As global soccer fans prepare for the quadrennial World Cup tournament, hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada and starting on Thursday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino is riding high.
Sadly, one major reason Infantino is riding high is that he has made this World Cup a triumph of FIFA greed. With staggered ticket sales and dynamic pricing, ticket prices have varied wildly since they were first offered. But they have generally been far more expensive than in previous tournaments. This has meant both that too many fans have been priced out of attending the tournament and that some games still have many empty seats to fill. Infantino says he is boosting FIFA revenues to support soccer development efforts across the world. But given the president’s and his fellow FIFA executives’ penchant for living like kings, that excuse deserves deep skepticism.
Still, what Infantino has done since he became president in 2016 should have prepared us for this debacle.
Speaking just before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, for example, Infantino declared, “Today, I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker. … As a child, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. I was bullied for that.”
This mad monologue followed criticism by soccer fans that the 2022 tournament was being held in a country devoid of soccer tradition. Fans also lamented how Qatar had built its stadiums with effective slave labor, that the World Cup was being held in winter rather than summer due to the country’s soaring temperatures (for which Infantino’s predecessor received memorable criticism from soccer coach Ian Holloway), and that Qatar funds terrorists and bans homosexuality.
Facing these facts and strong suggestions that FIFA might have awarded Qatar a World Cup due to the federation’s corruption and greed, Infantino was full of righteous indignation. Discontent with his transmorphing freckles adventure, Infantino next offered a dose of idiotic moral relativism, “For what [Europeans] have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before giving moral lessons.”
Only Infantino could come up with such a spectacle of silliness. He is, after all, a very wealthy Swiss white man. One with a penchant for dancing on the ethical edge. Indeed, Infantino’s presidency has seen him fire those charged with wrenching out FIFA’s endemic corruption. Infantino took heavy criticism for a secret 2020 meeting with the then-Swiss attorney general (who was then forced to resign). He has also reveled in accepting the VIP treatment from tournament hosts, including Russia. He now lives in Qatar. And considering Infantino’s decision to award the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, a country, again, not exactly known for its soccer prowess, one wonders whether Infantino’s offshore bank accounts might jump significantly in the coming years.
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What other treats might Infantino have in store for us over the five weeks of this World Cup?
Based on prior experience, we should certainly expect the unexpected.