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Infantino’s power is dependent on that money. “The money of FIFA is your money,” he told the organization’s delegates back in 2016. He distributes FIFA’s revenues to its 211 delegations—representatives of the nations that participate in its tournaments—in multimillion-dollar installments that come with few strings. Because Infantino’s power is contingent on his ability to dole out cash, stipends, and other favors, his tenure as FIFA president has been defined by a rapacious search for new revenue streams—and a host of questionable alliances with wealthy authoritarian nations and their autocratic leaders.

His relationship with Trump is one such alliance. Trump offers Infantino something a Democratic president almost certainly wouldn’t: the ability to run the World Cup the way he wants, without criticism, restraint, or any real attempt at oversight. This is not to say that Infantino is wholly unconcerned with the operation of the tournament itself or Trump’s potential to disrupt it. Thus far, Infantino’s combination of public displays of fealty with private lobbying has proved effective at swaying Trump to grant exceptions to FIFA on issues like visa processing. In November, amid growing fear about visa waiting times in some countries—500 days in Colombia, for instance—he convinced Trump to allow ticket holders access to special appointments on an expedited timeline, though they would still face the administration’s stringent screening process. (It was at the press conference announcing this plan that Trump threatened, while Infantino fidgeted behind him, to bomb Mexican cartels.)

But Infantino will step in only when Trump administration policy directly affects the World Cup. And his steadfast refusal to acknowledge, let alone reckon with, any of the numerous policies, directives, and statements that indirectly affect the tournament increasingly looks like a form of grave negligence. After all, Trump’s mere presence in the White House makes dysfunction at the World Cup significantly more likely. Even if you dispense with the fuzzy bromides about celebrating global diversity and togetherness, hosting the World Cup still demands doing something this administration seems both incapable of and fundamentally opposed to: welcoming dozens of foreign teams and millions of fans—a projected six million—into the country.