• Egypt’s football body says Pride event would clash with values

• Iran raises objections to plans organised by local Seattle group

Egypt and Iran are calling on football’s governing body to intervene in the LGBTQ+ Pride celebration planned to coincide with their group stage match in Seattle at the 2026 World Cup.

Egypt’s Football Association (EFA) said on Tuesday it had sent a letter to Fifa urging them to prevent any LGBTQ+ Pride-related activities during the national team’s match against Iran next June.

• Complaint from FairSquare calls for investigation

• Infantino awarded Trump peace prize at World Cup draw

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, has been accused of breaching his organisation’s rules on political neutrality in relation to the US president, Donald Trump.

Infantino and Trump have formed a close bond in recent years, with the US one of the co-hosts for the men’s World Cup next year. Infantino even presented Trump with the inaugural Fifa peace prize at the World Cup draw in Washington DC last Friday.

Friday’s ceremony in Washington DC was cringe-inducing and craven enough to make football fans nostalgic for the reign of Sepp Blatter

Well, that was awful, wasn’t it? Donald Trump’s heroic victory over a field of one to claim the inaugural Fifa peace prize, on-stage banter so dead it was already fossilized, Gianni Infantino doing crowd work, and Wayne Gretzky struggling through the pronunciation of “Macedonia” and “Curaçao” in the draw’s linguistic group of death: even with the benefit of a few days’ distance it’s impossible to overstate how impressively bad the draw for the 2026 World Cup, held last Friday at the Trump-purged Kennedy Center in Washington DC, was.

“This is America, so we have to put on a show!” roared Fifa president Infantino, resembling a Sphinx cat in a borrowed suit, at the beginning of the ceremony. And put on a show Fifa did – just not one that anyone wanted to watch, least of all a desperately bored-looking Trump, who sat through Andrea Bocelli’s Nessun Dorma with the granitic joylessness that has become his default expression at each of the sporting events he’s ruined with his presence this year. Just let the man get back to the White House; he’s the president of the United States, for god’s sake, he has bathrooms to redesign.