I myself didn’t really think about until I started reading your reporting.” “Yeah, I think it depends a little bit who you speak to. However, the frustration has been mounting. There’s a lot of disagreements.” “One of the things that I’ve been fascinated by, though, is like, what has it been like for the head of a major American city to be approached by Gianni Infantino and his band of V&V VIPs who are demanding all this stuff. When America, I would have imagined, isn’t as desperate as countries that don’t have the built-in ego, I would have imagined, or resources.” “Particularly on the back of the Qatar and Russia, so Qatar was a nation-building project, and Russia was, I guess, a nation furnishing project in some ways. Now, I’m not saying America doesn’t want the World Cup, and even within the states themselves, Kansas City maybe needs this tournament more than New York or LA or Miami. You then come up against cities who are saying, hang on. Who do you think you are? And this was crystallized in a meeting that I was told about, which took place at SoFi Stadium, when all the cities were doing their pitches to FIFA and FIFA were pitching to them. And then the head of the LA Sports Commission puts her hand up and says, sorry, can I just check what exactly are we getting out of this? And the answer that she got was essentially, this will put Los Angeles on the map, right? And that’s fascinating because it gives you an insight into how FIFA perceive themselves, that this is the biggest thing in the world. And soccer is the biggest sport in the world, right?” “Absolutely.” “And it does have a huge reach and there’s a globality to it that enables these places to reach new things. But then I spoke to someone who was in the room for that meeting and they’re saying, hang on, we’re the place of the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys of Hollywood, of the Dodgers, the Lakers, and FIFA are going to put us on the map.” “Yeah, I believe the quote in your article in ‘The Athletic’ was, what did he just [BLEEP]: say?” “I think that’s it. It’s that sense of we’re star town. We don’t need you guys. You need us, or we need each other, but we don’t owe you.”
