{"id":327,"date":"2026-06-02T10:37:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T10:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=327"},"modified":"2026-06-02T10:37:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T10:37:38","slug":"the-world-cup-according-to-gianni-infantino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=327","title":{"rendered":"The World Cup According to Gianni Infantino"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In English, it\u2019s called the World Cup, but I prefer the stirring names by which it\u2019s known in other European languages\u2014Mundial, Mondiali, Weltmeisterschaft\u2014and which better convey the idea that this is not a sports tournament but something closer to a cosmological event, heavy with meaning. For soccer people, it requires no effort to measure out your life in World Cups. Just a few seconds of footage, or even a photograph, is usually enough\u2014the color of the turf, the haircuts, the uniforms, the exact shade of summer blue\u2014to ascertain not only which year it was and who won but where you were and who you were with and why you were with them and what the preoccupations of that time were from which it was possible, however briefly, to escape.<\/p>\n

Read more The Happy Ending Romeo and Juliet Didn\u2019t Get<\/a><\/p>\n

My earliest World Cup memory\u2014a six-year-old\u2019s spiral of indignation and despair\u2014is of Diego Maradona\u2019s dastardly Hand of God, which eliminated England in the quarterfinals of the 1986 edition, in Mexico. Twenty years later, I watched the final, an operatic affair between France and Italy, at a pub in East London. Zinedine Zidane, the great French playmaker, headbutted Marco Materazzi, a wily Italian defender who had made a passing remark about Zidane\u2019s sister. Zidane was ejected and France lost. It was a London summer night, when the smell of dried-out parks and exhaust fumes never entirely clears from the air. I stood at the bar with my girlfriend, whom I was desperately in love with but who didn\u2019t care about soccer at all, and I can still feel the conflicting parts of me\u2014one part absorbed by the magnitude, the improbable aesthetic beauty, of Zidane\u2019s gesture, the other by her\u2014reaching in two unbridgeable directions at once. (We broke up soon afterward; she is now my wife.)<\/p>\n

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So these are complicated, major occasions. And this summer\u2019s World Cup, which runs from June 11th to July 19th, will be the same, or even more so. For the first time, the tournament will be played across three nations\u2014the United States, Mexico, and Canada\u2014with forty-eight teams (up from thirty-two, as in previous editions) and a total of a hundred and four matches. It will be longer, more climatically varied, and more revenue-generating than ever before. It will probably be fantastic. Perhaps something will go wrong. Either way, the World Cup will be wasted on most Americans. Although millions will marvel at the sheer scale and global character of the enterprise (the Democratic Republic of the Congo will play Uzbekistan on the evening of June 27th, in Atlanta), it is unlikely to graft onto their sense of time and shared memory the way that Italy\u2019s victory did in 1982, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That summer, Gianni Infantino\u2014now the president of the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale de Football Association, which governs global soccer and owns the World Cup\u2014was twelve years old and living in Brig, a small town in the Swiss Alps. Infantino\u2019s parents were Italian migrants: his father worked on the night trains that ran under the mountains and across Europe, and his mother managed a kiosk at the railway station. Working-class Italians suffered discrimination in Switzerland during Infantino\u2019s childhood. But the triumph of the Azzurri, the Italian men\u2019s national team, in the World Cup helped to change that. It \u201callowed us to grow,\u201d Infantino said in a speech, in 2021. \u201cFor me personally, I think that the 1982 World Cup was definitely the moment when the football virus\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. became part of my life and my body.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swiss Italians of Infantino\u2019s generation have described the mounting euphoria of that summer as a feeling of riscatto<\/em>\u2014redemption and release. Brig is only a few miles from the Italian border. (Infantino calls his personality a combination of Italian creativity and Swiss precision.) After one match, he and his family crossed the border to the town of Domodossola to celebrate. There were no Italian flags on sale anywhere, so Infantino\u2019s mother bought strips of red, white, and green fabric and sewed them together herself.<\/p>\n

Brig is in the Upper Valais, a gaunt and conservative place where the inhabitants speak Walliser German, an Alpine dialect that many Swiss people find unintelligible. Six miles along the valley is Visp, the birthplace of Sepp Blatter, Infantino\u2019s predecessor at FIFA<\/em>, who, until Infantino entered the picture, was the most infamous soccer administrator of all time.<\/p>\n

Blatter was a former P.R. man and wedding m.c. who became a pioneer of global sponsorship and broadcasting deals. He joined FIFA<\/em> in 1975 and worked there for forty years. Under Blatter, FIFA<\/em> became powerful and rich but also morbidly corrupt. The organization is made up of two hundred and eleven national soccer associations and their representatives. For decades, FIFA<\/em> officials accepted bribes from sports-marketing companies in exchange for selling them the broadcast rights to valuable tournaments they controlled at preferential rates. At a news conference toward the end of Blatter\u2019s reign, a prankster showered him with banknotes.<\/p>\n

