YOU’RE FIRED! Did the FIFA President just get Trumped?!

0:02This is a global production. This is in your face stuff. This affects us. This affects all of us. He's kind of barnacled himself to Donald Trump. We should have seen the cynicism really from that point. Trump has emboldened Infantino. What you're getting is a sense from Trump that Infantino can do anything. There is growing anger and opposition in Europe over Gianni Infantino's attempts to sell off part of FIFA to private investors. Is Gianni Infantino still going to be the FIFA president?

0:44Hello and welcome to The Sports Agents. It's been quite a week and quite a decade for Gianni Infantino. In the last seven days, though, it appears the world has turned against him for the first time in his 10 years as FIFA president. So today we'll take a deep dive into the man himself who sparked such international outrage. Where has that come from? How has he changed world football in the decade that he's been in charge? And has his friendship with the president of the United States finally cost him? New York Times' Tarek Panja joins us. So Tariq, we're going to look at Infantino's career here and where he started and where he's ended up to now.

1:26But before we go right back to the start, just go back to the aftermath of the World Cup final. Would you have said at that stage, after this tournament, that he was untouchable? Yeah, in a way, because the only thing that really makes these people tick, when I say these people, I mean the FIFA members, 211 of them. the people that get to decide it's not the fans it's not clubs it's not leagues or anything like that it is 211 fa heads is money for for most of them and most of them rely on fifa to to function and here's a guy who's just presided over a 15 billion dollar world cup and that means a lot of that money is going to be pouring into their coffers this should have been a victory lap for him in in that closed circle of of fifa and fifa members and instead here we are talking mark so let's go back to the beginning with him and and his his rise through football to where he is now he's from um a swiss italian family an immigrant family in in switzerland he's made a point of this and that there was a lot of discrimination towards immigrants from the Italian background in Switzerland at the time.

2:43And that's his telling of it. His father, both his parents worked on the railway. His mum worked in a cafe bar, I think a station. His father worked on the trains. This is a humble working class guy. And he kind of was always busy. He liked football, but he wasn't particularly good at football. So he ended up kind of running the team, the local team, being, I guess, a football administrator from a very young age. You know, he talked about taking the kit home and things like that. But he was also quite hardworking. He was a lawyer, like a law student, with this passion for football. And he got into UEFA after his studies in the legal department.

3:33and he was just another body inside UEFA, European football's governing body. And his great stroke of luck was Michel Platini, which would be ironic for Michel Platini later on, arriving as a president of UEFA and sort of taking a shine to him, raising him up to the point where he becomes the secretary general of UEFA. and football fans in Europe would kind of only recognise him because he was the bloke with the balls doing the Champions League draws. Yeah. So you've got two things here, haven't you? And I'm sort of... I'm quite conscious of not trying to defend anything here, but just try not to, for this podcast, just to be one massive pile-on because there are interesting threads throughout the course of this discussion.

4:29But there are a couple of things here. One, a genuine interest and love of football as a kid. And secondly, a man who has worked hard to then find a path through the sport administrator legal fields. Yeah, sort of fiercely ambitious as well, right? So you have to be very ambitious to make your way through this. You also have to be talented. You know, he even now people will not say he's not hardworking. He's always up to something. And that's part of the problem in a way. He's trying to do something all of the time. And the thing with the ambition, that was clear. I remember when he was elected the FIFA president in 2016, I was walking out of the hall in Zurich and there was a UEFA guy I knew was talking to.

5:25And he surprised me. Now, I didn't know about the level of ambition at that point. Obviously, he's become the FIFA president, so there's that. But he said, look, as soon as this guy came in, he'd stay around late, especially around the Christmas period, and he'd be writing these handwritten Christmas cards to FA presidents and secretary generals everywhere, like outside of Europe, to Seychelles, Sri Lanka, all over the place, right, to kind of network and to kind of be in their thoughts. And that's like, I don't know, I don't know a lot of people who'd be doing that. It's a lot of foresight to thinking, I might need these friends in my future.

6:12I might need these people. Friendship and loyalty are so important in a way that you almost more than anything else, where you know in normal businesses it is about competence as the right person for the job can they do it here it's can i trust this guy uh well and so so that so then that leads us to the to the process by which he eventually ended up as fifa president because that that is a story of friendship and loyalty maybe between others not in not including him there and trust and corruption yeah so this this is remarkable and i always call him like the accidental president because it took a monumental scandal like a black swan event if you want for this path to be clear Even by FIFA standards, these are extraordinary developments.

