FIFA pledges $50m Gaza stadium at Trump Board of Peace event

FIFA has found a way to help war-ravaged Gaza: build a stadium.

The Independent reports that at the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump’s new “Board of Peace” in Washington, FIFA president Gianni Infantino pledged $50 million for a 20,000–25,000 seat national soccer stadium in Gaza, plus a $15 million “FIFA academy,” $2.5 million for 50 mini-pitches, and five full-sized fields at $1 million each. The same event featured governments pledging $7 billion toward Gaza relief—money that, as the Independent notes separately, is a fraction of what reconstruction is expected to cost.

The juxtaposition is the point. Gaza’s immediate needs are not mysterious: housing, water and sewage systems, roads, electricity grids, food production, and basic security. A stadium is not “infrastructure” so much as a camera-ready object that can be ribbon-cut in HD. It is also a procurement pipeline: design, construction, subcontracting, security, maintenance, sponsorships, and the inevitable “community programs” that follow the money.

Infantino’s pitch, per The Independent, was that Gaza needs not only homes and hospitals but also “emotion, hope and trust,” and that football is the “universal language” to supply it. This is the modern humanitarian genre: concrete poured as therapy, administered by global bodies that answer to no electorate in Gaza and face no downside if the project becomes a monument to misaligned priorities.

The Hill adds the optics: Infantino donned a Trump “USA” hat at the ceremony, as the Board of Peace tried to present itself as a new global problem-solving hub. Trump, never one to miss a branding opportunity, reportedly praised Infantino repeatedly and riffed about everything from escalator mishaps to B-2 bombers. The political theater may be cheap, but the contracts aren’t.

A $50 million stadium is small relative to Gaza’s total reconstruction bill, but that’s precisely why it’s attractive: it’s a manageable, legible deliverable that can be claimed as “progress” even if the less photogenic work—clearing rubble, rebuilding utilities, restoring property records, enabling private enterprise—remains stalled.

You don’t have to be anti-sports to notice the pattern: large international organizations love projects that centralize control, concentrate spending, and create dependencies. “Humanitarian infrastructure” frequently doubles as governance infrastructure—who allocates land, who approves permits, who controls access, who provides security. In a territory where political authority is contested and capital is scarce, a stadium is not neutral. It is a power node.

Gaza may eventually want football fields. What it needs first is the boring stuff that lets people live without begging a committee for permission. FIFA is offering the opposite: a gleaming symbol, funded and managed from above, to prove that hope has a budget line.