Is Gianni Infantino’s time up as Fifa president? - The Latest

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1:04Jonathan Liew:There comes a point at which the straw breaks the camel's back. The idea that you would run to President Trump to save your skin when your job is under threat is quite comical. It is encouraging that we've seen this groundswell of opinion against FIFA, but I just wish some of it had been crystallised and harnessed a little bit earlier. The damage that's been done to football could have been averted. From the Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Half. FIFA president Gianni Infantino is under huge pressure to stand down after his very humiliating U-turn over the weekend over plans to sell off parts of the World Cup to private equity.

1:46Gianni Liu, you're a Guardian sports writer and columnist. Let's circle back to last week. I'm just wondering how you felt when you first heard the news of this scheme.

1:57Jonathan Liew:To be really brutally honest, kind of nonplussed by it. Really? Having covered FIFA and football for, what, 10, 15 years and seen the indignities and iniquities that FIFA has got up to, it's almost kind of like a frog in boiling water. You see the latest, oh, well, obviously they've overturned a red card. Obviously, they've given the World Cup to Russia. Obviously, they're going to sell a part of it off. It didn't seem to me like a massive leap from the direction of travel that they were going in. Part of me wondered whether private equity or private investors might introduce a layer of accountability, almost.

2:38Jonathan Liew:Could private equity do a worse job of organising a World Cup than FIFA do? Also, all these thoughts swimming through my head. And I guess for the broader footballing community, it's really hard to know what the line is. There comes a point, and we saw this with the Super League as well, the European Super League a few years ago, that people will almost tune out and tune out and tune out. But there comes a point at which the straw breaks the camel's back and a cascade of opproprium rains down on everyone's head. And it's always really hard to know where that point is. But there was something that's really emblematic about the idea of, even though FIFA would not describe it like this, of selling the World Cup.

3:20Jonathan Liew:That is very evocative. So I think that is what's got everyone really exercised. Yeah. And Gianni Infantino, obviously, being the person that was supposed to sort of clean up FIFA after the set blatter years and all the allegations of corruption during that period. In a statement, obviously trying to save his own back, Infantino said that it had become clear that the project had created divisions and that his intent was to bring all interested parties back together in the coming days and weeks. But it really feels like the opposite has happened. And UEFA in particular last week threatened to boycott any future World Cup, but they've now gone even further than that, seemingly really putting pressure on Infantino to go.

4:06Jonathan Liew:Yes, and that pressure appears to be ramping up this week. There's a story in The Guardian this morning about how CONCACAF, which represent the North American, Central American, Caribbean nations, are the latest federation that is going to look at, that is allegedly going to look at putting up a candidate or backing a candidate to stop in Fantino. Arsene Wenger, who's FIFA's head of development, who's been pretty quiet on this for the last couple of weeks. He's come out this morning and said, look, this has nothing to do with me. I didn't want it. There's an internal memo, an internal staff memo from Infantino's right-hand man, essentially, the General Secretary, Matthias Grafstrom, to staff at FIFA saying that this is a regrettable episode.

4:46Jonathan Liew:And that the organisation is bigger than any one event or individual, which, you know, it sounds, it is coded language, but it does sound kind of ominous. and the fact that Impatino rode back on it so quickly and and is almost trying to he was he's trying to shore up support you know you you can guarantee that he is calling his allies he is he's he's ringing around the people that he trusts uh to try and get a sense of where he is because you know as they say in politics the first rule is is no out of count and uh the the federations that are trying to topple him will need 106 votes to, you know, a simple majority of the 211 federations to force him out.

5:29Jonathan Liew:And at present, it's not entirely clear whether they have anything like those numbers, even though UEFA's 55 is comfortably the biggest confederation. Yeah, yeah. And a very meaningful and significant one. One person that we know Infantino has been trying to call to rally support is Donald Trump. But it's been reported that Trump is not picking up his calls. I'm wondering if you think kind of that relationship is where it all went wrong, because of course, part of this private equity scheme involved Joshua Kushner and his private equity firm, who is of course the brother of Trump's son-in-law.

6:06Do you think that relationship is what's forming so much of this controversy?

6:11Jonathan Liew:It certainly tarnished him reputationally. I think his closeness with Trump helped deliver what FIFA would say was the most commercially lucrative World Cup in history. And that is what they would say is their raison d 'etre. But yeah, of course it has. Morally, reputationally. And I think politically, it is tying himself to what is, if you look at the polls in America, quite a lame duck leader who is reviled in most of Europe and much of the global south, you know, he's reviled around the world. And so the idea that you would run to President Trump to save your skin when your job is under threat is quite comical for two reasons, really.

