The Weekly Vine Edition 100: The FIFA Trump Awards

Hello and welcome to the 100th edition of the Weekly Vine. First, a solemn thanks to all readers who have been with us through thick and thin, reading every edition, giving feedback and admonishing us whenever we miss Meow Times. For the last month or so, yours truly, along with millions across the globe, sacrificed sleep so Gianni Infantino could improve FIFA’s relationship with MAGA and Mammon. But now, to quote the nepo kid Jon Snow, who didn’t know he was a nepo kid like Karna, my watch is over. Before we get back to regular programming, there is one last World Cup post. And we promise this one is for all Vine readers: football fans or otherwise.

So without further ado, here are the FIFA Trump Awards.

Best Beautiful Meme Lord Award
Winner: ‘Dictator’ Mbappe

There have been many, many memes at this World Cup. The Japanese coach scribbling in the Death Note diary. Yamal channelling Baby Yoda. Cabo Verde refusing to lose. Japanese fans cleaning up and social media immediately turning civic responsibility into marriage counselling. Vikings rowing everywhere they went, proving once again that if white people clap in formation, global broadcasters will call it culture. But the meme that takes the cake for standing the test of time is ‘Dictator’ Mbappe. Around since 2023, it truly came to the fore as France treated opponents with imperial disdain until they ran into a Spain team that taught them the meaning of pain.

Some Say The Best Ever Pookie Award
Winner: Erling Haaland

On the field, he gives defenders nightmares. Off the field, he gives them to boyfriends. Erling Haaland has always been a football fan’s favourite thanks to his enormous physique and prodigious goalscoring ability, but this was the World Cup where even non-football fans discovered his remarkable online presence and immediately bestowed upon him the sobriquet of Some Say The Best Ever Pookie. A man built like Scandinavia had reopened the Viking programme somehow became the internet’s largest soft toy.

The Main Character-in-Chief Medal
Winner: Rodri

After winning the World Cup, Ferran Torres wore a cap titled Make Spain Great Again during the victory celebration in Madrid, but the true winner of this spectacle was, to borrow a line from another hydration enthusiast, football itself. Amid the spectacle, heat, politics, celebrity cameos and trophy-stage weirdness, Spain ensured that the best team won by beating an Argentina side that had turned up at a football match as if it were a pub brawl with shin pads.

The Pete Hegseth Hydration Break Award
Winner: Hydration breaks

Regular followers of American politics will know that Pete Hegseth is a huge fan of hydration, something Saturday Night Live loves reminding us. The Pete Hegseth Hydration Break Award therefore goes to all the sponsors and broadcasters who somehow managed to turn a game of two halves into four quarters so they could showcase their ads. What began as a medical necessity soon looked like the great American dream: a public service announcement with commercial inventory attached. God bless capitalism. God bless America. God bless hydration breaks.

The Elon Musk Best Assist Award
Winner: Nico Williams

They might not be BFFs anymore, but Elon Musk’s money, platform muscle and chaos engine were arguably the greatest assist in modern political history, helping pave the way for Trump to become President against a mainstream American media ecosystem that tried very hard to convince us Kamala Harris was a great interviewer. Nico Williams did the football version in the final. Ferran Torres got the goal, but Williams supplied the decisive push that made the finish feel inevitable. Every Trump needs a Musk. Every World Cup final needs the man who makes someone else look like destiny.

The Gianni Infantino Stable Genius Award
Winner: Gianni Infantino

They do not come more stable than the little boy from a Swiss chalet who has rebranded football in his own image, ensuring that we continue to hate the game we love because of an organisation whose entire existence is based on squeezing moolah out of us. Gianni Infantino has the permanent expression of a man who has mistaken proximity to power for statesmanship and hospitality revenue for moral progress. That said, most of us thought a 48-team World Cup would be bloated, and it turned out to be a lot of fun, which is exactly how FIFA gets you. First the football entertains you, then the invoice arrives.

The Make Football Great Again Award
Winner: Spain

After winning the World Cup, Ferran Torres wore a cap titled Make Spain Great Again during the victory celebration in Madrid, but the true winner of this spectacle was, to borrow a line from another hydration enthusiast, football itself. Amid the spectacle, heat, politics, celebrity cameos and trophy-stage weirdness, Spain ensured that the best team won by beating an Argentina side that had turned up at a football match as if it were a pub brawl with shin pads.

The Zlatan Ibrahimovic Best Football Pundit Award
Winner: Donald Trump

Anyone who has followed Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s career knows he loves talking about his favourite subject: Zlatan. So it was surprising when he decided to become a football pundit because that requires give and take, and occasionally analysing things beyond one’s id and ego. Surprisingly, Zlatan was not the worst thing in a four-part panel on Fox Sports, and the Swede pulled a Cantona by deciding to retire after the tournament. But perhaps the best pundit of this World Cup was the leader of the free world, who looked at England’s late collapse against Argentina and somehow reached the correct pub conclusion: if Lionel Messi is still on the pitch, inviting pressure is not a tactic, it is a suicide note with tactical arrows. Certainly better punditry than whatever we usually hear from Gary Neville or the Class of 92.

