Sheikh Up The World

Fifa chief ’s monologue was in parts comic but he scored with his critique of European hypocrisy

- Rashmee Roshan Lall

If there were any doubt the politics of world football is performance theatre, Gianni Infantino laid it to rest 24 hours before the World Cup kicked off in Qatar. In an extraordinary 57-minute monologue to journalists assembled in Qatar, the president of Fifa, world soccer’s governing body, conflated 12 years of sustained and hostile criticism of the West Asian country’s many failings with colonialism, Eurocentrism and Western hypocrisy.

“I think for what we Europeans have been doing [for] the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for [the] next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,” he said.

The comment suggested a somewhat skewed notion of timelines (3,000 years of European dominance?) but then Infantino is neither historian nor philosopher. He’s a trained lawyer, a career sports administrator, a Swiss-Italian man with a shiny pate and a face as smooth and creamy as a Caucasian baby’s bottom.

● Overall though, he had a point, one

first made clear by the stinging headline in a German tabloid back in 2010, right after Fifa picked the 2022 World Cup host.

● “Qatarstrophe”, the paper declared, alleging that only petro-wealth and corruption could have influenced the Gulf kingdom’s selection.

● It’s worth noting that even now, despite all the incessant rumours and intrepid reporting, there is no clear chain of evidence to link the Qatari authorities with any act of impropriety or graft in securing the right to host world football’s biggest contest.