By Sir Hardly Anyone
You may be excused if you didn’t know, but Fifa has just held its 70th congress. The Fifa Congress is the supreme legislative body in football but the UK media won’t report on it because… well, its a bit dodgy and because FA pours money into Fifa via its membership fees, and then a lot more when it applies to be a host nation for the world cup, they don’t really want people to know.
But worst of all it is mugs like me (and maybe you, if you are a UK taxpayer) who fund the FA and thus Fifa. And I wouldn’t want to overplay the point by banging on and on about our National Health Service and how it has been rundown in the last ten years of austerity, but really, if we didn’t give money to the FA and instead spent that on the NHS, we might all feel a little safer.
But that of course is just left wing whining and propaganda and I am sure that Fifa is a really deserving cause, and the newspapers don’t report what it is up to because really it is all very boring, not least because these court cases they get involved in are held in Foreign Parts and worse (and inexcusably) in foreign tongues. I mean how is there supposed to be justice if they can’t speak English?
Anyway the Fifa ordinary congress meets every year, and the UK press never report it. Fifa can, if they want, also have an extraordinary congress any time they like, just for fun, that that can be called by one fifth of the members of FIFA. Will 20% of the robotic nonentities call for a congress as and when Infantino is found guilty as charged on all counts? I wouldn’t bank on it. Infantino might bank on it, in fact he probably already is banking it, as it were, because he does a lot of banking on it, but we shall see.
Each of the 211 members of FIFA has one vote in the congress, and they use that vote mostly to vote for Infantino, and each other. When he was elected he actually got 115 out of the 207 votes. Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa got 88 votes and Prince Ali bin Hussein got four votes.
So anyway, this congress is of course on line because of the virus, which suited everyone as it meant no one quite knew where Infantino was, and so unlike that day in 2015 when the FBI just marched in and picked everyone up, no troops were on hand in the name of democracy.
Besides which, since Infantino’s team controlled all the microphone links no one was allowed to contradict him, boo him, jeer him or indeed ask questions.
Thus it was that the FIFA President defended himself aggressively and confidently against the notion that he and the federal prosecutor of the Swiss judiciary and others have corrupted the entire legal process of both the Swiss state and Fifa. He alleged a conspiracy by… well, I am not quite sure who by, but it certainly was not him.
“We will see that those who have brought up these conspiracy theories and want to cause damage with them, become victims of their own plans,” announced Mr Infantino. “Everything is fine.”
Now that is a bold claim and beyond doubt in those parts of the civilised world where Infantino is watched and his court cases reported on, it will be used as a measuring stick against which his performance is judged. Not in the UK of course where nothing is reported, but in much the rest of the world.
Besides which Infantino’s speech included a use of the word “fine” that I have never come across before. If I, myself, personally, was on trial along with the chief federal prosecutor of the entire Swiss state, for corrupting the legal process, would I say “everything is fine?” I’d more likely say, “Everything is screwed, and I am about to take a vacation… I might be gone for some time…”
So what did the President say? He said that everyone was convinced that the “New FIFA” was unravelling the corruption of the past. He expressed bemusement on the issue of what the charges were all about – perhaps because he has not had a chance to read Untold Arsenal where we have been covering the case as regularly as we can. Mr President – there are links to a few of them below, just to help you out.
The allegations are “absurd”, he said, even though he also admitted he couldn’t understand them.
So, anyway, as a public service to Fifa in general and Mr Infantino in particular, here are some details… But before that, a reminder…
Now Fifa…
- Fifa starts to implode, and the strange case of lack of UK interest in events
- Amazing unbelievable development in the Fifa battle; sadly not on UK news
- The Fifa court cases continue, more corruption, more scandals and the FA says…
- How Fifa is finally falling apart in the courts (but the English don’t want to know)
- The Swiss government is fighting Fifa. And now so is the USA!
- Another legal case involving Fifa, yet more silence in the UK media
- Is Fifa now threatening the media’s future access to the world cup?
- Fifa in chaos. England is silent but Europe is up in arms
- Federal court rejects challenges filed by Fifa secretary Jérôme Valcke.
- The man whom Sepp Blatter called a megalomaniac
It is all rather jolly, don’t you think?