Blatter ran the show but never quite took center stage. In \u201cWorld Cup Fever,\u201d a new history of the tournament, the writer Simon Kuper likens him to der portier<\/em>, the manager of an expensive Swiss hotel who understands all his customers\u2019 predilections and who has the cash to cover their bills. \u201cBlatter\u2019s genius lay in knowing who was bribing whom,\u201d Patrick Oberli, a Swiss journalist and documentary filmmaker who has covered FIFA<\/em> for years, told me. Since taking over, in 2016, Infantino has made Blatter seem small-time by comparison. He has sublimated FIFA<\/em> into his own personhood, with astonishing success. His Instagram account, which has 4.2 million followers and a comments section that is strictly curtailed, is now the organization\u2019s principal mouthpiece. He has transformed the role of the FIFA<\/em> president into that of a prominent international politician (President Donald Trump calls Infantino \u201cthe king of soccer\u201d) while dramatically increasing FIFA<\/em>\u2019s revenues and reach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Infantino will be unavoidable this summer. During the previous World Cup, in Qatar, directors of the official tournament feed were reportedly instructed to show him in the crowd once per match and not while he was looking at his phone. The geography of this year\u2019s World Cup means that he won\u2019t be physically omnipresent, but his imprint will be everywhere. \u201cIt\u2019s safe to say that there\u2019s no major decision that\u2019s being made at this tournament without the direct involvement of Gianni,\u201d a former high-ranking FIFA<\/em> official told me. FIFA<\/em> has staged two men\u2019s World Cups under Infantino, but the 2026 edition is the first to be awarded and delivered during his tenure, and thus fully shaped in his image. He has already declared it to be the greatest of all time. Infantino\u2019s messaging is as relentless as a 3-D printer\u2019s. He is fond of the number eleven, which is the number of players on a soccer team. Most things are iconic. He likes to describe FIFA<\/em> as \u201cthe official happiness provider to humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Infantino is both absolutely in control and strangely ill at ease. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t trust many people,\u201d the former official said. \u201cHis circle is very small.\u201d Oberli, the Swiss journalist, has interviewed him four times. (Infantino declined to speak with me.) \u201cIn every case, I was faced with someone who was fearful,\u201d Oberli said. \u201cIt was a peculiar feeling. It was as if he were sitting an exam.\u201d In 2023, when Infantino was re\u00eblected, unopposed, for a second full term as president, he opened a rare news conference with a rebuke for the waiting reporters. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why some of you are so mean,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy? Why? I don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The modern history of FIFA<\/em> begins at dawn eleven years ago, when Swiss police officers entered the Baur au Lac, a luxurious nineteenth-century hotel in Zurich, and started arresting the organization\u2019s delegates, who had gathered for an annual congress. The raid, on May 27, 2015, followed years of investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. (More than forty FIFA<\/em> officials and associates were ultimately indicted on various fraud charges; twenty-seven pleaded guilty.) As the delegates were marched out of their hotel rooms, investigators also arrived at the Home of FIFA<\/em>, the organization\u2019s global headquarters, which has six underground levels dug into a hillside on the edge of Zurich. According to a Swiss search warrant, the police spent from 7:50 A.M<\/em>. to 9:30 P.M<\/em>. in the building, removing hundreds of boxes of bidding documents, World Cup contracts, and USB drives.<\/p>\n

Six days later, Blatter announced that he would step down. For years, his presumptive heir had been Michel Platini, a former captain of the French national team and the president of UEFA<\/em>, Europe\u2019s soccer governing body. (FIFA<\/em>\u2019s national associations are organized into six powerful continental blocs.) Where Blatter was a political operator, Platini was bluff and down-to-earth\u2014an actual soccer guy. In the eighties, Platini had won the Ballon d\u2019Or, the prize for the world\u2019s best player, three years in a row. \u201cEverything is set up for Michel Platini to be president,\u201d the former official recalled.<\/p>\n

But a single invoice changed that. On the afternoon of September 25th, some four months after the raids, Olivier Thormann, the head of the Swiss economic-crime division, returned to the Home of FIFA<\/em> to question Blatter and Platini about a payment of two million Swiss francs (roughly two million dollars) that his officers had discovered. Although the alleged purpose of the payment (for consulting work that Platini had done for Blatter in the late nineties) and its timing (just before Blatter\u2019s re\u00eblection in 2011) were definitely questionable, they weren\u2019t obviously illegal\u2014unlike the bribery and money laundering that the F.B.I. had uncovered. But Swiss prosecutors didn\u2019t see it that way. The two most important administrators in global soccer were taken to separate rooms. According to a former employee at the organization, as the FIFA<\/em> president was led away, Thormann asked a receptionist, \u201cDo you have a defibrillator for Mr. Blatter?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The criminal investigation ended Blatter\u2019s and Platini\u2019s careers in soccer. (Both men were charged with forgery and fraud, but later acquitted of any wrongdoing.) It also threw open the succession question at FIFA<\/em>: Who would run instead of Platini? For years, he had been assisted at UEFA<\/em> by Infantino, its forty-five-year-old general secretary and the former head of its legal department. Platini had star quality, but Infantino was an energetic administrator with a noticeable gift for languages. \u201cIt was a bit like \u2018Pinky and the Brain,\u2019\u00a0\u201d a former FIFA<\/em> executive told me, referring to a nineties cartoon about two genetically engineered mice. (In each episode, the Brain would come up with a plot to take over the world.) \u201cInfantino was the brains. Platini was the fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among fans, Infantino was best known for overseeing the draws for UEFA<\/em>\u2019s competitions, like the Champions League, where a former player would take balls out of a glass bowl and then open them to disclose which teams were playing each other. Infantino presided over the events with jocular asides and instant recall of previous matches and scores. \u201cHe was extremely competent and hardworking,\u201d a former colleague at UEFA<\/em> said. \u201cHe knew all the rules, read all the regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n

When UEFA<\/em> adopted Infantino as its presidential candidate, some observers wondered whether he was merely a placeholder until Platini could clear his name. But \u201cGianni\u2019s campaign was very slick,\u201d Philippe Auclair, a veteran French journalist and soccer writer, recalled. \u201cHe travelled everywhere. He met absolutely everybody.\u201d With UEFA<\/em>\u2019s funding, Infantino toured the world, courting soccer bureaucrats from Montserrat to Papua New Guinea. (Each FIFA<\/em> member has equal voting power.) \u201cHe was like a juggernaut, basically, which surprised a lot of us,\u201d Auclair said.<\/p>\n

Infantino\u2019s chief rival was Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, of Bahrain, the president of the Asian Football Confederation and a longtime dealmaker within FIFA<\/em>. But on election day, in Zurich, Infantino gave a thirteen-minute speech that was crisp and commanding. Beginning in English, he switched effortlessly among Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He acknowledged the arrests and the need for reform. \u201cWe have been speaking in the last months about many, many things: corruption, courts, tribunals, lawyers, whatever,\u201d he said. \u201cPolice.\u201d But Infantino\u2019s central\u2014and audacious\u2014pitch to the delegates was that, as president, he would give them more riches than ever before. \u201cWhen I propose figures, I know what I\u2019m speaking about,\u201d he said. His plan was to double the amount of FIFA<\/em> revenues that were paid out to members to help develop soccer in their countries\u2014a total of $1.2 billion. \u201cThe money of FIFA<\/em> is your money,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not the money of the FIFA<\/em> president. It\u2019s your<\/em> money.\u201d The room broke into a loud applause. A former FIFA<\/em> employee who was watching the proceedings realized that the election was over. \u201cLike, why even vote?\u201d the employee said. \u201cHe just promised them more money.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If Infantino has an operating philosophy, it is \u201cMore.\u201d For the first seventy-three years of FIFA<\/em>\u2019s history, the organization arranged just two competitions: the men\u2019s World Cup and the soccer tournament at the Olympic Games. Now it oversees twenty, ranging from the FIFA<\/em> Beach Soccer World Cup to FIFA<\/em>e, its e-sports division. Infantino sees FIFA<\/em>\u2019s expansion in ethical, as well as commercial, terms. He talks about soccer the way that other people talk about clean water or universal basic income.<\/p>\n

\u201cImmediately you have a ball, you smile,\u201d he said, at last year\u2019s America Business Forum, in Miami. \u201cThis is a magic object which transforms children or people into happy people or happy children.\u201d In 2022, at a meeting of the Council of Europe, a human-rights organization, Infantino suggested that holding the World Cup more often might prevent so many African refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

The effects on FIFA<\/em>\u2019s bottom line have been tremendous. Since Infantino took over, its revenues, which are calculated on a four-year cycle, have more than doubled. During the next cycle, which will run until 2030, FIFA<\/em> is projected to have fourteen billion dollars to spend\u2014of which $2.7 billion, some twenty per cent, will be handed back to its national associations, under a program known as FIFA<\/em> Forward. Blatter championed \u201cfootball development\u201d in the nineteen-seventies, to translate profits from FIFA<\/em>\u2019s ticket sales, sponsors, and broadcasters into fields and shoes and soccer programs around the world.<\/p>\n

But skeptics have long argued that such funding, which has increased eightfold under Infantino, is really just a mechanism for patronage and control. Brazil\u2014which has a population of two hundred and thirteen million people, of whom around a quarter live in poverty\u2014has won the men\u2019s World Cup five times. Between 2023 and 2025, it received $6.35 million from FIFA<\/em> Forward. The wealthy republic of San Marino (population thirty-four thousand), which is the bottom-ranked soccer nation in the world, received ninety-four thousand dollars more.<\/p>\n

The president holds the purse strings. \u201cThe concentration of so much money at the top creates two fundamental problems,\u201d Miguel Maduro, a Portuguese governance scholar, told me, of FIFA<\/em>. The first is that it gives any incumbent extraordinary leverage over the delegates who elect him. \u201cThat\u2019s why no president of a football association dares to publicly challenge the president,\u201d Maduro said. The second is what Maduro called \u201ca systemic conflict of interest\u201d between FIFA<\/em>\u2019s missions of regulating and monetizing soccer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In May, 2016, Maduro was appointed as the chairman of a new governance-and-review committee at FIFA<\/em>, to oversee elections and senior appointments at the organization. Maduro was one of several high-profile figures\u2014including Navi Pillay, a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights\u2014who were recruited to reform FIFA<\/em> and recast its public image in the wake of the corruption scandal. But, a year later, Maduro and Pillay were gone, along with Joseph Weiler, a professor at New York University, after the committee refused to appoint Vitaly Mutko, Russia\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister, to FIFA<\/em>\u2019s ruling council, because he was a serving government official.\u201cThe moment we started to do some things that could put into risk Infantino\u2019s structure of power, he had to decide whether to stay faithful to the reform process or to stay in power,\u201d Maduro told me. \u201cHe didn\u2019t hesitate.\u201d<\/p>\n

People who have worked at FIFA<\/em> describe it as an intoxicating place. \u201cO.K., you work at a massive investment bank. Is there one global investment bank?\u201d Mark Goddard, who worked at FIFA<\/em> for thirteen years, asked me. \u201cThere is only one FIFA<\/em>. There will only ever be one FIFA<\/em>, by intention and design.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former executive observed how rapidly new hires could fall under its spell. \u201cWithin six to twelve months, you see a huge personality shift,\u201d he said. \u201cYou see people who suddenly have this massive sense of entitlement, who get angry about the smallest things, like, Why has this person got match tickets? Why is this person seated here? Why did this person get this watch?\u201d<\/p>\n

FIFA<\/em> describes itself as a nonprofit, but its staff and delegates live well. Members of the FIFA<\/em> Council and many chairmen of its committees are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (plus expenses and per diems) to attend a handful of meetings a year. Under Infantino, the number of FIFA<\/em> committees has increased from seven to thirty-five. \u201cNo one is saying to be humble, at any point. You go to tournament events in exotic locations. You\u2019re flown business class. You stay in five-star hotels on Copacabana Beach,\u201d the former executive went on. Maduro added, \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to get co-opted or captured. You just need not to take very seriously your function.\u201d<\/p>\n

FIFA<\/em> has had other presidents who channelled the spirit of their era. Jules Rimet, who created the World Cup, was the son of grocers and grew up in fin-de-si\u00e8cle Paris. Rimet believed, beyond all reason, in soccer\u2019s ability to reconcile warring nations. According to \u201cWorld Cup Fever,\u201d he volunteered to serve in the trenches of the First World War, at the age of forty-one, where he was bombarded for four years and awarded the Croix de Guerre three times. Throughout his service, he wrote letters, hands shivering from the cold, to organize future international soccer competitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Blatter and his predecessor, Jo\u00e3o Havelange, a Brazilian businessman, were twentieth-century pioneers of branding and marketing deals\u2014agents of globalization. Infantino is a creature of our post-liberal moment: simultaneously banal and hard to read. \u201cHis vision for the game is to expand FIFA<\/em>\u2019s power and his own power, by definition, basically using the logic that anything that is good for me and FIFA<\/em> is good for football,\u201d the former UEFA<\/em> colleague said. \u201cIt\u2019s very simple.\u201d Earlier this year, Infantino\u2019s tenth anniversary at FIFA<\/em> was branded \u201cINFANTIN10\u201d on the organization\u2019s social-media channels and marked by a thirty-minute adulatory film, of which more than five minutes were taken up by congratulatory cellphone video messages sent by the great and the good of soccer.<\/p>\n

Infantino could not be more European, and yet he often chastises the historic and economic center of the sport that he governs. (More than seventy per cent of the players at the previous World Cup played in the European leagues.) \u201cEurope has to do much more,\u201d he said during his election speech, imploring the Continent to share its footballing wealth and expertise with other countries. He is troubling to many Europeans because he suggests that both their power and their preoccupations\u2014with democracy, human rights, the rule of law\u2014are somehow quaint and fading. \u201cIt\u2019s easy in our part of the world to paint with a dark paint everything that comes from the East, from Russia, or from the Arab world,\u201d Infantino said at a news conference in Moscow, six months before the 2018 World Cup, in Russia. (He was later awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin.)<\/p>\n

Read more Leo Woodall Gets a Tune Up<\/a><\/p>\n

FIFA<\/em>\u2019s statutes describe the organization as \u201cneutral in matters of politics and religion.\u201d But neutral is not the same as disinterested. During the 1934 World Cup, in Italy, Rimet sat in silence next to Benito Mussolini during matches in Rome. Il Duce liked to watch \u201cwith sustained attention, without distractions,\u201d Rimet later wrote. In 1978, FIFA<\/em> allowed the World Cup to be staged by Argentina\u2019s military junta. Brave ground staff painted the base of the goalposts black, to remind the world of the victims of the regime. The governments that Infantino has worked most closely with as FIFA<\/em> president have been Putin\u2019s, the Emir of Qatar\u2019s, the Trump Administration, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, it is a self-selecting group. FIFA<\/em> has to deal with rulers who have the wealth, and the disposition, to put on the largest events. \u201cA lot of the sucking up is exactly as a multinational corporation will do,\u201d a former FIFA<\/em> committee member told me. \u201cIt\u2019s the behavior of Coca-Cola, of Siemens, of Mercedes.\u201d In 2024, Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company, became an official FIFA<\/em> sponsor. On the other hand, Infantino\u2019s fascination with autocracy seems to be more than just a matter of the people whom he does business with. In 2021, he and his family lived in Qatar, which hosted the following year\u2019s World Cup. On the eve of the tournament, Infantino gave what is known as his \u201cToday I Feel\u201d speech, in which he said that he felt as if he were Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled, and a migrant worker all at the same time, in response to criticism of the labor and human-rights conditions in the Gulf state. The sound bite was widely ridiculed, but it was only a fragment of a much longer address in which Infantino questioned the superiority of Western values and claimed that soccer was an irreducible good, immune to the human context in which it was played. \u201cIf we could organize an event in any country of the world, in North Korea, I would be the first to go,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Infantino likes to remind people that FIFA<\/em> has more members than the United Nations. Earlier this year, the organization announced a partnership with Trump\u2019s Board of Peace at its launch, in Washington, D.C. Infantino presented what appeared to be an A.I.-generated video of a new seventy-five-million-dollar \u201cfootball ecosystem\u201d that would rebuild \u201cpeople, emotion, hope, and trust\u201d in Gaza, and rocked out while Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, sang along to an Elvis song. Then, in March, Infantino was among a handful of spectators at the Mardan Sports Complex, in southern Turkey, to watch the Iranian men\u2019s team play a friendly match and to insist on the team\u2019s appearance at the World Cup this summer. \u201cWe have to bring people together. It is my responsibility,\u201d he said recently. \u201cIt is our<\/em> responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a form of politics in which choices\u2014even Infantino\u2019s\u2014do not really exist. Last year, he delayed the start of the FIFA<\/em> Congress, in Paraguay, by three hours because he was tied up with Trump and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, in Doha. A group of UEFA<\/em> delegates walked out in protest, accusing Infantino of putting his political ambitions ahead of soccer\u2019s. Infantino can\u2019t stand that kind of dissent. He does not believe in boycotts or what he refers to, disapprovingly, as \u201cpressure\u201d on FIFA<\/em>\u2019s members or corporate sponsors. At the America Business Forum, he said that he is surprised whenever he reads negative coverage about Trump: \u201cHe\u2019s just implementing what he said he would do. So I think we should all support what he\u2019s doing, because I think he\u2019s doing pretty good, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

A month later, at the ceremony for the World Cup draw, in Washington, D.C., Infantino awarded Trump FIFA<\/em>\u2019s inaugural Peace Prize. \u201cThis is what we want from a leader,\u201d Infantino said, as he bestowed a miniature version of \u201cThoughts and Desires,\u201d a statue that stands outside the U.N.\u2019s offices in Geneva, upon the President. Only one FIFA<\/em> member, Lise Klaveness, the president of the Norwegian Football Federation, has had the temerity to speak out against Infantino\u2019s political freelancing. \u201cI sat in Washington, in a room full of football presidents, and felt the painful feeling of being hostage to something that is clearly wrong,\u201d she said in a speech, two months later. \u201cThe feeling that the emperor is not only walking without clothes\u2014but that he is leading us in a dangerous direction, and that, at the same time, I can\u2019t stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone else, for the most part, takes the magic ball and smiles. After the prize ceremony, Trump and Infantino returned to the stage with the leaders of the other host countries for this summer\u2019s World Cup\u2014Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico, and Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada\u2014to begin the draw for the tournament. Carney pulled out the first ball, which he unscrewed to reveal the first team assigned to the group stages. \u201cUh-oh!\u201d he said, chuckling. It was Canada. Sheinbaum pulled out the next. \u201cViva Mexico!\u201d she whooped. Trump, at least, had the naturalness, or the insouciance, to show that he knew the thing was rigged. \u201cThis is shocking,\u201d he deadpanned, after taking out a ball for the U.S.A. But Infantino didn\u2019t mind. He had his own podium, for FIFA<\/em>, alongside the host nations. He marshalled the politicians like a concierge you might easily mistake for a guest. Then he took out his phone for a group selfie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Infantino\u2019s most notable intervention at FIFA<\/em> has been his foray into club soccer, which was once the preserve of national and regional associations. FIFA<\/em>\u2019s \u00e9lite club competition\u2014the Club World Cup\u2014used to be little more than a set of glorified friendlies between the continental champions, usually held in the Middle East or Japan. But, in 2022, Infantino changed the format dramatically. The tournament would now take place every four years, like the World Cup proper, and include thirty-two teams rather than seven. There would be a prize pot of a billion dollars and a new trophy, made by Tiffany & Co.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, I stopped by FIFA<\/em>\u2019s museum, in Zurich, where the new Club World Cup was on display. It is a large concave disk, made of gold vermeil, which opens, with a key, to reveal what looks like an astronomical model. Almost every surface is laser-engraved with text, in thirteen languages. Infantino\u2019s favorite slogan, \u201cFootball Unites the World,\u201d is rendered, in Latin, as \u201cPediludus Coniungit Mundum<\/em>.\u201d Elsewhere on the trophy, there are the original rules to soccer, from 1863, which include a proscription on players having nails, iron plates, or gutta-percha\u2014a Malaysian rubberlike material, now used in root canals\u2014protruding from their boots. Infantino\u2019s name is inscribed twice, as the competition\u2019s \u201cfounding president\u201d and visionary, in the trophy\u2019s heavily punctuated prose: \u201cThe pinnacle of all club competitions. Inspired by FIFA<\/em> President Gianni Infantino, the tournament, first staged in 2025, eclipses any precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Infantino\u2019s first revamped Club World Cup took place in the U.S. last summer and presented an uneven spectacle. There were mismatches: Bayern Munich, the perennial German champions, thumped Auckland City 10\u20130. At a match in Orlando, only three thousand people turned up to watch Ulsan H.D., of South Korea, lose 1\u20130 to Mamelodi Sundowns, of South Africa. There can be such a thing as too much soccer. Games were dulled by the heat. Players from the top European teams, like Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, had already played sixty matches during their regular seasons, before taking to pitches in heat-dome temperatures of ninety-seven degrees and stifling humidity. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible,\u201d Marcos Llorente, of Atl\u00e9tico Madrid, complained after a match in Pasadena. \u201cEven my toenails were hurting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ahead of the tournament, the European members of Fifpro<\/em>\u2014a players\u2019 union\u2014filed a legal complaint against FIFA<\/em>, alleging \u201cabuse of dominance\u201d over the soccer calendar, which forces some players to compete virtually all year round. Fans at the Club World Cup also suffered from the heat, thunderstorms, and the vagaries of FIFA<\/em>\u2019s dynamic ticket pricing, whereby prices rise and fall according to demand. Shortly before the semifinal between Chelsea and Fluminense, a Brazilian club, at MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey, ticket prices went from four hundred and seventy-three dollars to thirteen. As if reading from the trophy, Infantino described the tournament as \u201cthe most successful club competition in the world.\u201d The winning team, Chelsea, earned more than a hundred million dollars in prize money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Club World Cup was a rehearsal for the big one this summer. There will be sixty per cent more matches at the 2026 World Cup than at any previous edition. According to research published in the journal Sports Medicine<\/em> in March, \u201cNever has one tournament presented such a combination of extreme environmental factors,\u201d with players encountering high altitude for matches in Guadalajara and Mexico City; elevated pollution risk, from ozone and possible wildfire smoke, on the West Coast; and the danger of exertional heat illness, or stroke, when forced to play in the midday sun.<\/p>\n

During the tournament, more than half of the sixteen participating venues are expected to exceed safe temperature levels for high-activity sports, as determined by Fifpro<\/em> and the American College of Sports Medicine. FIFA<\/em>\u2019s own safety threshold is a few degrees higher. Last December, FIFA<\/em> announced that there would be two cooling breaks per match, regardless of the weather, which led to speculation that the organization was more interested in creating regular interruptions\u2014for broadcasters and sponsors\u2014than in player welfare.<\/p>\n

The Champions League final, the climax of the European soccer season, takes place twelve days before the World Cup starts. \u201cIt\u2019s no secret that there\u2019s not enough time,\u201d Lee Taylor, a sports scientist at Loughborough University and a co-author of the Sports Medicine<\/em> paper, said. \u201cThey won\u2019t be prepared in the gold-standard way.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The players are bloody knackered.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ticketing environment has also been extreme. At the World Cup in Qatar, in 2022, the most expensive seats for the final cost about sixteen hundred dollars. In April, equivalent tickets for this year\u2019s final, at MetLife, went on sale for $10,990. A month later, the price tripled, to almost thirty-three thousand dollars. For the first time at a World Cup, FIFA<\/em> has experimented with both dynamic pricing and its own proprietary resale platform, on which it earns an additional thirty-per-cent commission. The organization is forecast to make about two and a half billion dollars from ticket sales. \u201cA big issue in the past was to make sure it was accessible to everyone, or to most people,\u201d the former senior official said. \u201cThis one is obviously different.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early April, I visited FIFA<\/em>\u2019s resale site to see what I could find. A few months earlier, in response to complaints about high prices, the organization had released thousands of sixty-dollar tickets for \u201chardcore\u201d fans. I found one of those, at the back of the upper deck of A.T. & T. stadium, in Arlington, Texas, for England\u2019s game against Croatia, on June 17th, for two thousand dollars. For the quarterfinal that will be played in Miami, on July 11th, there were seats high above the corner flag available for five thousand dollars. But for virtually the same spot, one row down, the price rose to thirty-five thousand dollars. (Last week, prosecutors in New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA for information about its ticketing strategy. Jennifer Davenport, the New Jersey attorney general, called the process \u201ca gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity and impossibly high prices.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is a tournament without rules,\u201d Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, a network of fan groups, told me one morning this spring. I asked Evain what he was most concerned about. \u201cIt is rather the things I am not concerned about,\u201d he replied. Immigration control was at the top of the list of concerns. Citizens from four countries that have qualified for the World Cup\u2014Senegal, Haiti, Iran, and C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire\u2014currently face restrictions travelling to the U.S. \u201cWhat is going to be the security doctrine of the tournament?\u201d Evain asked. \u201cCan you show an L.G.B.T.+ flag? Can you show a flag of Greenland?\u201d<\/p>\n

FIFA<\/em>\u2019s permanent workforce has almost doubled in size during Infantino\u2019s presidency, and another thousand staff have been hired to put on the World Cup, many working from the organization\u2019s offices in Miami. According to Evain, one of the major challenges ahead of the tournament has simply been to obtain information: about visas, or ticketing for disabled fans, or parking. Even small decisions within FIFA<\/em> are thought to require Infantino\u2019s personal approval\u2014\u201cHe decides everything by himself,\u201d a former council member told me\u2014an arrangement that has contributed to an atmosphere of opacity and delay. (FIFA<\/em> denies this.) Evain told me that FIFA<\/em> staff sometimes message him to find out what is going on. \u201cThe boss is all-powerful, but he\u2019s largely absent,\u201d Evain said. \u201cIt looks like people are left with two options: either not doing anything or trying to guess what he wants.\u201d When I texted Evain\u2019s comment to a former FIFA<\/em> employee who\u2019d spent years working for Infantino, he replied, \u201cDecisions = risks = fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discord around FIFA<\/em> contrasts sharply with Infantino\u2019s absolute control over the organization. Blatter often had to yield to lesser chiefs, such as the heads of the continental confederations, in order to maintain his grip on power. But Infantino faces no such resistance. \u201cBlatter was afraid of the big federations,\u201d the former colleague said. \u201cInfantino doesn\u2019t take them seriously. They are just co-opted into the system.\u201d Infantino is unlikely to be challenged when he runs for another four-year term, in 2027.<\/p>\n