6:52Jonathan Liew:First, the idea that, you know, what exactly is Trump going to do? What is he going to impose tariffs on whales unless they back him? It sounds kind of absurd, the idea that the animal magnetism of Trump would somehow scare Europe into alignment. But also the idea that President Trump is a loyal kind of guy at all, that he's someone you can call in a favour on. He clearly does have a personal regard for Gianni Ampantino. But I don't think the intervention of Trump, if and when it occurs, if it even has any credence at all, is going to sway much on either side. Yeah, well, prayers for Wales and the hope that tariffs aren't imposed there.

7:37There are presidential elections next year. I think when this story broke last week, there was a sense, firstly, that Infantino was likely to survive it, but secondly, that it was likely to go through, or certainly that was some of the reporting. That feels very different now. I mean, you touched on it earlier, but do you think there is a possibility that there will be a challenger candidate and that Infantino might lose that election?

8:06Jonathan Liew:I think there's the possibility of a candidate. I think UEFA are trying incredibly hard right now amongst the federations to try and come up with a candidate that will be acceptable to a broad base of the FIFA electorate, which is not easy. FIFA is an incredibly factional place. And UEFA, for all the power they enjoy, the cultural power and financial power, is not universally popular in the world game. Their power base, globally speaking, is quite small. So the name that gets talked about is Victor Montaliano from Canada, obviously from the CONCACAF Federation that just held the World Cup. And, you know, he's, again, because there's so little transparency, because there's so little way of scrutinising the process, it's impossible to know whether he actually wants it.

8:52Jonathan Liew:But, you know, apparently he's one of the names that UEFA have talked about. One of the other names that was mentioned, which is Al-Khalifi, Nasser Al-Khalifi of Qatar, who's obviously the owner of PSG. And I don't think that that is going to be very likely. I think he's quite close to Infantino. He's not a confrontational kind of guy. I think he's much more of a pragmatist. who enjoys quite a significant power base as it is and might not want to risk that with a divisive presidential campaign. So, yeah, I mean, the time is running out, by the way, because, you know, once a name is picked or anointed, they basically have three months to get a campaign together before the presidential election, the next FIFA Congress.

9:31Jonathan Liew:and in that time Infantino will be using all his levers of power, all his political nous and skills and contacts and leverage, I guess you could call it, to try and swing the result his way. Yeah, it's going to be a fascinating thing to watch. Just lastly, Johnny, I mean, obviously you mentioned the comparison with the European Super League and the sort of enormous backlash to that. We've seen a similar thing happen here. But at the end of a World Cup that felt so flawed, so hyper monetized and commercialized, the hydration breaks that created so much advertising revenue. Do you think or do you still feel confident as someone that loves football that it is a game that belongs to the fans?

10:19Jonathan Liew:To an extent. I took so much inspiration from the European Super League protests. I found it incredibly moving, actually, and stirring how quickly the game united against that idea. And we saw something similar to that. It wasn't as concerted or frankly as passionate or energetic a campaign as when fans took to the streets to protest the Super League. But we did see a lot of that same kind of momentum that I think maybe had been building for a while discontent with FIFA, with Infantino, with the way the game is run, with the way a lot of our world is run, frankly. I think the MAGA World Cup, as a lot of people called it, I think it displayed, it demonstrated so much of what has gone wrong in the world in terms of the relationship of power to the people it's supposed to protect and the ordinary man or woman in the street.

11:25Jonathan Liew:my only kind of caveat with that is i i we talked about all of the the grim stuff that fifa has done over the years and i and i just think where was this energy uh when the u.s was trying to ban a referee from from coming to the world cup where was this energy over iran where is this energy uh over you know qatar or russia or you know or your palestine israel or any of the thousands issues in football that frankly should have put an instant end to the Infantino reign on the spot but people just kind of nodded it along and you know sort of made noises and so he was allowed to think himself unimpeachable impregnable like a kind of messianic figure who could do whatever he wanted and you know it may well be that he survives this and is strengthened and wins another election and rules football for another four years you know we can't rule that out so I think And it is encouraging that we've seen this groundswell of opinion against FIFA.

12:22Jonathan Liew:But I just wish some of it had been crystallised and harnessed a little bit earlier when a little bit of the damage that's been done to football could have been averted. Yeah, a very good point. Well made. And one imagines Infantino as having some sleepless nights in this period. Johnny, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Johnny Liu, Guardian sports writer and columnist. You can keep up with all his work over at theguardian.com. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest. Today in Focus will be back in your feeds as usual tomorrow morning. The Latest will be back tomorrow night.

12:59This episode was produced by Annie Levespa and Bryony Moore. The senior producer was Ryan Ramgobin. It was presented by me, Lucy Hoff.

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