Will Trump rename soccer?

On the one-year anniversary of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on his life, President Trump celebrated on stage with Chelsea FC after they won the FIFA Club World Cup in Giants Stadium. No one dancing around the trophy looked happier than Trump, who appeared like an aged striker who’d ducked into the locker room to put on a blue suit and a red tie.

“I knew he was going to be here but I didn’t know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy. I was a bit confused,” said Chelsea FC star Cole Palmer. Above all else, Donald Trump celebrates winning, and this was a big win, complete with confetti shower. Plus, you can’t discount the fact that on this day, of all days, Trump was just happy to be alive, the greatest win of all.

The President’s box in East Rutherford was like an episode of Succession come to life. Joining him and Melania were several Trump siblings and sibling-spouses, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, Trump’s best “gal” attorney General Pam Bondi, cabinet secretaries Kristi Noem and Sean Duffy, powerful Trump fixer Boris Epshteyn, Tom Brady, Rupert Murdoch and Tom Wambgans, head of ATN News. If you’re a big winner in life, you dined at the Trump buffet on Sunday.

But he’s clearly also setting the stage for showcasing the United States in the 2026 World Cup. He even joked with a reporter who asked him if he’d issue an executive order officially renaming soccer “football” in the U.S. “I think we can do that,” Trump said.

He was practically hooting in an interview with the global sports network DAZN. The 2026 North America World Cup is going to be yuge, the best World Cup, so big that even Mexico and Canada are hosting it. But we all know who the world will be really watching. “[The US] is doing very well on the other stage, on the political stage, on the financial stage,” Trump said. “I was just in Saudi Arabia, I was in Qatar, I was in the UAE. Here we have Qatar, you know, the big presence they have, but you have all of the leaders and then you look at NATO, all of the leaders said ‘A year ago your country was dead, and now you have the hottest country in the world.’ There’s a lot of truth to that, we were doing very badly as a country in an incompetent administration and now we have a hot country. It’s really hot. And I think the soccer is going to be hot here too.”

Trump also said that Pelé was his favorite soccer player of all time, the “GOAT,” which is a bit of a dated reference, but if someone had seen Willie Mays or Hank Aaron play and made the same claim about baseball, you wouldn’t doubt them, so not a bad choice. He also said, in some weird funhouse mirror Invictus way, that the 2026 World Cup would help bring about world peace.

“[Sports] is about unity, a lot of getting together, a lot of love between countries. I guess this is probably the most international sport, so it can really bring the world together,” he told DAZN.

It’s one big beautiful game, really. The United States, as we all know, has the best World Cups because it’s really hot right now. Early favorites to win the Cup are defending champion Spain, with France, the U.K. and Brazil also looking strong. But no matter who hoists the trophy in New Jersey next summer, you can guarantee that Donald Trump will be standing nearby, looking like the biggest winner of all.