It was hard to choose one favourite photo from football’s double-header at the White House this week. In part this is because the pictures from Donald Trump’s state dinner with Mohammed bin Salman and his in-house hype men Cristiano Ronaldo and Gianni Infantino were everywhere, recycled feverishly across the internet, dusted with their own drool-stained commentary by the wider Ronaldo-verse.
Mainly there were just so many jaw-droppers. Perhaps you liked the one of Trump and Ronaldo strolling the halls of power, Ronaldo dressed all in black and laughing uproariously, like a really happy ninja. Or the one of Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez standing either side of a weirdly beaming Trump at his desk, holding up some kind of large heraldic key as though they’ve just been presented with their own wind-up wooden sex-grandad.
Perhaps you preferred footage of the dinner itself where even the air in the room looks thick and smudged and strange, the kind of room where you look down and notice the chair you’re sitting on is made out of human fingernails. There was the bit where Trump is giving a speech about all the “unbelievable dignitaries”, impresario-style, like he’s cutting the ribbon on a shopping mall in Boca Raton. As you look closer it becomes clear his hair has now decisively evolved from its previous form as a kind of flat orange hat and has gone full 1980s newsreader bouffant, so thick with spray and chemicals it’s closer to a kind of gauze, hair you could stick your hand in and then never get it out, like flypaper.
Maybe it’s the simple game of trying to work out what might have been on the menu given Ronaldo dines off swordfish, lettuce and a gallon of mineral water, whereas an average Trump dinner is two Filets-O-Fish covered in ketchup, 12 cans of Diet Coke and a wheelbarrow full of biscuits.
My favourite bits are where Infantino keeps wandering into shot. There he is again, gurning at the back of Ronaldo’s post-dinner power-selfie, looking as ever like a vampire who does card tricks, but also seeming, at this ultimate level of weirdness, to be showing some slight sense of impostor syndrome.
Albeit, in Infantino’s case this is not a syndrome. He is an actual impostor, out there pretending to be a disinterested administrator. And he is correct to feel this way, in so much as essence of human vanity compacted into a dinner jacket and taught to say the phrase “Today I feel like a hazelnut” can feel anything.
It is worth being totally clear on what was happening here. This was, first of all, a state visit and a significant refresh of US-Saudi relations. But it was also a kind of executive benediction. First for Ronaldo, who hadn’t been photographed in the US since the leaking in 2017 of allegations of sexual assault, which he denies and have never been proven.
Not being in the US has cost the Ronaldo brand millions. A final pension-pot World Cup is looming. With Trump in the White House and MBS at his back, it seems this is now a safe space. The quid pro quo is obvious. CR7 is huge among young men on the internet. He’s the most winningest World Cup mascot. He’s a tall handsome guy. This is where we are, why Trump is up at his dais saying the word “Roonnnallldoo” in those sensuous cooing tones, like he’s whispering into the ear of his favourite doughnut.
The second returnee is MBS, overlord of the next World Cup-but-two. The crown prince was on his first visit to the US since being accused by its intelligence service of complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Here he was casually exonerated by Trump (“He knew nothing about it”) in an aside to journalists.
How do you get hold of one of these off-the-cuff pardons? By sheer coincidence, on Wednesday night Trump also got to announce that Saudi Arabia is investing $1tn in the US. But whatever the lines of cause and effect, here was a man previously accused of complicity in murder and a man previously accused of sexual assault being welcomed back by the most indicted president in US history. All of them talking about the power of love and peace. All of it glossed and legitimised by the presence at the table of football.
And so here we have it, the ultimate in grotesque sporting spectacles. For Ronaldo, this represents a convincing nadir, confirmation of the moral emptiness of his entire schlocky persona. But Ronaldo is also a private individual who can come and go as he pleases. Football, Fifa, the World Cup. These things belong to us and they really shouldn’t be in this room.
There is a sense of outrage fatigue about all this. Infantino is doing something awful again? No way dude. Maybe humans just prefer evil stuff on some level. It’s more cinematic. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, the world’s first unintended rock star, out there throwing TVs out the hotel window, the bad guy usually does steal the show.
But it is still necessary to ramp up the anger thrusters again, because this is a level up. Here we have an all-time footballer, who doesn’t need more money, being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to play in Saudi Arabia and who is now a mascot to the travelling court.
For all Ronaldo’s alpha-dog stylingthis is such invertebrate behaviour. I will perfect my physical form. I will rise to become the most famous human. All the better to polish the boots of power. None of this will dissuade any of Ronaldo’s online supplicants. This is the point. His influence is being entirely co-opted, the greatest one-man act of multiple regime-washing yet devised.
It also matters because of next year’s World Cup. Infantino’s dog-like devotion to Trump is not just a personal oddity, but a breach of his duty of care. Fifa is non-political. Fifa is an administrator, not a player on the stage. Fifa has no mandate to use football’s popularity to endorse a movement, to be present while globally significant arms sales and nuclear cooperation are agreed.
The day before the Ronaldo buffet, Infantino sat nodding along while Trump talked about moving World Cup games from cities run by his political opponents and threatened to bomb Fifa’s co-host Mexico. Trump is already shaping this global show as a projector screen for his own divisive politics and the power-play with fellow autocrats, to the extent it is fair to say the US World Cup is as bad as Qatar and Russia on a register of political cynicism. At least neither of those two ever pretended to be the world’s leading liberal democracy.
There was an obvious emotional counterpoint this week in the glimpses of that other sporting world, Troy Parrott saying: “That’s why we love football,” the joy of Scotland’s qualification, little shots of beauty that keep you coming. We don’t have to give up on the World Cup. But we can give up on the people who have weaponised it. And demand, wherever it is still possible, a great deal better than this.
