LINEKER IS KIDDING HIMSELF IF HE PUTS FAITH IN INFANTINO

GARY LINEKER says he would not have hosted FIFA’s World Cup draw had Sepp Blatter still been president. He thinks Gianni Infantino is different. Funny — he seemed more intelligent than that. Infantino is FIFA’s Mikhail Gorbachev. But not the Gorbachev of popular imagination, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, dismantler of the Soviet Union. He’s the Gorbachev who, before he did that, spent four decades rising through the Communist Party, having joined it at Moscow State University during the time of Stalin. He’s the Gorbachev who was promoted to First Secretary of the Stavropol City Komsomol Committee in 1956, in the era of Nikita Khrushchev, and became Head of the Department of Party Organs in the Stavropol Agricultural Kraikom in 1963. He’s the Gorbachev who under Leonid Brezhnev became a Representative of the Supreme Soviet in 1974 and joined the Politburo in 1979. Now, to earn this series of promotions and endorsements, how often do you think Gorbachev stuck his hand up for perestroika (restructuring),

glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratisation)? Not much, one imagines. A cynic might think that when the Politburo were discussing sending the army in, Comrade Gorbachev either concurred, or said nothing. And then, he got into power, in changing times, and did what was necessary to avoid economic catastrophe. It makes him a smart politician, but perhaps not quite the reforming angel he is painted. And it’s the same with Infantino. He walked football’s corridors of power at a time we now know the game was bent, rubbed shoulders with men we now know were crooks and unless he was deaf or stupid must have heard gossip about topics that are now subject to criminal proceedings. And yet his professional advancement continued. How often in that time do you think he spoke out about reform, corruption and corporate greed? His biggest ideas involve expanding tournaments to win votes and delivering more power and wealth to the most powerful and wealthy. A country that ran a statesubsidised doping programme and will be banned from two Olympics will host the first World Cup of his presidency; and one with a dismal human rights record, terrorist pals and a seemingly bottomless pit of corrupt cash hand-outs will host his second. He could have addressed that, but chose not to. Asked about Russian doping, which has been subject to one of the most comprehensive investigations ever undertaken in sport, with whistle-blowers in witness protection programmes and thousands of pages of evidence, Infantino replied that it was speculation. ‘Do not try to paint with a dark paint everything that comes from the east, from Russia or the Arab world,’ he said, self-servingly, as if tales of Qatari corruption and Russian cheating were the work of a racist agenda, which FIFA saw through, nobly. And this is the man whose image Lineker burnished in Moscow. Infantino isn’t Blatter, but he was never anti-Blatter, either. And that makes him, and his lickspittles, almost as bad.