7:16At the behest of the US Attorney General, seven senior FIFA officials arrested at the crack of dawn concerning allegations of fraud, racketeering and money laundering going back decades. So what we're talking about is the 2015 FIFA scandal. I think some of the listeners to the podcast might remember that that day, May the 25th, 2015, a storm raid on the Borlaq Hotel on the banks of Lake Zurich, where FIFA's high and mighty are gathered in this lovely hotel there in their suites, in their rooms, get a knock on the door from the Swiss police at about 6 a.m. acting on an indictment from the Department of Justice in the U.S.

8:07They're hauled out of bed, in fact, they're doing a perp walk out of this hotel. And there starts the end of FIFA as we knew it. Sepp Blatter and Co. will be no more. This is the kind of almost ground zero moment. This starts again for a whole new group of people to emerge as leaders. And Infantino is a remarkable thing that happened here in particular, because in the indictment, Michel Platini, who was the UEFA president, he was not named in that. As soon as all these guys got arrested, it was assumed that Michel Platini, great former football player, not tarnished by this indictment at this point, is going to sweep in and replace Sepp Blatter as the FIFA president, because Blatter, also not named in the indictment, is under a huge amount of pressure because all of his mates have been taken away.

9:09So he says he's going to lay down his mandate, I remember that, and will eventually go. in the end he was forced out because uh mysteriously the the in all of the the searches by the swiss police fifa is raided very quickly this is amazingly quickly this payment this this um payment to uh michelle platini from sepp blatter for two million swiss francs it's it's one of the first things that emerges here so so i don't know whether that who was behind finding this thing so the alacrity here is is something and michelle platini and blatter are suspended pending this investigation so while this happens we're like hang on he was going to be the fifa president he said well i still am but i need a placeholder guy while i fight this uh you know this this claim against me we'll be all over very quickly don't worry i'll be back and emerges Mr G Infantino I'll do it guys I know I'm not going to be there I'm just doing it for my friend Michel He'll be back, we all back him of course And Michel doesn't come back There is an election And on the billet Is Gianni Infantino The European candidate But part of his campaign Aside from the Christmas cards that you'd mentioned But his campaign Was basically i will get you more money basically wasn't it to to smaller i don't mean that in a disrespectful way i mean less major footballing fa's you were dead right he we should have seen the the cynicism really from from that point but perhaps because of the scandal because he was on a reform committee around that time that was going to clean FIFA up.

11:08Maybe, and he wasn't Sheikh Salman. That was the other thing from AFC because he's part of the old guard as well, in a way. People perhaps didn't take a close look at this. And what we're talking about, he offered more money to these members, you're right, than anybody else. He also offered more World Cup places than anybody else. 48 teams was in his manifesto and obviously he's delivered it here. These are gifts. These are things that you can give that separate you from your candidate, particularly this financial offering. It means that every FA, that's the way FIFA is structured. No matter of the need, no matter of the size or the wealth or any of this, every single FA gets the same amount of money.

11:49That means in very small places, you're just awash in cash. And this is what gets you elected. This is your electorate. Look, if he's... The structure of FIFA is that you become, once you're the president, you become extremely powerful because you have in your hands the power to almost investigate these guys, to gift them stuff. And they owe you. All of these people end up owing you something, including the bigger FAs. I couldn't help but notice. I couldn't help but notice. after the issue with the United States forward following Baloghan, this affected the field in the biggest and most prestigious sports tournament in the world, right?

12:37We had a statement from UEFA, but where were the FAs? UEFA isn't an FA. UEFA is an association of FAs. Where was the English Football Association? Where was the Belgian Football Association put this statement out? But Pascal Van Damme, she sits, She's the president of the Belgian FA, for example. She sits on the FIFA council. She gets her 250 grand a year to go to these three or four meetings. We've also got to remember this. It's her country. Where was a statement from her saying this is not good enough? Even afterwards, yeah, Belgium are through. We want follow up here. We want to know why Infantino did this.

