FIFA president’s jet logged enough miles to circle the Equator – twice
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FIFA president Gianni Infantino clapping during the Legends Cup of the 2026 World Cup football tournament at the Rockefeller Center in New York on July 17, 2026.
PHOTO: AFP
NEW YORK – The 2026 World Cup features an unprecedented 104 matches after FIFA expanded the competition to 48 teams. By the tournament’s end, Gianni Infantino will have attended nearly half of them.
To do so, the FIFA president has flown about 93,000km between the three host countries – Canada, Mexico and the US – on a luxury Gulfstream G650ER operated by Qatar Airways that FIFA pays to use, according to a Bloomberg calculation of the shortest distance between airports based on numbers from JetSpy, an aviation data provider.
That is equivalent to taking 23 flights between Los Angeles and New York or lapping Earth’s equator twice.
Suited and surrounded by football officials, Infantino has been such a ubiquitous sight at the tournament that one online joke claiming he was present at two simultaneous games went viral.
Infantino did not bend the rules of space and time to attend two games at once in the final round of group matches, but he did attend two games played on the same day in different cities – sometimes in different countries – on 13 occasions.
His attendance is especially notable due to the unprecedented scope of the 2026 tournament.
In 2022, Infantino made a point of attending all 64 matches held in Qatar – a country smaller than Connecticut. Not only does the 2026 tournament have 40 more matches, but it is also the first in FIFA’s century-long history to be hosted by three countries.
FIFA will consider stretching the next tournament even further to include 64 teams, Infantino told Swiss broadcaster Blue Sport. The 2030 World Cup will be co-hosted by Morocco, Portugal and Spain.
Infantino’s longest travel day was June 26, when his jet flew more than 8,900km.
After watching Ivory Coast defeat Curacao in Philadelphia the evening before and spending the night in Miami, he flew to Dallas, where he briefly visited Jordan’s team.
An hour and a half later, he jetted off to Seattle to catch the match between Egypt and Iran. After the game, he flew back to Miami for the night, where he watched Colombia and Portugal the next day.
The 56-year-old will have watched six games in Miami – more than any other location – following the third-place match between France and England on July 18. He relocated to the south Florida city two years ago ahead of the tournament.
A FIFA spokesperson declined to comment on Infantino’s North America itinerary.
The World Cup caused a spike in demand for private jet charters this summer as wealthy football enthusiasts built multi-city travel itineraries, said Barry Shevlin, chief executive officer of private aviation company FlyUSA. But it would take the average private jet customer at least a year to travel anywhere near 93,000km, he said.
Infantino’s World Cup journeys could cost more than US$350,000 (S$452,000) in jet fuel alone and produce over 700,000kg of CO2 emissions, Shevlin said. That is roughly equal to the annual carbon footprint of 40 average Americans.
When Infantino is at a World Cup game, broadcasts often cut to him more than once. Those cuts have occasionally been met with boos from fans reacting to his numerous controversies throughout the tournament – most notably FIFA’s rare decision to rescind a one-game ban given to American player Folarin Balogun after US President Donald Trump made a phone call to Infantino requesting that the penalty be revoked.
His close ties to the Trump administration were on display at the US’ opening match against Paraguay, which he attended with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Paraguayan President Santiago Pena.
More often than heads of state, Infantino has attended matches with the presidents of football federations from around the world who participate in the FIFA Congress.
An expanded World Cup is an opportunity for the FIFA president to meet his constituents as he seeks a fourth term as the head of football’s governing body, said Declan Abernethy, a lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies the sport’s history.
“The way that this system works is by relationships,” he said. “He recognises that those relationships are critical. Being there gives him authority, but it also shows who he is beholden to.”
Infantino is widely expected to be re-elected by the FIFA Congress, which has representatives from 211 countries and territories and holds an election in March 2027. BLOOMBERG