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United States President Donald Trump has been awarded FIFA’s newly created peace prize at the draw for the 2026 men’s football World Cup.

Trump, who has campaigned aggressively for a Nobel Peace Prize, thanked FIFA on Friday and called the award “one of the great honours of my life”.

The US leader had been heavily favoured to win the football governing body’s inaugural prize.

He and FIFA president Gianni Infantino are close allies, and Infantino had made it clear that he thought Trump should have won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to broker a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“This is your prize, this is your peace prize,” Infantino said at the glitzy, celebrity-studded ceremony at Washington’s Kennedy Center.

Infantino has repeatedly spoken about football as a unifier for the world, but the prize is a departure from the federation’s traditional focus on sport.

The US, along with Canada and Mexico, will host the football tournament next year. The prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, and the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, were at the ceremony, too.

In a nod to Trump’s love of spectacle, Infantino, who served as master of ceremonies, had the three leaders stand behind brightly coloured podiums – game-show style – to draw their teams.

After the draw, they all posed for a selfie with Infantino.

“This will be unique, this will be stellar, this will be spectacular,” Infantino said at the outset of the ceremony, referring to next year’s games.

The men’s World Cup will be held from June 11 to July 19, 2026, with a record 104 matches in 16 host cities. It will kick off with Mexico playing South Africa at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, followed by South Korea against a playoff winner.

The US and Canada will join the World Cup party the following day.

FIFA award under scrutiny

FIFA announced the annual peace prize in November, saying it would recognise “individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace”.

A video prior to the presentation celebrated Trump for resolving the war in Gaza and trying to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The trophy, a gold-plated globe carried by upraised hands, was considerably larger than the Nobel, which is just a simple medal.

Trump was given a medal as well and donned it as Infantino lauded him. The president deserved the award for “promoting peace and unity around the world”, he said.

“Thank you very much. This is truly one of the great honours of my life. And beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this, we saved millions and millions of lives,” Trump said.

“The world is a safer place now.”

The US, he said, was “not doing too well” before he took office, but now “we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world”.

Earlier, Trump told reporters he did not care about the prize, but noted that he had “settled eight wars” in his 10 months in office.

“I don’t need prizes. I need to save lives,” Trump said. “I saved millions and millions of lives, and that’s really what I want to do.”

The claim that Trump has ended eight wars this year is widely disputed.

Much work remains before most of the conflicts the president claims to have ended, including Israel’s war on Gaza, can actually be considered resolved.

Trump received the award as he continues to face criticism from Democrats and rights groups for launching a huge US military build-up around Venezuela and ordering deadly air strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats.

He has also ordered a hardline migration crackdown, threatening to move World Cup games from cities where he has sent troops and freezing asylum decisions from 19 countries – including World Cup participants Haiti and Iran.

It also came days after the president demeaned Somali immigrants in the US as “garbage” – triggering an outcry both at home and abroad.

There has been little transparency around FIFA’s peace prize.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it has written to FIFA to request a list of the nominees, the judges, the criteria and the selection process – and has received no response.

“FIFA’s so-called peace prize is being awarded against a backdrop of violent detentions of immigrants, national guard deployments in US cities, and the obsequious cancellation of FIFA’s own anti-racism and anti-discrimination campaigns,” Minky Worden, who oversees sport for HRW, said in a statement.

Washington, DC – Players often face fines and bans from FIFA for displaying political messages, as the football governing body has long proclaimed a policy of political neutrality.

But on Friday, the association’s chief Gianni Infantino handed United States President Donald Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, further cementing his embrace of the Republican leader.

Critics pointed out that the award came less than 24 hours after the Trump administration carried out another deadly air strike in the Caribbean.

Craig Mokhiber, a former United Nations official who has campaigned to suspend Israel from world football over its genocidal war in Gaza, called the award to Trump a “truly shameful development”.

Infantino has refused to take action against Israel, arguing that football “cannot solve geopolitical” issues.

“Not satisfied with two years of FIFA complicity in genocide in Palestine, Infantino and his cronies have now invented a new ‘peace prize’ in order to curry favour with Donald Trump,” Mokhiber told Al Jazeera.

He added that the award also aims to “obscure” Trump’s “disgraceful record” of support to Israel, his deadly strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea, and “gross violations of human rights” inside the US.

Infantino praises Trump

While presenting the prize on Friday, Infantino expressed support for Trump’s international deals, including the so-called Abraham Accords that established formal ties between Israel and several Arab states without resolving the question of Palestinian statehood.

“This is what we want from a leader: a leader that cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite, and that’s what we do here today, and that’s what we want to do at the World Cup,” Infantino said as he presented the award.

“Mr President, you definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action, for what you have obtained in your way, but you have obtained in an incredible way.”

Trump has openly campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize but missed out on the award earlier this year.

He said the new FIFA recognition is one of the “great honours” he has received, and he repeated his claim that his presidency has saved millions of lives and ended eight wars.

The US president’s remarks were brief, but he still could not help but take a shot at the record of his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.

“The United States, one year ago, was not doing too well, and now I have to say we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said.

A departure from past statements

Infantino has previously warned against using football to stoke division. “There’s no more powerful tool than sport to unite the people,” he said in 2023. “Now we have to protect the autonomy of sport: the political neutrality of sport and to protect the values of sport.”

Two years later, critics point out that Infantino has created a prize to celebrate peace and unity, and then handed it to a president who called people from Somalia “garbage” just days prior.

“Giving Donald Trump a prize for peace is like giving Luis Suarez a prize for not biting people’s ears off,” football journalist Zach Lowy wrote on social media, referring to the Uruguayan forward who has been caught up in at least three biting incidents on the pitch throughout his career.

Infantino appears to have forged strong ties with Trump as the US prepares to co-host the World Cup with Mexico and Canada next year.

The FIFA president has been a regular guest at the White House, and in October, he attended a ceremony with Trump to formalise the Gaza truce in Egypt.

FIFA did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The Democratic Party was among the critics taking aim at the new FIFA award. “Trump couldn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize so FIFA made one up for him,” it said in a social media post.

But rights advocates levelled more serious criticism at the US president, invoking his rights record and foreign policy.

Trump’s record

While Trump has helped broker some peace deals between warring parties, most recently between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he has been an advocate for increased military spending across the Western world.

Trump also ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, and he has continued to arm Israel despite its well-documented abuses against Palestinians.

In the Western Hemisphere, Trump’s administration has also carried out 22 air strikes against vessels that it says are carrying drugs, killing at least 86 people. Legal experts have widely condemned the attacks as unlawful acts of extrajudicial killing.

Moreover, Trump has been amassing military assets near Venezuela, raising speculation that the US may go to war with the country to topple left-wing President Nicolas Maduro.

At home, Trump has intensified an anti-immigration crackdown that has led to the detention and attempted deportation of non-citizens. Some advocates have been targeted for their criticism of Israel, an act of free speech protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.

“US President Donald Trump was just awarded the newly created ‘FIFA Peace Prize’,” Human Rights Watch said on the social media platform X.

“But his administration’s appalling human rights record certainly does not display ‘exceptional actions for peace and unity’.”

For his part, Mokhiber, the former UN official, said the “vulgar” prize to Trump must be rescinded.