The J6 Pardon Award
Winner: Folarin Balogun

The J6 pardons refer to about 1,500 individuals who treated the US Capitol the way Spain treat the football pitch and were eventually pardoned by Trump in 2025. Folarin Balogun got a similar pardon when Trump used the KBC-like Phone-a-Friend option to call FIFA and ask them to look again at his red card. FIFA did not rescind the card, but suspended the one-match ban for a year, which in footballing terms is the same thing as saying the intern misplaced the constitution. The red-card redemption made no difference as Belgium thrashed the US 4-1 and then rubbed it in with “Overturn this”. The real irony is that Trump may have done something corrupt that was not aimed at self-aggrandisement, but at his country. Growth.

The Art of the Steal Award
Winner: FIFA

Progressives might be tempted to claim Messi or VARGENTINA deserve it, but there can be only one winner for the Art of the Steal Award: FIFA. Because while footballers were busy sweating, pressing and pretending they had normal hamstrings, FIFA was doing what FIFA does best: turning the world’s most loved sport into a money-printing machine with a conscience smaller than a VAR offside line. Bigger World Cup, more teams, more matches, more sponsors, more broadcast deals, more hospitality packages, more everything. The expanded 48-team tournament reportedly helped FIFA head towards record World Cup revenue of around $15 billion, while the prize pool also ballooned for the teams. Trump may have written The Art of the Deal, but Infantino has mastered the sequel: The Art of the Steal.

The Sleepy Joe Award
Winner: Football fans

Donald Trump loved to call his predecessor “Sleepy Joe” before giving us a real-time view into the perils of presidential logorrhoea. But the award goes to football fans, particularly those in Asia, who took Dani Rojas’s maxim of “Football is life” by giving up any semblance of one and staying awake till ungodly hours to watch matches. The real World Cup endurance test was not altitude, pressing or extra time. It was the human sleep cycle. As Robert Frost would put it: minutes to watch before I sleep.

The Most Oppressed Team Award
Winner: Iran

It is not every World Cup that a host country is also bombing one of the participants. One of the unsaid rules of the World Cup is that we put geopolitical squabbles aside for a while, but there were no such niceties for Iran, who had to move their base to Mexico and were required to leave the country after their match. The treatment meted out by the US led Amir Ghalenoei to label Iran the “most oppressed team” at the World Cup, which is perhaps the first time the men’s team got a glimpse of the treatment meted out to women in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

MAGA Best Fans Award
Winner: Scottish fans

There are two unsaid rules of MAGA: always agree with Donald Trump and always agree with Donald Trump. Failure to do so means being cast out of MAGA heaven, which explains why the movement has some of the loudest fans ever. We saw top-drawer fan culture across the tournament, from the Australians, whose anti-Trump chant travelled farther than some of their passes, to the Japanese cleaning up stadiums (and irking their wives), to Vikings breaking into rows wherever they could. But the winners have to be the Scottish fans. While the Scotland team disappointed on the pitch, the fans won hearts and minds everywhere they went by drinking pubs dry, leaving one Boston bar with only Bud Light, which in Scottish-fan terms is less alcohol than a cry for help.

Zohran Mamdani Underdog Award
Winner: Cabo Verde

When Zohran Mamdani began his campaign for New York mayor, he was the subject of much mirth. Today, he is the Democratic Socialist mayor of the city that never accepted Trump as its own, which perhaps explains why the President appears to have a soft spot for him. At this World Cup, our Mamdani was Cabo Verde, the smallest nation to reach the World Cup finals and a team that seemed to have been put together on LinkedIn before winning the hearts and minds of fans across the globe. History will remember that this World Cup final was contested between two nations that could not beat them in normal time.

Barron Trump Cutie Pie Award
Winner: Keyne

It is hard to use the words Trump and cute together, but before Barron grew so tall that he made Erling Haaland look like a full-back, he used to be rather cute. Donald Trump might have wanted to make the World Cup final all about himself, but the true winner of that day was Lamine Yamal’s young half-brother Keyne, who ran on to the pitch after Spain’s win and celebrated with the gusto of a toddler who had just won the World Cup. Just to be clear, as one wrote on Offside, that sort of behaviour is cute when one is three, not when one is 80.

Game of Thrones Finale Award
Winner: Argentina

We live in very divided times where we can never agree on anything, but one thing everyone can agree on, irrespective of gender or politics, is that the Game of Thrones finale sucked. And that is why it is fitting that the Game of Thrones Finale Award goes to Argentina, who managed to spoil Messi’s last dance with a performance that was more Fight Club than football match. Argentina had made a tournament of escaping Egypt, Switzerland and England, but they simply did not look capable of doing that against Spain because they seemed least bothered about playing football.

The SEO guy is still here, and so are we

There is a guy in every Indian newsroom whose single job is to make sure the headline contains the words people are already typing into Google. He does not write the story. He reads it, winces, and appends a colon, after which comes the keyword: the actor’s name, the IPO, the phone that launched, the ailment currently trending on WhatsApp. He is paid to ensure that a piece of journalism arrives at the reader disguised as the answer to a question the reader was too bored to finish asking. We have all made our peace with him, which is precisely the problem.

Somewhere along the way, and I have been in these rooms long enough to have helped lay the track, we decided the metric was the point. Not the story that produced the number, not the reader the number stood in for, but the number itself, glowing on a dashboard that someone refreshes the way an anxious man refreshes his phone for a text that is not coming. We built desks around the dashboard. We hired for it. We promoted the people who understood it and quietly reassigned the ones who kept asking what it was for, which is a career-limiting question in any organisation that has stopped wanting to know the answer.

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