In the 1980s, having just opened his tower on Fifth Avenue, Donald Trump bought the struggling New Jersey Generals football team. As television producer Mike Tollin recalled to the BBC, “This guy with funny hair, which was not yet orange, a tortured bowl of insanity, entered the picture.” Within a year, the team was one of the best in the nascent United States Football League, which was gaining popularity so rapidly that some believed it could one day rival the N.F.L. Then, it folded. “[Trump] was the air pump into the tire,” sports broadcaster Charley Steiner told The Washington Post. “He gave the league the air it needed, elevated it to another level, pumped it up real good, and kept pumping till it exploded.” Trump’s brief, bloodthirsty foray into the world of professional sports was recalled Friday morning, when he promoted North America’s united bid for the 2026 World Cup by threatening any countries that decline to back it. “The U.S. has put together a STRONG bid w/ Canada & Mexico for the 2026 World Cup,” he wrote on Twitter. “It would be a shame if countries that we always support were to lobby against the U.S. bid. Why should we be supporting these countries when they don’t support us (including at the United Nations)?”

Trump’s threat to strong-arm other nations into compliance is not out of character; he has continuously dangled the possibility of pulling out of NAFTA before his fellow North American leaders in an attempt to force them into granting concessions. (”He’s a man who’s been negotiating all his life with a very particular, singular, aggressive style,” Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray said in a radio interview back in August, correctly predicting that “there will be more speeches, more tweets, more messages of this kind.”) Nor is the president’s passion for bribery out of step with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), soccer’s governing body, which is famously riddled with corruption. The upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia will be shadowed by the chemical weapons attacks in Salisbury and Syria, and it is widely alleged that Qatar’s successful 2022 bid to host the tournament was scored thanks to an intricate bribery scheme—in a court case back in November, a witness testified that a senior FIFA official accepted at least $1 million in bribes in exchange for his vote. Qatar has also faced international criticism over its treatment of workers who are constructing the more than $200 billion worth of major infrastructure projects planned for the competition.

Many who voted in support of Russia’s and Qatar’s bids have now been accused of or charged with criminal wrongdoing by the U.S. authorities as part of an international investigation aided by Chuck Blazer, who served on FIFA’s executive committee and as general secretary of the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association of Football (CONCACAF). In 2011, Blazer, who pleaded guilty, became an F.B.I. informant, providing reels of evidence for a case that indelibly linked FIFA in the public consciousness with bribery, cronyism, and relationships with politically dubious characters. Inevitably, Trump’s name was dragged into the mix—per Blazer’s suggestion, CONCACAF’s offices reportedly took up the entire 17th floor of Trump Tower, and Blazer himself owned two apartments in the building, one of which was exclusively occupied by his cats.

So when Gianni Infantino, who succeeded Sepp Blatter as FIFA’s president, “officially informed” the public that the organization’s corruption “crisis is over,” nobody actually believed him. And when Donald Trump threatened various world nations with repercussions should they vote against the United States’ bid, it was roughly in keeping with FIFA’s sordid history—except that, unlike the rest of FIFA’s leadership, the president didn’t even have the decency to conceal it.