The first awarding marked the apex of Gianni Infantino’s hubris. A new version could highlight the good in the world of soccer

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Poor Fifa peace prize. Unloved, unliked, mocked, tainted by association with its first winner. And now demoted, too, after Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, dumped the thing on the global governing body’s “social responsibility committee” to look after. To redeem it, rather than to ditch it, to spare Infantino the embarrassment of acknowledging that his fake prize was really just a fake prize all along.

Here is where we should probably acknowledge that, as fake prizes go, and in the context of what it was intended to accomplish, the first awarding of the Fifa peace prize was an unqualified success. It achieved exactly what it was meant to, made by Infantino to flatter Donald Trump, the man he needed to keep on his side to safeguard the riches to be extracted from the North American market in order to consolidate his power base within Fifa. Trump, the gullible buffoon, was pleased as punch – handed a big, golden bauble and a medal he placed around his own neck – and briefly forgot about the Nobel peace prize he desperately covets.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.

The protests around an anti-ICE T-shirt show that politics can never be separated from sports, especially now

On 26 September, Daniela Silva was expelled from Austin FC’s match with San Diego FC for wearing a T-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”. She says she was banned from Q2 Stadium for a year (Austin FC said that the ban was issued by the Austin Police Department, not the club, and that they offered to rescind it but that Silva declined).

This happened, really, truly, and you cannot make this up, during Austin FC’s Hispanic Heritage Night. It also happened six days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot a Venezuelan delivery driver, 28-year-old Wilber Garcés Pérez, in the torso in Austin, sparking protests in the city.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.