For Gianni Infantino the next six months will be a tense period of campaigning as he tries to rebuild his fractured support before next March’s Fifa presidential vote that will decide if he remains at the pinnacle of elite sports administration.
Until recently, Mr Infantino had a relatively good record when it came to taking calculated risks to grow Fifa. Ultimately, these manoeuvres did not affect the sporting integrity of its competitions too greatly. Even the controversial decision to expand the men’s World Cup to 48 teams was being praised before the 2026 tournament was even halfway over.
Instead, it has been a series of smaller, more insidious decisions over the summer that have badly hurt the sense of fairness in the game and, by extension, put Mr Infantino’s leadership of Fifa under the microscope.
First, a lenient Fifa allowed Cristiano Ronaldo to play the early group games at the World Cup, deferring a suspension the Portuguese striker picked up in a previous match against Ireland. Then it failed to intervene to obtain entry to the US for a suitably qualified referee, while at the same time the Iranian team were not allowed the same travel and entry conditions as other sides. Worst of all, Fifa ensured the US player Folarin Balogun escaped the usual punishment for a red card and played in his next game.
Each of these decisions may have seemed appropriately pragmatic from Mr Infantino’s perspective, but individually and taken together, they undermined the spirit and letter of the laws of the game. This was done to such a degree that all other moves associated with his presidency – culminating in the embarrassment of how the final was organised – have come to be perceived as toxic.
Yet, on the surface, it seems odd that Mr Infantino is in such a difficult position, coming as he is off the back of the most successful World Cup in history. This success is according to almost every metric, with record breaking revenue related to the tournament held in the US, Canada and Mexico projected to be at least $8.9 billion (Dh32.68 billion).
Revelations about Mr Infantino’s Fifa Forward Enterprise proposal to bring in private money and officially commercialise World Cup operations have been the catalyst for his standing to be irreparably damaged, with threats to boycott Fifa competitions in the future being enough to stop these plans before they were even formally presented.
The Fifa president’s problems are not just about finances, which are in need of a revamp up and down the football pyramid. For example, the owners of Liverpool have just sold a minority stake in the storied English club to some of the world’s richest families and individuals, in what has become an orthodoxy in the European game. Such deals are not without their critics, especially among grassroots fans, but it is generally accepted that football needs additional sources of investment if it is to keep growing. What is true for clubs is also true for the international game – men’s and women’s. Mr Infantino is only following a wider trend.
Over the past three decades, a kind of Americanisation of the game has been taking place. This aims to replicate the success of the likes of North America’s NFL and NBA in getting increasing numbers of people who don’t particularly love football to follow it regularly. By and large this requires treating football primarily as entertainment rather than a competitive sport.
Fifa borrowing from live music’s dynamic ticketing pricing to maximise income is only the latest symptom of this. The most egregious example is Welsh side Wrexham’s rise and the creation of the Welcome to Wrexham reality TV series airing on Disney Plus and starring Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds.
Football is now a TV product with half-time shows and hydration breaks as much a part of it as Video Assistant Referees and the endless churn of celebrities in hospitality suites shown on stadium screens at the expense of what is happening on the pitch. As the cliche goes, “the game’s gone”.
So, if this is the direction of travel, why has Mr Infantino found himself the target of so much anger and vitriol from the world of football? Partly it is politics. Uefa, the European governing body, is both subordinate to and independent from Fifa, and is its greatest economic rival. Uefa leads the attacks on Mr Infantino for undermining the integrity of competition even as its own concessions to stop the biggest European clubs from breaking away has watered down the competitive intensity of its cash cow, the Champions League.
Off the pitch, there are few good guys in football. Each party is serving its own interest. Each also understands that what has sustained football’s growth to now cannot last. With the media landscape fragmented, the business model that relies on ever-rising TV money and sponsorship has been broken since before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the matter to a head.
Less popular sports than football, such as F1, have been quicker to change direction and take greater control of their own destinies, using private equity backing to make the investments needed in technology to help grow their audiences. Individual football clubs have followed suit as much as they can but with the biggest international competitions controlled by Fifa and Uefa, there are structural obstacles that limit their potential. This tension is building towards an almighty tussle for power that will get very ugly before it is settled.
To some extent, Mr Infantino understands this better than most. Ever since he took over a Fifa that had been wounded by corruption and the criminal prosecution of his predecessors, he has worked hard to stay close to US President Donald Trump and his family, to enhance his own influence and strengthen his position for future battles to come.
The irony is that his instinct for self-preservation has become too much of a distraction from what is the greatest asset that Fifa and Infantino have – the intensity of competition that only a World Cup can deliver. Not even the Champions League or European Championships can match it. Perhaps only individual events at the Summer Olympics such as the 100m final compare but they lack the scale and breadth of the World Cup knockout matches. That is the World Cup’s true power and Mr Infantino has allowed himself to become disassociated from it, undermining his leadership. In the future, it may well be that proposals similar to FFE come to pass but it will never be with Mr Infantino at the lead.
