Simon Skinner
It has been a bad few weeks for Fifa and its president, Gianni Infantino, and therefore a good few weeks for football. ‘Having been re-elected unopposed in 2019 and 2023,’ I wrote in June, ‘Infantino has just announced his intention to stand again. His victory seems a formality.’ More and worse has happened since then than even Fifa’s most fatalistic observers would have thought possible.
First, Infantino’s abasement of Fifa’s interests to those of his latest bestie potentate, Donald Trump, intruded into the World Cup in the most direct fashion, with a red card for the USA’s star player, Folarin Balogun, overturned after Trump made a series of phone calls to Infantino, permitting Balogun to play in their decisive group match against Belgium – which, self-conscious and unsettled, the US team karmically lost, with the Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku screaming ‘appeal that!’ into the cameras after his goal and mocking Trump’s sclerotic dance moves.
Fifa had already suspended a ban incurred in qualifying by Cristiano Ronaldo so that he could play in Portugal’s opening games, a week after a White House circle-jerk dinner hosted by Trump and attended by Infantino, Ronaldo and his Saudi paymaster, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But Balogun’s restitution mid-tournament was higher profile, and the international reaction to it gratifyingly noisy.
After the tournament (which generated $15 billion), and with the Fifa elections due early next year, any president with functioning political antennae, or a half-awake consigliere, would have kept his head down for a spell. On 28 July, however, Infantino unveiled his plan to create a subsidiary called Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) that would manage all the commercial rights of Fifa competitions, with a 20 per cent stake (potentially worth more than $4 billion) sold to private investors. UEFA issued a statement rejecting the proposal:
The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product. It is one of football’s greatest sporting legacies. It has been built over generations by players, national teams and supporters across every continent. No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale.
Many member associations protested at the structural bribery of the proposal: while the ultimate benefit to each was estimated at $20 million, those that accepted the plan before 19 September would receive an additional $20 million sweetener. Many in Fifa’s senior echelons protested at the lack of consultation. Infantino’s right-hand man, Carlos Cordeiro, resigned. ‘As a senior adviser to the Fifa president, a former banker and a lifelong football fan,’ he said,
I cannot stand by while Fifa considers selling a stake in the World Cup. Let me be clear: I had no involvement in this proposal, and I oppose it unequivocally. It is a bad deal for Fifa’s member associations, a bad deal for football, and a bad deal for the long-term future of the game.
Fifa’s secretary-general, Mattias Grafström, called the FFE plans a ‘sad and reproachable series of events’ in an email to staff. Fifa’s chief of global development, the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, pronounced the withdrawal of FFE ‘absolutely necessary and beyond question’. Fifa’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, said that FFE was ‘the project of one person’, that the organisation itself had been ‘deceived’, and that ‘the time has now come for football political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions … If that means I lose my job, then so be it … At least I’ll sleep well tonight.’ Unlike Cordeiro, though, Grafström, Wenger and Lamour haven’t resigned.
Unsurprisingly, Infantino had a financial stake in the outcome: it was reported that at the projected end of his third presidential term in 2031, he would serve as the FFE’s commissioner on a salary similar to that of the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who was paid $64 million in 2021, when his earnings were last made public. The Portugal legend Luís Figo, a failed Fifa clean-up presidential candidate, called Infantino’s ‘the lowest, most deceitful and cravenly self-interested behaviour I have ever witnessed’. The global players’ union, Fifpro, issued a statement accusing Infantino of a ‘profound abuse of presidential power’.
But Infantino wasn’t the only prospective beneficiary. When the plans were unveiled, it transpired that the lead investor would be Thrive Eternal, an investment fund controlled by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, senior adviser and director of the Office of American Innovation in his first administration, and currently special envoy for peace. Between his White House gigs, Jared Kushner founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm deriving most of its capital from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
On 1 August, global condemnation culminated in UEFA unanimously voting to boycott all Fifa competitions until FFE was ‘abandoned in its entirety’. With Concacaf (Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football) and the AFC (the Asian Football Confederation) also rejecting the scheme, Infantino withdrew the proposal. The hope for his opponents – which is to say, almost anyone not on Fifa’s executive committee – has always been that his hubris would impel him to the point that even those clients whose football associations and expense accounts have been so well rewarded for their quietude might come to think that their interests would be better served by a president who furnished 90 per cent of the income and 10 per cent of the adverse publicity. And that is where we now are.
If Infantino thought that the withdrawal of FFE would allow him to retreat to the status quo, he has been spectacularly mistaken (yes, you could say that the goalposts have shifted). On 10 August, UEFA, Concacaf and the AFC wrote a joint open letter accusing Infantino of ‘trust broken through deception’. In the absence of ‘binding assurances … that Fifa will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership’, UEFA remains committed to its tournament boycott.
In the euphoria of the moment at which the statue starts to topple, it is natural to cheer the parties pulling on the ropes. But they do not deserve much credit. We should not forget how egregious Infantino’s behaviour had been long before they decided to pull, or how far reputational embarrassment had to outweigh material self-interest and institutional complicity for them to stir themselves. All regimes have tipping points, and at those moments the world is full of naphtalinards, the name given to those French officers who kept their uniforms mothballed until coming out and posing as members of the Resistance at the liberation.
Credit is due to the Norwegian football association, one of a handful of FAs not to endorse Infantino earlier this year when everyone else did, and this month the first to call for his resignation. ‘The trust is now gone for us, there is no way back for Infantino,’ the NFF president, Lise Klaveness, said: ‘We understand that we’re one country, but it’s our position.’ Other FAs, now recalling their letters of support for Infantino’s re-election, can hardly congratulate themselves when their mass servility emboldened the behaviour they have finally been moved to deplore.
It was an achievement for UEFA to get all 55 of its member associations to endorse the threat to withdraw from Fifa competitions unless the FFE plans were abandoned. But they are not united when it comes to Infantino’s candidacy, with some more appeased than others by his abandonment of the proposals and apology. Some blocs will resent UEFA acting as neocolonial ringmaster. All blocs have the potential to fragment. Concacaf backed UEFA’s call for a review of Fifa’s governance but Mexico has broken ranks, saying that it ‘supports president Infantino’s leadership in continuing to promote the development of football through institutional strengthening’. There is speculation that Mexico may even defect south to Conmebol (the South American confederation), which is redoubtably loyalist. Argentina issued a sycophantic statement:
we address you, dear president, and through your worthy intermediary the Fifa board, to express our support for the management carried out during the last ten years, which had as its main axes the development of football throughout the world and institutional solidity based on a clear governance model, stable and transparent.
Curiously, Fifa has yet to punish Argentina for its proscribed political messaging on the Falklands after the World Cup semi-final, or the violent conduct of its players after the final. CAF, the African federation, is also solidly pro-Infantino. In Infantino’s Zurich bunker, and newsrooms everywhere, the numbers are being counted. If UEFA (55), Concacaf (35) and AFC (46) hold fairly firm, then Infantino will not be re-elected.
The Fifa Under-20 Women’s World Cup kicks off in Poland on 5 September. If UEFA boycotts it, football’s organisational politics will go dramatically beyond its current manoeuvres. Historically, elites resisted the secret ballot because it gave them control, the ability to monitor the fruits of their patronage. Reformers agitated for the secret ballot because it protected them from the retribution that might be visited on them by vengeful patrons. Under Fifa’s constitution, with its electoral ‘letters of support’, presidents know exactly who votes for and against them. That will be unsettling the reformist national associations. Getting rid of Infantino won’t be enough: Fifa also needs wider constitutional reform. You come at the king, you best not miss.
Source: London Review of Books
