In the gilded halls of Budapest, a city that has witnessed enough historical collapses to know better, the self-appointed masters of the European footballing universe gathered to celebrate themselves. The Hungarian Football Federation was marking its 125th anniversary, a milestone that should have been spent drinking expensive wine and patting each other on the back for effectively monetizing the physical exertion of twenty-two young men. Instead, the air was thick with a peculiar brand of panic—the kind only experienced by high-level bureaucrats when they realize their performative world of sports is about to collide with the brute-force idiocy of high-level geopolitics. The topic on the table wasn’t the offside rule or the latest corruption scandal; it was the prospect of Donald Trump deciding to treat the world’s largest island like a distressed foreclosure in Atlantic City.

The Guardian reports that approximately twenty heads of football associations (FAs) spent their informal intervals in Budapest whispering about the "Greenland crisis." For those who haven’t been paying attention to the fever dreams of the American executive branch, Trump’s recurring obsession with annexing Greenland is back on the menu. To the orange-tinted developer in Washington, Greenland isn't a sovereign territory of the Kingdom of Denmark or a home to the Inuit; it is 836,000 square miles of untapped real estate that would look much better with a gold-plated tower and a mediocre buffet. It is a land grab so prehistoric in its logic that it makes the 19th century look like a bastion of progressive diplomacy.

Enter UEFA. The European football chiefs, sensing an opportunity to play at being actual statesmen, have begun discussing a coordinated response. The primary weapon in their arsenal? A boycott of the World Cup. It is a move so profoundly stupid that it can only have been conceived by people who believe that kicking a ball is a fundamental human right. The logic—if one can use that word without irony—is that a unified European withdrawal from the world's most lucrative advertisement for soft drinks and sports betting would somehow force the United States to abandon its dreams of Arctic expansion. It is the height of European arrogance: the belief that the American right-wing’s appetite for manifest destiny can be quelled by the threat of not having to watch Harry Kane take a penalty.

Let us deconstruct the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have Trump, a man who views the globe as a Monopoly board where he is the only one with the 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. His desire to annex Greenland is a testament to the terminal boredom of the American political class; having failed to solve anything within their own borders, they have decided to shop for more. On the other side, we have the UEFA leadership—a cabal of suits who have spent decades ignoring the human rights abuses of their host nations and sponsors as long as the checks cleared. For these men to suddenly find their moral compass because of a territorial dispute in the North Atlantic is nothing short of comedic. It is performative virtue at its most expensive. They aren't worried about the sovereignty of Greenland; they are worried about the optics of a world where their little game is rendered irrelevant by the crude realities of land-grabbing.

The discussions in Budapest reflect a deeper, more existential dread. We are living in an era where the institutions we built to maintain order—the UN, the WTO, the various treaties that supposedly govern our behavior—are being bypassed by individuals who operate on the logic of a schoolyard bully. In response, the people in charge of our entertainment have decided they are the new thin blue line. The absurdity of a "unified European response" led by football associations should be enough to make anyone with a functioning brain weep. These are the same organizations that would sell the naming rights to their own grandmothers if the price was right, yet here they are, acting as the vanguard of Western liberal democracy.

The implications for the World Cup are, as the reporting suggests, "alarming." But for whom? For the fans who will be denied their tribal dopamine hit? For the sponsors who will lose their eyeballs? Or for the politicians who use these events as a smoke screen for their own incompetence? A boycott would be the ultimate empty gesture. It would change nothing about the American desire for Arctic minerals or strategic dominance, but it would allow the European elite to feel a warm glow of superiority as they sit at home during the summer. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a 'thoughts and prayers' tweet, backed by the collective ego of twenty men in Budapest who think they are saving the world while they are really just worried about their corporate hospitality suites.

In the end, the Greenland saga is the perfect microcosm of our current rot. We have a greedy, moronic impulse on one side of the Atlantic met by a performative, hypocritical bureaucracy on the other. Neither side cares about the actual reality of Greenland; it is merely a prop in a much larger play about who gets to pretend they are in charge. As the ice caps melt and the world inches closer to a state of permanent ecological and political collapse, we can all find solace in the fact that the men who run soccer are having "initial discussions" about it. The ball is in their court, and as usual, they are likely to trip over it while trying to score an own goal.