Norway's football chief wants FIFA's peace prize gone. Not reformed, not reviewed — abolished. And given how the inaugural edition played out, it's hard to argue with her.
NFF President Lise Klaveness made her position clear on Monday, calling for FIFA to scrap the award entirely after world football's governing body handed its first-ever peace prize to Donald Trump at the 2026 World Cup draw back in December. Trump, who has publicly and repeatedly said he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, co-hosts this summer's tournament alongside Canada and Mexico. The optics were never going to be subtle.
"It's not FIFA's mandate"
"We don't think it's part of FIFA's mandate to give such a prize," Klaveness said. "We think we have a Nobel Institute that does that job independently already."
She's right, and the argument is straightforward: FIFA doesn't have the infrastructure, the independent juries, or the established criteria to hand out political prizes without it looking exactly like what it looked like — a governing body under Gianni Infantino cosying up to a sitting head of state whose country just happens to be hosting the World Cup.
Non-profit organisation FairSquare has already filed a complaint alleging that Infantino and FIFA may have breached their own ethical guidelines on political impartiality. The NFF board is writing a letter in support of that investigation. Klaveness wants the process to be transparent — both the reasoning and the conclusion.
"There should be checks and balances on these issues," she said. That's not a radical demand. It's the bare minimum.
Why this matters beyond the headline
Football federations are supposed to maintain arm's-length distance from state leaders. The moment that distance collapses, every decision FIFA makes around host nations, sanctions, and political disputes becomes compromised. For anyone watching how FIFA has handled Qatar, Russia, and now the Trump prize in sequence, the pattern is uncomfortable.
Klaveness, a 45-year-old lawyer by training, framed it plainly: running a genuinely independent peace prize is "full-time work" that requires expertise FIFA simply doesn't have. From a governance angle, she said, "it should be avoided also in the future."
FairSquare's complaint is now waiting on a response. Whether FIFA treats it with the transparency Klaveness is asking for will say a lot about whether Infantino's organisation is capable of holding itself accountable at all.
