Infantino's World Cup travel draws fire over private jet use

Gianni Infantino attended 10 World Cup matches in seven days across North America, moving from Mexico City and Guadalajara to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Kansas City, Houston and Miami with the help of a Qatar Airways private jet. The travel came as the 2026 tournament spread 48 teams across 104 matches, 16 stadiums and four time zones, with some venues separated by more than 2,800 miles.

FIFA defended the president’s itinerary by saying its executives choose between commercial and private flights based on what is most efficient and cost-effective, and that FIFA covers the travel costs. The organization has built a tournament that demands constant movement, and Infantino’s schedule became the clearest example of how that design plays out at the top of the federation.

By BBC Verify’s tally, Infantino’s World Cup travel reached 24 matches and 27 flights in just over two weeks, underscoring how the scale of North America’s World Cup enabled the president to move from city to city at pace. The itinerary also highlighted the contradiction at the center of FIFA’s climate messaging, with the president’s frequent jet use sitting uneasily beside the tournament’s sustainability claims.

Environmental critics seized on that gap. David Gogishvili of the University of Lausanne called it a "sustainability paradox," while Greenpeace USA’s John Hocevar criticized daily private-jet flights as a poor signal from a sport that says it wants to confront climate change. The criticism landed harder because the travel was not an isolated episode but a pattern repeated across a sprawling tournament.

The broader context is FIFA’s own recent history. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar drew 1,846 private jets, and reporting citing Nature said that total exceeded the private-jet counts for the Super Bowl, Cannes, Davos and COP28 combined. Qatar also provided the backdrop for the 2022 event’s heavy air traffic, making this year’s debate look less like a one-off and more like a recurring feature of FIFA’s biggest stage.

Infantino’s movement across North America was possible because the tournament itself was built around vast distances and packed scheduling. It was also a reminder that FIFA’s governance culture at the top still relies on the same high-carbon mobility that its public climate language invites others to rethink.