13:11To be honest with you, you and I are sitting here talking about this financial scheme. The Balogand thing should have been enough for this type of reaction, to be honest with you. But which therefore, if you go back to when Infantino took over, so bearing in mind the scandal that had gone on, everything with Blatter, FIFA members being paraded out of that hotel, as you were saying, a press conference where a comedian threw wads of money at Blatter. All of that, Infantino is swept in here. There was a report and suggested corruption reforms. And he'd been that. Correct? he was one of the people who designed that reform, including term limits.

13:54And when you say bind it, it kind of happens over time. It wasn't like, I'm in and it's all going to be binned. So one of the key policies in this reform was get rid of these grace and favour committees, because that was a way of sorting your friends out. These committees that didn't defeat, I was bloated. I think I had 22 committees or something like that at the time. so you have all these people you fly them in in business class maybe first class you give them 500 per diems per day and they get to shop in zurich or wherever these meetings would be held quite a nice life access to world cup tickets and all of these things because you want to create a situation where everyone's getting a bit of something and no one wants to rock the boat um and so they were like right we're getting rid of these committees so very quickly these committees were got rid of i think they went down to like five or six and they were they were um supposed to function in that way.

14:50But now, as we talk now, in 2024, I think, we've got more committees than we've ever had before. We just brought them back with a vengeance. There's like 35 of these things. So, yeah, he has thrown away this stuff. Term limits, supposed to be 12 years. If Gianni Infantino, which he said he is, is going to stand again next year, he'll go through 12 years because Because somehow that first period when he came in, they found out a way that it didn't count anymore. So he gets to do a bit more. And he's not the only one. The UEFA president last year, the year before, that first term, somehow the voting members said, all right, that doesn't count either.

15:35So football seems unreformable from the inside. And I think they realize that no one is looking for them. it's switzerland the swiss government's not really doing anything it was only the doj and the fbi investigation uh which kind of um took them out i'm really surprised that they're not nervous about this stuff because that did happen but they're clearly impervious to change since infantino took over russia russia and qatar were already awarded the tournament before he took over. He got very close to power, would you say, in those two tournaments, i.e. the powers of the two countries and in the build-ups to them.

16:18He was then obviously responsible for going to the USA, and we will talk Donald Trump very shortly when Emily Maitlis joins us from the newsagents. Then we have the one in 2030, which is in a whole load of different countries, and then we go to Saudi in 2034. How is he viewed in terms of all those tournaments since 2018? He has shown who he is, his character, and it's evolved in a way throughout there. Again, we didn't know what kind of FIFA president he would be, but he just loves being around the powerful rulers of these countries. It started with Vladimir Putin, and he was loving it. He was loving being close to this guy, and Putin enjoyed having him there because you've got FIFA, you've got the world's most popular football tournament, And you've got Gianni Infantino fluffing you every time he's got this opportunity.

17:27And he gave him, I think, gave him the most senior medal the Russian state could give to a foreign person. So he got that. And then he moved to Doha and kind of lived in Qatar with his family and basically became a public relations machine for the government of Qatar. and their positions throughout this period. And that obviously was highlighted in that pre-tournament speech, the diatribe, the I feel speech, the famous I feel speech, in which he lambasted, I guess, Western media and Western public opinion and effectively came with sword and shield for the Qatari state, which was perhaps above and beyond what you kind of needed to do but here he is doing doing this um and you know talking to people he loves being around very powerful very rich and very famous people and this is this is from some of his closest um aides and advisors now um and and And you can track that, sorry Tariq, you can track that way back, can't you?

18:49Not from just the first World Cup that was under his charge, but even his election campaign back to become FIFA president, which had a whole array of football royalty behind it. Or as he would call them, the FIFA legends now. So sorry, yes. so so these are these so these yeah he these it's a kid in a candy shop as well right again we go we got you know i'm not a psychologist but you know the humble beginnings he talked about being bullied as a kid and now here he is right at the top with the best stars in football i think it started with these stars and i still think he likes being around them because um he keeps telling us that because the only place we are able to actually um almost see infantino and hear from him because he doesn't like doing press conferences or talking to the media at all is um this instagram account and it is quite something in in every picture is with some type of leader it is with some type of celebrity he is enjoying the trappings of this and during the world cup i i don't know um whether it was my he just kept being around the the brazilian legends of of the 90s and early 2000 era and who doesn't want to hang out with Cafu for 10 minutes they're maybe doing a bit of five aside with Roberto Carlos I don't know you know he was just with these people kind of all of the time if not them um Hollywood A-listers um Tom Brady and apparently uh you know he really enjoys the company uh of Shakira as well she she seems to have had a season ticket to FIFA music since the 2010 World Cup and she's a big part of the entourage now as well I know I keep saying this but just that was the best World Cup song though so I can I can understand if you have delivered Waka Waka why you feature prominently after that.

