In the best novel by Vargas Llosa, ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, there is a question (one character asks another) that has served as a metaphor for many weaknesses and innocence: “When did Peru get screwed?”. When one listens to Giovanni Infantino he wonders when football got screwed. But it is naive. Football has been screwed up forever for a long time. Since he became a planetary business in the hands of some multinationals around which, like a resistant but unstable system, orbit politicians, lawyers, investors, companies, players, publicists… Infantino is just the latest CEO of Todo es Fútbol SA Some consider him a mafioso. A ‘consiglieri’. That is profoundly unfair, because it can’t be anything else.
Before FIFA, Infantino made a career in UEFA – FIFA’s most powerful confederation – and did so brilliantly. The son of modest Italian emigrants in Switzerland and a football fan since he was a child, he had graduated in Law from the University of Friborg in the early 1990s and soon after became Secretary General of the International Center for Sports Studies at the University of Neuchâtel. He is multilingual and speaks English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and (they say) Arabic. He arrived at UEFA in 2000 and already in 2004 he was appointed director of the Legal Affairs Division. He was undoubtedly a good lawyer, but above all dazzled by his ability for public relations. He unfolds the map of his personal relationships like the cartography of a battle plan and never forgets a name, a responsibility, an anecdote.
It is not – it has not been until now, at least – an overwhelming one. On the contrary; its wrapping technique is to listen. He can spend hours listening, and repeating with delicate emphasis the phrases of your speech that you most like to hear, and at that moment he makes you a proposal that seems to have been made by you. Between 2004 and 2008 he dedicated himself, therefore, to strengthening UEFA’s relations with the European Union, the Council of Europe and the governments of almost the entire continent. He was at the same time a lawyer, diplomat and director of the organization. At the end of 2008 he was appointed Deputy Secretary General and in 2009 Secretary General. Infantino continued the work already undertaken to clean up UEFA ideologically by adding to the official discourse the suitable doses of anti-machismo, inclusivity, environmentalism and other modern fragrances. He has done the same (promoting congresses, symposiums, courses, workshops, collaborations with universities and NGOs) at the head of FIFA, for which he was elected in 2015, to remove it completely and definitively from the macho, rough and caveman times by Juan Havelangealready softened under the baton of Roberto Guerin.
Related news
Of course, the strategic objective of Infantino and his management team at FIFA -where Arsène Wenger, former Arsenal coach and today the entity’s Development Director, has a particularly important role- is strengthen business foundations and increase its already fabulous profitability. Once the organization is fully controlled and relatively calm in terms of corruption, Infantino has already launched to finish his work. And what has occurred to him, simply, is that the cow should be milked more and better. Why a Soccer World Cup every four years? If it is a magnificent business! Let’s do it every two years. If for this it is necessary to modify international or even national competition calendars, then it is modified to fit all the pieces.
Infantino has argued that there are currently “too many inconsequential parties.” In reality, what he means is that there are too many parties with poor, low or insufficiently distributed profitability. It is better for the world football aristocracy -the powerful teams, the great European and American teams- fewer games but in a competition that is more attractive to the general public: the unfortunate people who wave the little flags of their countries and fill the pockets of companies, managers, coaches and players without a country. This strategy formally coincides with that of Florentino Pérez and his ‘unborn’ invention of the Super League. In fact, UEFA views with suspicion, if not with open hostility, both the biannual World Cup and the Super League of the merengue prince. Perhaps he fears – perhaps with some reason – that the head of FIFA might be able to propose a World Cup every six months. Infantino does not wrinkle. Qatar has hosted the World Cup.