A whole new ball game

IT’S difficult to think of a sports boss in recent memory who has had to endure the same kind of intense scrutiny as that which awaits Gianni Infantino, the new president of Fifa.

He has taken over a sport suffering from deep wounds of corruption and scandal, and he has to be one of the main surgeons to heal the incision.

Infantino, the 45-year-old former general secretary of Europe’s soccer governing body Uefa, was elected last Friday to replace Sepp Blatter.

Infantino beat Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa after Africa’s candidate, Toyko Sexwale, withdrew from the race at the last minute.

(Sexwale, by the way, deserves the praise he has been getting for doing the right thing. He also made a moving speech at the meeting which earned him a standing ovation.)

Infantino has made a bright start to his tenure, thanks in part to the fact that Fifa approved a number of strong measures at the meeting in Zurich.

The executive committee has been replaced by a 36-member Fifa council, while the president and other top officials have been limited to three terms of four years.

Infantino was at pains to put a distance between himself and the disgraced Blatter, as well as former Europe boss Michel Platini, who like Blatter has been banned for six years.

He also would have won many friends around the globe when he said: “The future of football belongs to women.”

The new president also strongly committed himself to the reforms announced on Friday, although of course these reforms will not be worth the paper they are written on if Infantino and his lieutenants only pay lip service to them.

Soccer has an awful lot of cleaning up to do. Infantino needs to ensure that the sport is run transparently, the stains of match-fixing and financial impropriety must be removed, and soccer needs to be seen to putting the interests of the players first.

(And that applies to South African soccer as well.) In short, we need the beautiful game to become beautiful again.