20:51Anyhow, quick reminder you can catch up on our previous episodes on YouTube, Global Player or wherever you get your podcast please subscribe, follow, leave us a review while you are there. Tariq is staying with us. Newsagent Emily Maitlis will join us next to discuss Infantino's relationship with Donald Trump and how it has now created the biggest crisis of Infantino's career.

21:19So along with Tariq, Emily joins us for this part as well. But first of all, Tariq, I just want to go back to what we were talking about earlier and bring it forward to Donald Trump because you spoke about the close relationships that Infantino had had with other World Cup hosts but this was of a completely different scale with Trump. Yeah this is of a different scale that any sports leader in modern history has had with a leader of any country. He's kind of barnacled himself to Donald Trump and they seem to kind of have a vibe with each other as well um because trump whenever he sees him anywhere he's like you know there's johnny johnny where are you i can't see you johnny like he he does recognize him and he he does enjoy having him around because janine fantino has spent almost the entire period he's been in the u.s um acting as a booster for donald trump in ways that go well beyond what a sports administrator should be doing uh notably um obviously the fifa peace prize that he delivered to donald trump in washington before before the world cup draw in in december he's been censured for that he's under a i don't know if he's under the ethics investigation but there is a ethics complaint against him for for breaching fifa's rules on neutrality there so i mean he did the Peace Prize, which I think so many people are aware of.

22:50Infantino was prominent at Trump's second inauguration. If you go back to 2018, Infantino was with Trump at the G20 in Buenos Aires in 2020. He opened for Trump in Davos at the Economic Forum there. What's in it for Trump, Emily? Well, I think he sees somebody who is like-minded and I think he sees somebody who he can teach. And what they share is this sense that fundamentally, rules are for wimps. You don't need systems, you don't need processes, you just need personal relationships. And I think that's where Trump has always started and what Infantino has learned from Trump. And don't forget, their careers, their sort of political careers run pretty much in tandem because Infantino came in in 2016.

23:42Trump is elected that same year. And so you can see that there is a sort of sense of the like-minded in each other. Trump, I think, believes in the branding and believes in the transaction of every role he's had. And Infantino does. And neither of them care that much about football. So in a way, they're sort of perfectly matched, aren't they? They're these sort of mirror images of each other. And I think Trump has emboldened Infantino. I mean, if you go back to 2016, what do they share? They both came in with a sort of variation of the drain the swamp idea, right? I mean, Infantino in a very limited way, you know, but that sort of crazy first speech that there was that sense of, we are the new guys, we're here to restore the power and kind of, and get everything moving again.

24:34And obviously they have just been swallowed up into the swamp in their respective ways. But I think that what you're getting is a sense from Trump that Infantino can do anything. He has become more brazen when he starts asking for the security, you know, the convoy ahead of the World Cup, when he starts treating himself like a president or like a pope, that tells you that the mindset has changed, right? He no longer thinks of himself as a head of a governing body. He thinks of himself literally as a president. It's just a different kind of president. And I guess the other thing they share really is a sort of complete disregard for democracy, right?

25:21Because we know that Trump likes to win elections, And even when he doesn't win elections, he still claims he's won elections. And there was something about the whole way this project came about. You know, I'm sure you've talked about it already, but the Sun Valley, Idaho, J.P. Morgan, the idea that you would, instead of sort of putting this out to tender to your members, to 211 individual countries and saying, what do you think? You know, is there a way forward? Is there a way of giving more money to the countries that need it? You basically get a deck together from JP Morgan. You sit under a shady tree with Trump's, you know, extended family son-in-law.

