World Cup draw latest: Donald Trump at major date in football calendar – as FIFA lines up peace prize

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World Cup draw latest: Donald Trump at major date in football calendar - as FIFA lines up peace prize

Matches at the World Cup will be hosted across 16 different cities in the US (11), Mexico (three) and Canada (two).

But Donald Trump has previously spoken about moving matches away from certain cities.

“If we think there’s going to be a sign of any trouble, I would ask Gianni [FIFA President Gianni Infantino] to move that to a different city.

“We have a lot of cities that would love to have it, and would do it very safely.”

Trump and Infantino have spent time together at the White House and even watched a match together in recent months, as the pair seek to build a strong relationship ahead of the tournament.

The US president has been known to use sporting events for self-promotion.

Los Angeles – in Democrat-run California – is currently slated to host eight World Cup matches, but Trump has threatened to take them away after a string of recent protests in the city.

Trump says this, coupled with the devastating wildfires seen in LA earlier this year, shows the city is unsafe and his weak leadership.

But does he really have the power to move the location of the fixtures?

“If I were ones of those mayors, I just wouldn’t worry about it,” Scott LeTellier, the managing director of the 1994 World Cup, told Sky News.

“It would require, by law, some type of national emergency that would give the federal government the authority to cancel an event.

“Of course, if President Trump decided to leverage the weight of federal government’s support for the event against a demand that it leave a particular city, that could not be discounted, but I don’t see that there’s even a remote chance of that happening.”

As it stands, World Cup games will be held in the following cities:

United States