Imagine a plan so distasteful that even the Americans and a Middle Eastern nepo-royal football boss can’t be doing with it. Such is the status of Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s scheme to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors. More historically, perhaps, the 55 nations that make up Uefa have reacted to this horror show by voting unanimously to boycott Fifa tournaments, including World Cups, if Infantino presses ahead. That would mean Spain and Portugal boycotting their own men’s World Cup next time around, which you’d think – not to call it too soon – would come off as slightly bad vibes.
A testing moment, then, for the haunted cue-ball. Again. Can it really already be time to turn to Infantino once more, even after he appeared in this spot only on Tuesday, after his 15-page Instagram crash-out about his haters? Yes. Yes, I’m afraid it can. Demanding the federations of the world sell off the World Cup to some fund led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother will regrettably draw attention to you in ways that will prove difficult to control. As indicated, the Fifa president’s plan has contrived to appear vulgar to the North American confederation, Concacaf, as well as the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, the Bahraini royal who leads the AFC, has issued a statement, declaring that “the AFC is deeply concerned that Fifa’s unilateral actions appear to undermine the very foundations of continental football, which are based on solidarity, cooperation and transparency”. He went on to call for “the highest standards of ethics and good governance”. And certainly, it’s always a pleasure to take an ethics lesson from a guy like this. A number of human rights organisations claim that during the Arab spring, Salman busied himself with identifying dissident players and other athletes, many of whom were imprisoned and tortured. (He denies this.) Yet even he simply cannot force himself through Infantino’s latest show of full-spectrum amorality.
It’s hard to escape the sense of gathering momentum against not only Infantino’s plan but the man himself, even from federations he has showered with disproportionate amounts of development cash over the years. A hotly defensive new statement declaring that “Nobody is selling football” emanated overnight from Fifa, which, to repeat, is proposing literally selling stakes in football to private investors.
It’s a testing moment, too, for one of the most extravagant pieces of corporate bullshit of our entire era – the post-binfire promise: “We will learn from this.” And so to the involvement of JP Morgan in Infantino’s scheme. Five years ago, JP Morgan ended up apologising to fans after its part in the imploded plan to create a breakaway European Super League. Back then, it said: “We clearly misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community and how it might affect them in the future.” Then, it was time to deploy the mother lode: “We will learn from this.” Will you though? JP Morgan evidently regards time as a great healer, because it is once again the bank at the centre of the firestorm, having been working with Fifa to raise $4.2bn with the new commercial vehicle.
At time of writing, Infantino was still insisting that he was pressing ahead with the scheme despite Uefa’s boycott pledge, which is certainly bold, given he would be trying to sell stakes in a tournament in which most of the best sides would not be playing. One intervention that has yet to materialise is any comment on the idea from Trump. The US president has, of course, been quite taken up over the past few days with his Middle East peace manoeuvres, crediting his “historic” agreement to disarm Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza to the machinations of his Board of Peace – a body whose inauguration, you might recall, Infantino showily attended. Perhaps the most excruciatingly on-brand move for the Fifa president now would be to post a 15-page Insta meltdown about how he was way more concerned with the slightly more important matter of Middle East peace as brought about by his special friend, than about trifling matters such as flogging the World Cup to private equity. Certainly wouldn’t put it past him.
But it is hard not to conclude that it is too much time with his special friend that has caused Infantino to overplay his hand in precisely the way he has. Maybe the real Trump derangement syndrome is the betas who suck up to the alpha in the apparent belief they will somehow osmotically absorb his unique characteristics and political gifts, and then themselves get away with the sort of stuff that only he has historically been able to pull. It’s personality cult as cargo cult.
We see it in Nigel Farage, a man who threw a byelection to which no one turned up, and is now having to chomp his way through a long hot summer of wasting time and money. And we see it in Infantino, a man who has spent the past year or two getting as up close and personal as possible with Trump, and presumably concluded that the US president’s ability to defy various laws of politics had rubbed magically off on him. But that isn’t how it has worked at all, as he is now finding out, presumably to his own bemusement. The first rule of politics, famously, is to learn how to count – and Infantino’s failure to do so now suggests his own days are numbered.
- Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist