Gianni Infantino as a unifier: in front of a divided football planet, the president of Fifa announced Thursday in Doha to seek re-election in 2023.
Taking advantage of the body’s annual congress, on the eve of Friday’s draw for the World Cup in Qatar (November 21-December 18), the Italian-Swiss leader tried to defuse several hot topics, starting with the proposal aimed at increasing the frequency of football’s premier event from four to two years.
«Fifa has never offered a biennial World Cup“but only studied his”feasibility“, nuanced Infantino, who had however long defended this idea in recent months. But the front of the refusal, going from Europe (UEFA) to South America (Conmebol) via associations of clubs or supporters, has apparently pushed the boss of Fifa to now call on the “compromiseon the reform of the international calendar by 2024. The leading polyglot, in office since 2016, closed this 72nd Congress, formalizing, to applause, his candidacy in 2023 for a third and final four-year term. Elected in 2016 with the promise of “restore the image of FifaStuck in a global corruption scandal, Infantino has no declared major opponent for the time being.
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The leader, targeted since July 2020 by criminal proceedings for having secretly met the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Swiss Confederation, has his economic record on his side. Fifa predicts record turnover of 7 billion dollars (6.3 billion euros) over the four-year cycle ending in 2022, more than expected, thanks to the next World Cup . And, for Infantino, the time is no longer for divisive proposals.
He only mentioned on Thursday that the Club World Cup, which Fifa once wanted to expand to 24 clubs, would be part of the discussions. Some are talking about a return to the Confederations Cup, a mini-tournament with eight selections played between 1992 and 2019, or an expansion to American teams in the League of Nations, created in 2018 by UEFA. Eight months before the 2022 World Cup, the FIFA boss also faced controversy over the rights of women and LGBT people, or controversies over the status of migrant workers employed on construction sites in Qatar… “Injured migrant workers or families of those who died in the build-up to the World Cup must be taken into account“, lambasted Lise Klaveness, president of the Norwegian federation, during an offensive and noticed speech.
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Insisting on theprogressof Qatar on human rights, Infantino responded by assuring that the work done by Doha on this subject wascopy». «Of course not everything is perfect, of course it’s not paradise, but no country is paradise“, he estimated. The emirate abolished from 2016 the “kafala“, sponsorship system making employees quasi-properties of their employer, and introduced in 2020 a minimum hourly wage (1.30 dollars today). Qatar has done more than any other country in the region, authorities say. “The World Cup in Qatar will bring progress“human rights”very quickly“, assured Thursday to AFP the president of the French Football Federation (FFF) Noël Le Graët, according to whom “mentalityis changing in the emirate.
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Posing as a unifier, Infantino also urged the belligerents in Ukraine to “engage in dialogue“And recalled that Fifa had excluded the Russian selection from the race for the World Cup-2022, a decision”not easy” to his eyes. Some voices, such as Ukrainian Ambassador to Qatar Andrii Kuzmenko, present at the Congress, have called for going further by excluding the Russian Federation from Fifa. But the Russian Alexey Sorokin, questioned on the subject, kicked in touch: “What does Russian football have to do with it? What did Russian football do wrong?“Defended this former member of the Council of Fifa. The placement in alphabetical order meant that the Russians and Ukrainians were seated a few rows apart, symbolizing one of the many fault lines that world football hopes to bridge.
