Of all Gianni Infantino’s delusions, perhaps the most dangerous is that he regards himself as a head of state. You saw it in a demand this year for the traffic in Vancouver to be stopped for his police motorcade, a level of security that the Canadian city would typically only afford for a visiting US President or the Pope.
There was a clue, too, in his Instagram screed this week, where, in language more befitting a truculent teenager, he framed any legitimate scrutiny of Fifa as “hate”. “While you divide, we unite,” he declared, with a loftiness to illustrate why Donald Trump favoured him as a future head of the United Nations. And 24 hours later, he showed what this soaring oratory meant, carving up the World Cup and offering to sell it to the highest bidder.
I hesitate to describe Infantino’s rhetoric as Orwellian, simply because George Orwell himself would likely have found his distortions too brazen to be believed.
Just look at his latest hits: first he bestowed the “Fifa Peace Prize” on a US leader who promptly threatened to wipe out the civilisation of Iran in one evening, then he displayed Fifa’s commitment to “transparency” by refusing to answer any questions about how or why Folarin Balogun, the World Cup hosts’ star striker, had his red card suspended. “Will you resign?” a journalist asked him in the lobby of New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. “Nice to meet you,” he stonewalled, offering a trite thumbs up as he disappeared.
After the Balogun outrage, quite possibly the most flagrant case of political interference in a World Cup ever witnessed, you might think Infantino would seek to protect Fifa’s showpiece from external influence. Instead, he exposes it to more, proposing to syphon its commercial interests to “outside investors”.
And guess who the first investor in the frame is? Thrive Eternal, a venture capital company created by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, Trump’s son-in-law. If you thought the entanglements between Fifa and the Trump clan were uncomfortable already, this threatens to be only the beginning. Kushner, Fifa confirms, will lead the investor group. Somehow, Infantino has the gall to call this process “democratisation”. Truly, he is a gaslighter extraordinaire.
Hard though it is to imagine, Infantino has not always been so twisted by the pursuit of power. In 2016, his first act on being elected Fifa president was to fly easyJet from Geneva to Bristol, telling reporters: “We are normal people and we have to behave like normal people.” It was all a ruse to divorce himself from the largesse of his predecessor Sepp Blatter, who once rewarded delegates at a Fifa conference with gold-plated iPads and a performance by Cirque du Soleil.
In the decade since, any sense of normality has evaporated. This summer Infantino glided from one World Cup host city to the next by Qatari private jet, breaking off from the tournament only for a 26,000km return trip to Doha so that he could mourn the late father of the emir.
He is so aloof that he no longer much cares what his own organisation thinks. Last year, Infantino turned up late to Fifa’s congress in Paraguay on the grounds that he was too busy gallivanting across the Middle East with Trump. That was an insult too far for Uefa, who staged a walkout at the event in protest.
Today, the fissure between the European and global governing bodies is wider than ever, with Aleksander Ceferin refusing to attend the World Cup final in New Jersey and Uefa condemning Fifa’s opening of the door to private investment in withering terms. “This crosses a line that the institutions governing football should never cross,” the statement from Uefa read. “None of us owns football.”
Infantino acts as if he does, however. He is a pure megalomaniac, emboldened to engineer the worst stitch-ups in plain sight. The bizarre orchestration of the next World Cup in 2030 across Spain, Portugal and Morocco, with the first three group games shifted to Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, was all a ruse to rule out three confederations from bidding in 2034, just so that Saudi Arabia could sweep in unopposed.
Now he is laying the ground for another seismic shift in a similarly clandestine way. The Football Association, far too indulgent of his excesses to this point, had no idea of his plot to “expand football development funding” until it emerged this week.
Hawking a slice of the World Cup, for all its flaws the most cherished competition in sport, should be the cue for outright rebellion. Uefa should have the courage of its convictions and issue a warning to secede. For what would the event be, ultimately, without Europe? The continent had six of eight quarter-finalists this year and three of four semi-finalists. Why does Uefa not hatch a move to strike out without Fifa? If Ceferin abhors Infantino so much, he should cut him adrift altogether. That way, the Fifa president might finally see how much the loyalty of Vanuatu or a lifetime achievement award from the Central African Republic really means.
It will almost certainly never happen, of course. These scandals follow a time-honoured pattern: politicians fulminate, a few federations speak out, and then Infantino ploughs ahead regardless. He is banking on the same outcome this time, with an estimated $26bn World Cup windfall enabling him to do essentially as he pleases. He is a part of the oligarchy now, lethally preoccupied with power for its own sake. Just look at his gurning and genuflecting around Trump, abandoning any pretence at dignity.
While Infantino has often been said to resemble the Hood, the villain in Thunderbirds, he is arguably even more of a puppet. And now we see the logical endgame of all his abjection and cynical manoeuvring in this disgrace of a World Cup sell-off. Already swimming in money, he wants to be drowning in it. In his warped realm, too much is never enough.
– Daily Telegraph UK
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Source: New Zealand Herald
