The company FIFA president Infantino keeps tell you a lot about the man ...
Since coming to power in 2016, he has cosied up to warlords, dictators, corrupt officials, and authoritarian and human rights-abusing regimes, to boost himself.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino thrives on working with rich, powerful leaders from global politics, and as I watched Donald Trump and his “hillbilly” sidekick, JD Vance, bully Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday (below), it was another reminder that Infantino sucks up to these people for gain.
The 54-year-old Swiss-Italian lacks a backbone to use his privileged position for good. His major achievements include making a grifter, Salt Bae, famous worldwide in exchange for a few free platefuls of bang average steak.
Is Infantino corrupt and using his presidency to fill his own pockets and abuse his power, or laying the groundwork to do so in the future? Several investigations have concluded not, most prominently in this case, and then in this one, while others have gone nowhere.
We’ll explore this in detail later. There remain many in football who think Infantino should reasonably have been prosecuted early in his FIFA tenure.
AT ONE POINT in last Friday’s Oval Office ambush, Trump made it clear he believed the USA should not have been helping Ukraine with significant financial help since Vladimir Putin launched his illegal invasion in 2022.
“We gave you, through a stupid President [Biden], £350 billion dollars,” he told Zelensky.
Trump doesn’t want to fund Ukraine further unless there’s a deal in place for American firms to get access to Ukraine’s rare earths and critical minerals.
Vance ludicrously then demanded that Zelensky thank Trump and himself for the help provided by the Biden administration - and this at a time when Vance and Trump are happy to let Putin destroy Ukraine unless they get paid.
“Just say thank you!” demanded Vance, who is no intellectual but slick - or at least oily - with his PR spiels.
Remember: Friday’s scene was being dominated by a convicted felon, Trump, who is maniacal, and a confirmed sexual offender and accused of many other assaults on women, and a conspiracist who routinely lies.
Vance is a man who struggles to recognise or speak the truth, who has never cared about Ukraine, and who built his political career on a book that was part fiction (with more on that here and here) and transparently a PR play to help him to power.
If Trump and Vance’s ambush of Zelensky was a disgrace, then Infantino’s relationship with Trump is, relatively, “merely” sick-making, a nauseating old-man fumble in which they do each other favours and wouldn’t dream of calling the other to account for wrong-doing or a lack or morality.
Infantino could have have used his platform to offer help to Ukraine but has instead used it to defend Trump’s position and Trump’s supposedly important influence on football.
Has Infantino no shame?
(Obviously not, that was a trick question. The man is a sap. Who remembers, in November 2022, when he made a public plea for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine for the duration of the 2022 World Cup that November-December in Qatar? This was “leadership” by ineffectual press release. Did he expect Putin to stop the killing because he’d produced another banality? He made himself look an idiot by calling for a ceasefire that would never happen from a war-monger who had him twisted round his finger).
On Ukraine’s situation in recent days (and this is truly pathetic), Infantino said: “If there is a little role that football can play, once peace is there [my emphasis], then of course, we’ll play our role, and we look forward that all countries in the world can play football.”
In today’s deep-dive examination into how compromised Infantino has become in toadying up to human rights abusers and other institutionally corrupt powerbrokers, we’ll consider:
Cases where Infantino either dodged getting axed himself for serious wrong-doing, and / or help other wrong-doers get off the hook because it suited him.
How Trump and Infantino promote mutually beneficial interests but keep quiet about each other’s significant shortcomings.
How Infantino did nothing as Vladimir Putin green-lighted one of the world’s biggest doping conspiracies, because the Russia 2018 World Cup was coming up.
How Infantino mysteriously orchestrated that Saudi Arabia should stage the 2034 World Cup despite massive human rights concerns … while filling FIFA’s coffers with Saudi money.
How Infantino appears to love nothing more than an authoritarian regime overseeing workers rights abuses, corruption and lack of press freedoms, as long as he can - however implausibly - dress it up as good for football.
Without further ado, below is a 2016 document that laid bare what investigators alleged as gross misconduct in office by Infantino inside months of becoming Sepp Blatter’s successor.