26:03And you basically stitch this thing up together is, I think, the same sort of way that Trump thinks about things. Like, don't worry about them. We'll do it. We'll sort this out. It'll be fine. Yeah. And actually, this was the part where we were going to talk about, Emily. So we hadn't mentioned this deal, which looks like it's going to, you know, could bring him down until this point. Because, Tariq, within sport at the moment, the notion that has been proposed by Infantino of investment within two, you know, the people who run a tournament or run a game is not new. You know, F1 has had investment in a similar way or various rugby union tournaments have as well.

26:48But actually, it is the secrecy behind it, more than anything, as Emily has alluded to, that could bring him down. Yeah, and you've seen that in the comments. I think the most damaging comments really weren't from UEFA, in a way. They were from individuals who perhaps would be the closest to him. Carlos Cordero, senior advisor to Gianni Infantino, who's the former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs in Asia. So a bloke who knows about money. and he's said this is completely ludicrous he was kept in the why would you keep your senior advisor who worked at Goldman Sachs out of the loop on something like this because he might say no because he might say it's not a good idea and he resigned on Saturday because he was so nervous of being stained by this thing that he had to put this chorus game statement I mean the language there is is pretty pretty bad saying like you know this this is something that um is on no levels would be what football needs from a financial point of view the numbers don't add up and fifa is swimming in billions of dollars and there's a difference to to the point you made with these other organizations a lot of them are broke are in in big trouble they need to raise some money that's when you bring private equity in you're not you're not really um um they're not really your friends they're your your last resort in a way for for an organization to get desperately needed cash in we saw that with sports after covid fifa is loaded and the other statement was from a guy called kevin lamore who's a chief operating officer of fifa so his staff very senior inside the administration the people that run the place uh he said this was um deceitful um the staff were lied to they were kept in the dark as well this is the idea of one man like uh as jenny as donald trump would call him this was all decided by one man alone and that is the king of soccer and emily going back to then this this trump as some kind of teacher for infantino you've mentioned it from a disregard for the rules point of view you could probably look at it from the business point of view that you've that you've also talked about i know we'll get the family members to do this and the other but there's also the sort of attack counter-attack never apologize you know and he has gone down that route increasingly with some of his infantino with some of his posts and that's straight out of a trump playbook yeah i mean it was roy cone um sort of former advocate and lawyer to trump who basically gave him the mantra that has seen him through a good decade in politics.

29:36And that was, you never admit your mistakes. You never apologise. You, if anything, you double down. What we are seeing is that a lot of people who try and learn that bit of the playbook from Trump don't succeed. They don't actually manage to do that. I mean, we've seen it in the political sphere here to some extent with Nigel Farage, who can't decide whether to sort of double down when he gets into a sort of scandal-ridden set of questions or whether to sort of say, oh, Trump's nothing to do with me anymore, sort of put some distance. And I think what we saw from Infantino to some degree was he wants that to be the response, but he doesn't have any other cards to hold.

30:24I mean, that's Trump's favourite phrase, isn't it? You know, Trump manages to be Trump because everyone needs his patronage. With Infantino, I think I think what feels so different was that completely united front from UEFA right straight away. And obviously there's beef between UEFA and FIFA already. So I guess, you know, a lot of people, you guys won't be surprised, but the fact that they managed to get that united front of people to say, no way, like just no way, we're not doing it. That isn't what happened with NATO. That isn't what happened with the EU countries. That isn't what happened with any other body, if you like, that was prepared to take on Trump.

31:06Whereas UEFA basically said, I think I think we can survive post-Infantino. I think we can imagine a world without Infantino. I think we are prepared to go this far and this hard. And then they were joined, weren't they? I think CONCACAF has sort of boycotted, but they've kind of said no. And the Asian nations have kind of gone kind of fuck off, but in a slightly more palatable, you know, polite Asian way. And I think they've all basically said no to Infantino. And that's where this breaks down, because that never happens with Trump. fundamentally not enough people have ever said no to trump which is why he's emboldened by it

31:53will the breakdown of this deal emily bearing in mind who is involved on the the trump side of things. Will that it's difficult to look into the future isn't it? Particularly when we're talking these two. But how will that affect a Trump Infantino relationship? Oh I think you've already started to see it. I mean in that last press conference do you remember to Tarek's point you know Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. This time he just went who's Johnny? Who's Johnny? Who? Like as soon as he says who about you you're basically you're dead. You're fucked. You know that that's the line. And And I think you're seeing that already.

