Infantino Wants to Collect on Trump’s World Cup Favor but Polymarket Says He’s 36% Out

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has reportedly asked the Trump administration to help him keep his job, arranging a call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the New York Post reported Monday.

Polymarket traders price his exit by December 31 at 36.5%, up from roughly 19% a week ago. Almost all of the contract’s lifetime volume arrived in the past seven days.

Why Infantino Thinks Trump Owes FIFA a Favor

The reported ask lands four weeks after FIFA handed the White House a win. Its disciplinary committee cleared Folarin Balogun for Belgium, suspending the striker’s automatic red card ban on probation.

Trump had pushed for the reversal and claimed credit for it publicly.

“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Rubio is not a cold call. He sat in the Oval Office with Trump and Infantino last November. The occasion was a task force meeting on the World Cup.

FIFA’s bridge into that room is now gone. Carlos Cordeiro, the former Goldman Sachs banker who represented FIFA on the task force, resigned Friday over the sale plan. He had joined Infantino on repeated White House visits.

BeInCrypto could not independently verify the Rubio call, which the Post attributed to two people familiar with it.

Polymarket Traders Price the Fallout

The market read the revolt faster than the headlines did. It still traded near 20% on the afternoon of July 30. That was when all 55 UEFA member associations unanimously backed a boycott.

It broke above 40% the following day, once Infantino’s own executives turned on him. Chief operating officer Kevin Lamour told the Associated Press that staff had been deceived.

“It is the project of one person,” Kevin Lamour, chief operating officer of FIFA, in a statement to the Associated Press.

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Volume backs the repricing. The contract has handled $156,400 since it opened on July 6, and $151,700 of that traded in the past week. Open interest sits near $76,000.

The expiry date shapes how traders read it. The contract pays out only on a departure before December 31, while FIFA’s election falls next March. Challengers have until November 18 to declare, so the market is pricing resignation rather than defeat.

The asset in dispute is large. Cordeiro put FIFA’s revenue at $15 billion over the World Cup cycle. Josh Kushner’s fund offered $4.2 billion for 20% of a new FIFA subsidiary.

Crypto already has a claim on that value. The tournament drove $20 billion in World Cup prediction volume, Chainalysis found. FIFA’s own collectibles platform cleared at least $6 million in fees.

Whether Rubio’s call buys Infantino anything should show up in the odds before it shows up in a FIFA statement.

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