Infantino brought back down to earth

Luis Rubiales affair calls time on the best half-year of the FIFA boss' presidency

- Keir RADNEDGE

The fall-out from the Luis Rubiales affair will roll on far beyond the immediate embarrassment incurred by the Spanish Football Federation. Just when Gianni Infantino must have thought he had sailed out into clear blue water.

Up until Rubiales, the one-time Hamilton Academical full-back, wiped the positivity of the 2023 Women’s World Cup out of the global headlines, Infantino had been enjoying the best half-year of his FIFA presidency.

First box ticked was at the start of March when Swiss prosecutors shut down an allegation that Infantino had breached company regulations over his use of a private jet to fly back to Switzerland from Suriname in 2017.

Red flags had been raised because Infantino’s original version failed the test of veracity. Infantino claimed he undertook the flight to keep a meeting with Aleksander Ceferin, however the UEFA president had apparently been on an official trip to Armenia that day.

Infantino duly changed his story, ascribing the journey instead to meet Vassilios Skouris, the former European Court of Justice president and new FIFA ethics chair, a meeting Infantino had wanted to be treated confidential. Documentation from FIFA’s travel department supported its president. Hence frustrated prosecutors had to admit defeat in not the first FIFA controversy over private jets.

Infantino had sidestepped a similar issue early in his presidency while disgraced former secretary-general Jerome Valcke had also been caught out in his time. A bonus for Infantino was that the Swiss attorney-general’s office, having raised the complaint, had to pay all his and FIFA’s legal costs.

More delight to come.