It can now never be contradicted that Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump share a bone-deep appreciation of all that it means to best serve the world’s oldest and most popular game. Namely, the pursuit of money.
This endeavour has proved itself an enduringly compelling sport since the apple fell in the Garden, so it is as old as sin itself, and a pastime that today endangers bastardising modern football more deeply than any of the bank-lining panjandrums who went before them could ever have envisaged.
My goodness, others have tried hard to pollute sport. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the old Spanish fascist who sold the International Olympic Committee’s flaunted reputation for sporting purity all those years ago, gave it a good heave.
His self-acclaimed Excellency was reputed not to have earned a salary for his services in the name of progressing a vision set by the modern Olympics’ founding father Pierre de Coubertin. But in fawned-to, limousine-conveying grandeur he sold out his inheritance to dubious courtiers who militated against an ethic centred on guaranteeing a fair playing field for the youth of the world.
The youth of the world! Ha, if you will. The Olympic hymn, white doves at opening ceremonies, the oath sworn by an athlete on behalf of his fellow competitors in the name of honest competition. It was a pledge best uttered by the well-meaning, co-opted liar with crossed fingers behind his or her back.
We are, alas, inured to such hokum, a reality that reached its public apogee of infamy when Ben Johnson ran like a god in Seoul and was exposed as not quite the clock-defying deity we had hoped him to be.
Football needs to rebel against Gianni Infantino’s (left) bid to sell the World Cup
Lance Armstrong, East Germany’s state-sponsored doping, the Fuentes drugs scandal in Spain, and so the list goes on. Indeed, WG Grace, cricket’s founding father, was no stranger to sharp practices in the Victorian Age. Old as sin itself, as we were saying, long before Allen Stanford, the Texan fraudster, promised huge, ill-begotten riches to cricket or LIV golf’s accumulators entered the stage with their distorting avarice bankrolled by Middle Eastern riyals.
Sport being traduced from within is endemic. Yet, we must still rail against this latest and unprecedented news, a departure in its arching scope, of Infantino effectively putting the World Cup itself up for sale to the highest bidder.
This when his chief elected responsibility as the head of FIFA, football’s world governing body and its supposed guarantor, is to preserve the verities of the game from malign speculators.
It is the most blatant and brazen ambush to disfigure sport in elected office imaginable.
To get back to Trump, and his recent phone call to Monaco-domiciled Infantino that represented the nadir of a largely successful World Cup. It all becomes clear, now.
We are speaking about the word Trump dripped into Infantino’s ear in his successful intervention to overturn US striker Folarin Balogun’s automatic one-match suspension. Political neutrality, a sine qua non of FIFA, was waved aside.
Infantino ludicrously claimed: ‘Potentially mistaken red or yellow cards or subsequent decisions not to ban players in certain situations are routine and widely accepted in some of the biggest leagues worldwide. It’s curious that the same countries employing these practices are the ones criticising.’
Trump scoffed at criticism of his meddling. ‘I understand sports well,’ the president bloviated, while admitting from the Oval Office that he did not know what a red card or its implications for a non-negotiable ban implied.
It is the most blatant and brazen ambush to disfigure sport in elected office imaginable
Infantino doubled down this week, opining: ‘To those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours, I want to say that while you are sitting behind, we at FIFA are on the front lines organising, working hard, and delivering the best show in the world. We experienced no violence, no incidents, 100 per cent safety and security, only joy and happiness.’
Thanks, Gianni. The dots can be joined now. Who is lined up to be a major investor in the scheme to sell shares in the World Cup to private investors? None other than Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump’s in-law Jared, a key agitator in taking the World Cup to America.
Trump and Infantino, who gave the former the bogus bauble of a peace prize, never awarded before and likely never to be awarded again, are in cahoots, hence the smoke they blow up each other’s posterior. US bank JPMorgan is also cited as a willing owner.
Under Infantino’s scheme, a company would be established to control the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup. Which brings us to the point about money and what Infantino would be set to earn as a result of his brainchild.
All bosses of sporting bodies think a lot about this, their personal riches. They do not earn as much as the star performers, mostly men, accrue in the sport they (the governors) ‘serve’.
This disparity rankles. They want to get as rich as they can and seek to devise ways to do so.
So Infantino would, as it is understood, take on the role of ‘commissioner’ of his new World Cup order once his stint as FIFA president expires in 2031, offering him the potential to earn £37.5million a year, a some tenfold increase on his current wages. He will no doubt talk of wanting to grow the game. This is part of the playbook you would expect. He butters up the 211 members/sycophants who buttress his position – he will stand unopposed in office – by offering these supplicants shares in his folly, worth £15million to sell as they wish. That is nice earning possibilities for backwater associations if they then sublet their stakes.
And then we have the grotesque spectre of World Cups being staged more regularly than every four years, a dilution of world sport’s premier event, as all the moolah-grabbers look to exploit television rights deals, sponsorship, (exorbitant) ticket prices and hospitality sales on a more regular basis.
Joshua Kushner (pictured), brother of Trump’s in-law Jared, is lined up to be a major investor
The old framework of four-yearly World Cups would be swept away, just as wantonly as ‘hydration breaks’ were introduced spuriously over the last few weeks, with their advertising allure to TV networks clear.
Four quarters, rather than two halves, was a notion mooted, by the way, by Sepp Blatter ahead of the previous World Cup in America in 1994.
This latest abhorrence is of a different order. This, as Joseph Conrad wrote of another unchecked empire, is ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’.
The emphasis is on greed, and football should rise up against it.
