By Tony Attwood
Gianni Infantino’s notion of selling the World Cup to private investors has been withdrawn, after lasting something like a day. Uefa, you may have noted yesterday, had pulled out of the World Cup as a result. And with no European nations in the tournament, the rest of the world didn’t really have much interest, and so the threat of the boycott moved across the world
But there was also some internal tension as it seems some within Fifa are themselves getting rather fed up with having Infantino firing off his latest idea at the world, without even discussing it internally first. Senior figures in the association have been rebuking Infantino in pushing the idea out to the world without any real consultation.
And now, given the way Infantino has behaved in the past, there seems to be little or no chance that this rebuke, or perhaps one should simply say, this cock up will make him resign and get out of football once and for all, although that of course is what he should do.
Infantino is projecting the situation now as if he came up with an idea, circulated it to a few people in world football, had it turned down, and then took the view of the majority. That was not the situation at all, and world football knows it.
The question now is: will they sack him, and if not, what part does he have to play in the future? Certainly, with him in control Fifa is damaged for all time and has no credibility.
What is worrying is that he has offered a load of self-justification here, as if he is just the messenger and it is never a good idea just to blame the messenger, with statements like, “Our purpose has always been – and will always be – to unite and improve. As a result, this proposal will not proceed.”
Of course, had he proceeded by testing the idea out in private with various officials in different parts of Fifa, a clear idea could have been gained that the plan was not welcomed. But that is not the way of the top leadership of Fifa. It is always fanfares or nothing. For them, every idea is a BIG STEP FORWARD, and they can never understand that clubs and countries have their own interests at heart.
Of course, what makes this worse for Infantino is the passing of the Folarin Balogun affair, which revealed a complete lack of understanding of how world football works, and how rules are supposed to work. Maybe Infantino saw this latest wheeze as a way through the mess that escapade had created by promising lots of money to lots of countries. If so, he has got to many ventures wrong one after another.
At the moment no one is set to run against Infantino in the next election for leader, and so Infantino is still on track for his fourth term in charge of the show.
But he has managed to come up with a plan that was so awful that unthinkably both the American and Middle Eastern football authorities didn’t like it and Europe en masse rebelled. That is quite something, and might well be a situation from which the leader cannot recover – not least because he has shown no ability in the past to admit he was wrong.
It is not just this blog that has seen Fifa as removed from reality for many years – others have noted the fact too. Now maybe some of the associations will say, “this is enough” – not just about their leader, but about the whole show.
