FIFA President, Gianni Infantino’s relentless match-hopping across the 2026 World Cup has drawn fierce criticism from environmental groups, with campaigners accusing the world football governing body of a glaring contradiction between its climate commitments and the travel behaviour of its top official.

Since the tournament kicked off, Infantino has taken his Qatar Airways private jet to attend matches in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Kansas City, and Houston clocking up appearances at ten games in the space of just seven days.

The pattern is not new. Records had previously shown that Infantino logged over 600,000 kilometres aboard the private aircraft in the three years leading up to this tournament. But the expanded 2026 edition, the first to feature 48 teams spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with the match count jumping from 64 to 104, has given his flying habit an entirely new scale.

The backlash has come swiftly. John Hocevar, Oceans Campaign Director of Greenpeace USA, said on Instagram that having FIFA executives take daily flights on highly polluting private jets sends entirely the wrong message about whether the organisation recognises either its role in the climate crisis or its responsibility to be part of any solution. The criticism stings harder given that FIFA has for years publicly championed sustainability, pledging to make football climate-resilient and to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.

Climate analysts have put hard numbers to the damage. Estimates suggest Infantino’s jet alone could generate between 300 and 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the course of the tournament equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of as many as 55 people in France. That is only a sliver of the wider problem. Environmental organisation the New Weather Institute has described the 2026 World Cup as the most polluting event in the history of human entertainment, projecting total tournament emissions of around nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, with roughly 7.7 million tonnes of that figure coming from air travel alone. That is more than four times the emissions recorded at any World Cup held between 2010 and 2022.

David Gogishvili, a geographer at the University of Lausanne, told reporters that FIFA had created what he called a sustainability paradox — a tournament model structurally dependent on high-emission air travel, built around reusing existing NFL stadiums scattered across an entire continent. Unlike the 2022 Qatar edition where stadiums were clustered within 46 miles of each other, venues at the 2026 tournament can be up to 2,800 miles apart, spanning four time zones.

FIFA has defended the travel arrangements, stating that its executives choose between commercial and private flights based on what is most efficient and cost-effective, and that all travel costs are covered by the organisation.

Critics, however, argue the explanation does little to address the optics of the situation, especially as the private jet arrangement is understood to form part of Qatar Airways’ sponsorship deal with FIFA, making it a value-in-kind benefit rather than a straightforward operational decision.

The controversy is also unlikely to ease anytime soon. The Women’s World Cup heads to Brazil next year, and the 2030 men’s edition spans Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and three South American nations a logistical sprawl that promises to push the private jet question even further into the spotlight.