32:35Trump hates losers. And anyone who feels like they're losing is basically a lost cause to him. We go back to our earlier discussions about, Tariq, how everybody is, you know, everybody has something to gain from being in FIFA, the people who are making these decisions. are you surprised that given what happened with suspensions whether that be Ronaldo or Balogun whether it be what happened with ticket prices whether what happened with the cost of the tournament that it is only now that some governing bodies or the collective such as UEFA have taken a stand? Not really to be honest with you because it's just as cynical as it always has been how many of these people really care about football going to private equity probably not that many but this is the easiest public relations uh way to attack this plan that football is being sold to this private capital must never be done and i know many people would think it in the outside world the point of this deal if i'm uefa you're going to sell this to private equity 20 percent you're going to build this company and in that company you then say we're going to have potentially more lucrative tournaments potentially more world cups or more frequency of world cups perhaps more club tournaments um chappers you you cover champions league what's going to happen to the champions league if there's more global club competitions that's a real rival to uefa now the the fire and brimstone the emotive language for alexander sheffern it's really good it's really good at this in a crisis.

34:19But if you look at the detail, the bigger risk to UEFA is a threat of increased competitions from a commercial operation that FIFA could launch. So that is something that UEFA, the governing body, the owner of the Champions League, is really concerned about. So am I surprised? Long way of saying no, I'm not surprised, but it's not for the reasons that we think. And also some of these FAs privately would be like, we see which way the wind's blowing. But if it was blowing the other way, it'd be right up a drain pipe taking the 20 million off Infantino quite comfortably. I think the Balogun thing was really helpful for those who already were critical of Infantino because it crystallised for the whole world how easily he could be, I'm going to say, bought in commas.

35:13But it's a really interesting question, because remember the sequence of events that led up to the Balogun, you know, sort of change of mind, suspension. It started with reporting that, you know, that this was going to happen. And we understand that there were phone calls, which at that point, Trump hadn't confirmed. But after Trump's phone calls, it then went to the Commerce Secretary. It went to Howard Lutnick. It went to a whole series of lawyers. Now, I'm sorry, why do you need a Commerce Secretary? Why do you need lawyers on a discussion about a football rule, right? There was no understanding of why you would need quite so many people involved in that, unless, you know, a cynic might say money was changing hands at that point.

36:01I have no evidence. I don't know what happened there. But it does seem quite extraordinary that, you know, why do you use lawyers, presumably to draw up contracts of some kind, right? Presumably to sort of work out the fine print. And I think the moment that happened, for a lot of people who hadn't actually been paying attention to Infantino, who might have missed the moment he handed over the gold statue of peace to Trump or whatever, you suddenly thought, oh, hang on a second. Like this is in your face stuff. This is in your face wrong. Actually, what it is, Emily, isn't it? This affects us.

36:37This affects all of us who love football, work in football, support football. Whether some bloke gets a Mickey Mouse Peace Trophy or not is utterly irrelevant. We don't care. Put it in the downstairs loop. This could have made America go forward. And for a while, Mark, we were looking at what had happened there and going, is this going to be a sort of January the 6th moment? In other words, if America then get knocked out, is Trump going to turn around and go, no, they didn't. Like, we didn't know how long it was going to last. You know, does he keep on doing it? Is there sort of is there more kind of business to be done here in terms of keeping America in the World Cup?

37:16So I do. I actually think I think he showed his colors there. And that would have been like, you know, the A-level essay on this is like, well, it probably goes back way before this. But that was the moment when it almost started being all over, didn't it? He got lucky, didn't he? My view is it would have been great, not great from a footballing point of view, but to really show this up if Balogand had stepped up, scored a hat-trick and sent Belgium home in that game. That FIFA, Gianni Infantino, wherever they went to pray that morning, got their prayers answered because the US were eliminated and shockingly eliminated.

37:57But if he got through, because for me, once you start affecting the field of play, that should have been the, is Gianni Infantino still going to be the FIFA president? That is the moment because it's the governance of the game. And now we're here. I almost think that is as big, if not bigger, than what happened. And then it makes me think of the craven nature of these football administrators and FAs and all of these people that that didn't seem to register with them except privately. And I was getting annoyed because I'm getting like texts and what's up. Can you believe this? Can you look at a state?