Infantino: Emerging From The FIFA Inferno!

Perhaps it was sadly symbolic of the changeless depravity to which we associate FIFA across the years that the announcement of Gianni Infantino’s success was made in ringing tones by none other than Issa Hayatou, the acting FIFA President, who has a record if not as long as your arm, well up to the elbow. 

- Brian Glanville

Alas, it was all too plainly a question of would you rather be shot or hanged. Both leading candidates for the FIFA Presidency brought baggage behind them. Prince Ali of Jordan was unsuccessful after trying to delay the voting. To me he seemed the only convincing candidate of the five. Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain angrily denied Ali’s insistence that he had been a member of a committee which severely punished members of the country’s football team who had been involved in demonstrations against the oppressive regime. But even a local Bahrain newspaper reportedly disputed that. 

The Italo-Swiss Gianni Infantino, who has been running Europe’s ruling body UEFA since the disgrace of President Michel Platini, insists on the absurdity of a 40-team World Cup tournament and has been far too close to Platini to justify any confidence. In the meantime, as though to emphasise the moral ambiguities with which FIFA is so direly endemic, the eight-year suspensions on Sepp Blatter and Platini have been commuted to six years. Why?

Platini has betrayed his huge renown as an outstanding footballer. It is still inexplicable that as UEFA chief he would not only have voted for putrescent Qatar as World Cup hosts for 2022 despite the appalling summer 50 degrees centigrade heat, but happily agreed to the tournament being put on in the European winter, thus shockingly disputing the programme of the clubs he represented. Yet here we have both he and Blatter commended for their so called services to football.

Blatter? What services had he ever provided other than to himself and, notoriously, to that outrageous CONCACAF crook Jack Warner of Trinidad who could get whatever he wanted out of Blatter — as Blatter’s own correspondence shows — and invariably did, thanks to his CONCACAF power.