Traveling the enormous distances of the 2026 World Cup by private jet, FIFA President Gianni Infantino once again highlights the indifference of the institution that governs world football towards any climate austerity measures.
Mexico City, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Kansas City, Houston: the Italian-Swiss has appeared in the stands at least 10 times in 7 days, often accompanied by former French player Youri Djorkaeff, his football advisor.
Inseparable from his conception of power, his ubiquity is nothing new, nor is his recurrent use of private Qatar Airways flights: in September 2024, according to the Norwegian platform Josimar, Infantino had traveled 600,000 km aboard this aircraft during the three years prior to that date.
The 2026 World Cup, organized for the first time between the United States, Canada and Mexico with 48 teams, increased the number of matches from 64 to 104, multiplying the impact of the use of the jet.
“A single hour on this plane emits almost [a quantidade de CO₂ ] that a person emits on average in an entire year”, calculated this week by Greenly, a French company specializing in carbon footprint assessment.
If Gianni Infantino chains two cities a day until the end of the round of 16, and then watches the last eight matches, “we would be talking about between 300 and 500 tons of CO₂ just for his plane” during the tournament. In other words, “the annual footprint of 35 to 55 French people”, says Greenly.
FIFA states that its officials choose to travel by commercial or private flight “whichever is most effective and economical” and that, in any case, the organization “pays the travel costs”.
But Infantino’s case “perfectly reflects the systemic problem” of this tournament and, more broadly, of the direction taken by FIFA, David Gogishvili, a geographer at the University of Lausanne, tells AFP.
By being played in 16 stadiums “dispersed across a continent”, the football organization “created a model structurally dependent on air transport”, the biggest emitter of CO₂, he summarizes.
“Putting your managers on private flights every day doesn’t exactly convey the message” of climate awareness, says John Hocevar, from Greenpeace USA on Instagram, especially when this World Cup precisely illustrates the damage of extreme heat “for both players and fans”.
Far from being a temporary option, the geographic dispersion will be repeated next year during the Women’s World Cup in Brazil, which FIFA preferred in 2024 to a 100% accessible bid by train between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
And it will acquire an even more extreme character with the centenary of the men’s World Cup, in 2030, organized between Morocco, Portugal and Spain, with three matches in South America and the prospect, not yet defined, of increasing the number of participating teams to 64.
Due to the price structure and VIP boxes, the use of private planes for a football World Cup is, furthermore, far from being limited to the FIFA summit, which further increases the climate impact of the event.
The 2022 World Cup brought 1,846 private jets to Qatar, according to the British magazine Nature at the end of 2024, that is, more than the Super Bowl, the Cannes Film Festival, the Davos Economic Forum and COP 28 combined.
“The emissions associated with a World Cup are, by definition, emissions of luxury and not of subsistence”, recalled American academic Tim Walters a year ago on the debate platform Play the Game.
“In this context, the overt activity of the ultra-rich is particularly obscene and demoralizing,” said the expert.
