Infantino is Trump minus the comb-over
With his claims of fake news and removal of the two men investigating corruption at his governing body, Fifa chief is looking increasingly like the controversial US president
For imputations of comic malevolence, Gianni Infantino has often drawn parallels with The Hood, the villain from whom he uncannily resembles. Now, though, the Fifa president’s kindred spirit is Donald Trump.
Not content with disposing of Hans-joachim Eckert and Cornel Borbély, the two men investigating corruption in his organisation – remind you of anybody? – he has taken to parroting Trump’s favourite fatuous slogan. “There is a lot of fake news circulating,” he told delegates yesterday, preaching to the converted. “We don’t have to bulls--- you with artificial figures.”
The popular instinct with Infantino, ever since he emerged from the depths of Fifa’s calumnies as the best worst option, has been to give him time.
Hopes were high when he made his first overseas trip last May on Easyjet, eschewing Jérôme Valcke’s alleged habit of turning business trips to Russia into family holidays on Fifa’s private plane. But the subsequent narrative under his watch has become one of grim reversion to the old Zurich tropes: the opacity, the obfuscation, the love of excess.
It was bad enough that Infantino agreed to host this week’s Fifa Congress in Bahrain. For nothing says reform quite like holding your annual meeting in a repressive Gulf state that has more canisters of tear gas than people.
Nothing shows openness to scrutiny like legitimising a regime that denied a journalist’s visa to German broadcaster Robert Kempe, who once happened to express criticism of Bahraini royal and Fifa vicepresident Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al-khalifa, or detaining Omar Shakir, who wanted to ask why Fifa matches were held in illegal Israeli settlements, for 18 hours before sending him home.
Delegates, naturally, have all flown to Manama in some style. Indeed, Infantino’s stewardship has done nothing to allay suspicions that many of them see their Fifa work as a gold-plated carousel. When Ahmad Ahmad, of Madagascar, won election this year as leader of the African confederation, he did so on a promise to its representatives of “business-class travel to all future congresses”.
Infantino has enjoyed more days of honeymoon than Elizabeth Taylor, attracting much goodwill for his mandate to purge the poison of the Blatter years, but the cynicism of his leadership is now laid bare. His rationale for deposing Eckert and Borbély – Fifa’s improbable version is that their terms expired – is as inexplicable as Trump’s in sacking James Comey as director of the FBI. By all accounts, the two lawyers were working constructively with each other in examining the hundreds of ethics
His watch has become one of grim reversion to the old Zurich tropes: opacity, obfuscation, love of excess
cases in which Fifa is mired. They shared German as their mother tongue and lived a manageable distance apart, shuttling between Zurich and Bavaria.
The relationship between their proposed replacements would be nothing like so straightforward. Greece’s Vassilios Skouris, former president of the European Court of Justice, is somehow required to keep constant dialogue with María Claudia Rojas, the Colombian jurist, across 6,000 miles of ocean. The fact they have no common language is the least of their difficulties. A jaundiced reading of this set-up – what other kind is there with Fifa? – is that it is designed to be as unwieldy as possible. The morass of alleged malfeasance passing across their desks could take two years, perhaps more, to disentangle.
Princess Haya of Jordan, a far more progressive force when she ran world equestrianism, has seen enough of Infantino’s pretence at changing Fifa’s stripes. “It is a truly shameful act that removes the last possible shred of credibility from Fifa,” she said. “It makes a mockery of any claims of integrity from Fifa’s new leadership. Fifa is once again showing itself to be the same organisation it has always been: corrupt, unwilling to change, failing the people it was set up to represent.”
Bravo, Your Royal Highness. It is just a pity that our own administrators lack such a readiness to speak out. Greg Clarke, chairman of the Football Association, was at pains to stress that standards of governance were improving and that the latest people elected to serve Fifa would