Mark Pieth is a Swiss professor of criminal law who investigated the U.N.\u2019s oil-for-food scandal, in which corrupt officials paid kickbacks to Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime, in Iraq. In the twenty-tens, Pieth was one of the reputable figures enlisted by FIFA<\/em> to help reform the organization. He gave up after falling out with Blatter. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like if you wanted to reform the Vatican,\u201d Pieth told me, when we met at his office, in Basel. \u201cFIFA<\/em> never wanted to be really reformed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pieth observed that Infantino\u2019s FIFA<\/em> seems like a model of governance, with an independent ethics committee, a top-dollar human-rights policy, and a global democratic assembly. \u201cThe thing looks kind of good on the surface,\u201d Pieth said. \u201cBut it\u2019s empty. It\u2019s an empty shell.\u201d He was struck by how Infantino had begun to bypass FIFA<\/em>\u2019s membership\u2014in fact, anybody involved in the running of soccer at all\u2014in order to deal with the world\u2019s richest governments directly. \u201cTo be frank, I think the organization is shifting into a different mode,\u201d Pieth said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After the simultaneous awarding of the Russian and Qatari World Cups, in 2010, a process that was riddled with vote-buying, FIFA<\/em> updated its statutes to make sure that such a thing would never happen again. At the fifa<\/em> Congress in May, 2024, however, delegates relaxed the rules. That December, Infantino convened an extraordinary virtual meeting of all two hundred and eleven members to approve\u2014as a single agenda item\u2014the hosting rights for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups: a three-continent plan for the 2030 edition, shared between Spain, Portugal, and Morocco with three matches in South America, to mark the competition\u2019s centenary; and Saudi Arabia, in 2034.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hear \u2018corruption,\u2019 we always think about bribery and an individual person receiving a brown envelope,\u201d Pieth said. \u201cThis is a totally different kind of thing. They buy the entire world organization.\u201d After we spoke, I watched a recording of the vote. Infantino stood in front of a wall of screens\u2014the world of soccer on Microsoft Teams\u2014and asked for delegates to approve the hosts of the next two World Cups with a round of applause. \u201cIf you agree, please? Acclamation,\u201d Infantino said, and raised his hands. He stood and began to clap while the screens clapped back at him.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I took a train to Brig, where Infantino grew up. For centuries, the town was the gateway to the Simplon Pass, a vital trading route across the Alps to the wealthy states of Venice and Milan. Wordsworth walked out from Brig on a gloomy day in August, 1790. \u201cTumult and peace, the darkness and the light\u2014 \/ Were all like workings of one mind, the features \/ Of the same face,\u201d he wrote. I found my way to the small stadium of the town\u2019s soccer team, which plays in the sixth tier of the Swiss league. There was snow on the pitch, which was closed for the winter. Infantino likes to tell the story of how he became the president of F.C. Brig-Glis as a young man, after promising that his mother would wash the team\u2019s shirts for free. In 2017, as FIFA<\/em> president, he brought a team full of famous former players, including Diego Maradona, to Brig to play what the Swiss media called \u201cGianni\u2019s Game,\u201d a match in his honor.<\/p>\n

Before the game, the players gathered at Brig\u2019s most arresting building, the Stockalper Palace, which at the time of its construction was the largest private building in Switzerland. It was the headquarters of Kaspar Stockalper, a seventeenth-century merchant and an Alpine politician who parlayed his control of the Simplon Pass and a local salt monopoly into becoming one of the most powerful men in Europe. At Stockalper\u2019s zenith, when he travelled between Milan and Lyon, he could spend every night at a property that he owned. His fortune was once estimated to be worth 122,233 cows.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The palace is a fantasia, with a courtyard that does not lead to any rooms and three towers topped by onion domes\u2014the tallest of which was dedicated to Stockalper\u2019s namesake, Kaspar, of the Three Magi, and adorned by symbols of the sun. Stockalper\u2019s motto was \u201cSospes Lucra Carpat<\/em>,\u201d an anagram of his name that is loosely translated as \u201cGod\u2019s favorite shall take the profits.\u201d Almost every major family and merchant in the Valais owed Stockalper money, even the bishops. But, in 1679, to his surprise, Stockalper was brought down by his enemies and stripped of his power. \u201cUt ombra corpus sic gloriam sequitur invidia<\/em>,\u201d he wrote in his accounts ledger, according to a recent biography by the Swiss historian Helmut Stalder. \u201cAs the shadow follows the body, so envy follows glory.\u201d Stockalper went into exile across the mountains, to Domodossola, the town where Infantino celebrated during the World Cup as a boy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s mainly opportunity costs,\u201d Infantino\u2019s former colleague said, assessing his impact on soccer. \u201cIt\u2019s what you could have done with all your power and money versus what\u2019s actually happened.\u201d The colleague lamented FIFA<\/em>\u2019s heedless growth and the increasing state capture of the game: \u201cIt didn\u2019t have to be like that.\u201d Soccer and money have always intermingled. Rimet, the instigator of the World Cup, was an enthusiastic supporter of professional soccer at a time when amateur sport was considered superior. \u201cIs perfection of this world?\u201d he wrote in a challenge to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the squeaky-clean founder of the modern Olympic Games. But Infantino has moved FIFA<\/em> into a new era of gigantism and top-down compliance, in which the game\u2019s chief administrator is better known than many of the players whom he oversees. Unassailable, unloved, and corrosive to the sport that he adores.<\/p>\n

The World Cup this summer will be Infantino\u2019s masterpiece. It might also be his folly. \u201cI think that\u2019s the biggest problem he\u2019s got,\u201d Auclair, the French journalist, said. \u201cHe has overreached so much.\u201d At this year\u2019s FIFA<\/em> Congress, in Vancouver, Infantino invited Palestinian and Israeli delegates to the front to show that, in the world of soccer, all people get along. But the president of the Palestinian football federation, Jibril Rajoub, refused to shake his counterpart\u2019s hand. Infantino wasn\u2019t down for long. During his address, he returned to his favorite theme. \u201cIf nobody tries to unite, what will happen to our world?\u201d Infantino asked. \u201cWe have to do it, and we have this opportunity,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause, together, we are unbeatable.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Dusty Baker Plays the Long Game<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FIFA\u2019s powerful president is remaking global soccer in his own image, Sam Knight writes. 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