And maybe lots of people can ignore the fact that the media has kowtowed to Fifa in order to pick up its ration of free tickets, but boring though it might become, Untold won’t, even if we keep up saying what’s right on our own – as it has mostly been us for quite a few years.

According to reports in the Guardian, itself repeating other newspapers, “Infantino’s aides have been feverishly calling Fifa Legends – the organisation’s paid ex-player ambassadors – to persuade them to offer Infantino their public support.”

Yes, that is true, but what was the Guardian doing all these years?    It is all very well saying that it took until this past week for anyone to realise how awful Fifa has been, but the paper might also answer the question: why have you not been highlighting the whole process of internationals and the way countries take players from clubs, injure them, and tell the clubs to get the player fit for the next round of games?

So yes, it may make jolly good news to have a “governance boycott”, in which “members refuse to attend meetings or ratify Fifa decisions.”   But we might ask, where was the newspaper and general media protest when Infantino agreed to work with SoftBank (part of the Saudi Arabian banking complex).  I don’t remember the protests then, nor the protests when Manchester City started being bankrolled by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates, in 2008. 

Meanwhile newspapers and TV channels have cuddled up to Fifa for decades because it gave them lots of free tickets.  And that is certainly not going to stop overnight.

It is two years – yes only two years – since Saudi Arabia were given the 2034 tournament – and if you have forgotten how that was done, maybe it is worth going back and reading up on it.  Or maybe you recall it is three years since the Club World Cup was created and then two months since a referee was denied entry to the USA to run a game Fifa had selected him for.  Followed by the Folarin Balogun incident.  

Corruption and mismanagement, coupled with occasional duplicity, is the way of Fifa, and the problem is that now, by presenting us with a few changes, it is trying to convince newspapers that it really has changed and the past can be forgotten, past duplicities.  

And that doesn’t work for it fails to ask and then answer the simple question: how has it survived this long?

Lord Triesman at the FA called Fifa a “mafia family” and that is almost certainly still right.  Although to be more specific, “a mafia family but with more money and fewer guns.” The moral objections to Infantino’s investment plan are so overwhelming that they neither need mentioning, nor can they be forgiven.  But worse, there is a touch of economic incompetence wrapped up within all this in terms of how much anything can be sold for.  Making up numbers is something done by people who don’t have a clue about how much anything can be sold for, and so they pick a number at random.  It is not something done by people who have a lot of money – they go to advisers and get a real figure of value given to them.

The central problem with football from the Conference to the World Cup is that those running the show seem to believe that they run the show because they are in the know.  Or worse, they have a right to run the show.  They don’t care about us regular football watchers who know quite a bit about football.  They believe they have an absolute right to run football because…. they have an absolute right to run football.

We know they don’t have such a right, because every time they get their hands on a bit of football it goes bust.   Just look at the number of league clubs falling into debt each year.  And they are all run by rich men who believe they know something about football.