The latest pawn trick was particularly easy for Gianni Infantino, the Fifa President only had to copy it from his Olympic colleague Thomas Bach. Russia’s national football team should be severely sanctioned? Here you go: no anthem, no flag, also the name label of the Sbornaya must go – they should compete as “Russian Football Union”, as “RFU”, said the association on Sunday. Chapeau! With this ingenious disguise, no one would have guessed that Russia was hiding behind it!
Infantino wanted to save what could not be saved on the cheap until the end. Now Fifa is rushing behind everyone else: they have to suspend Russia. For world sport, however, it is time to make fundamental considerations about its leaders.
The very idea of being able to solve the political position on a war of aggression by changing the syllables suggests how intellectually Infantino’s Fifa apparatus is. This plan is so stupid it will take care of itself. The mere fact that many associations refused to play against such a sham reduced Infantino’s charade to absurdity: What would have happened if Poland refused to play the next World Cup qualifier against, uh, the Russian Union? Will Poland then be kicked out, and everyone else who refuses? Should Russia then play the 2022 World Cup in Qatar all alone, as a mini-tournament with Belarus?
The fact that sponsors like Adidas will have to react shortly, that the Europa-Union Uefa will separate from top sponsor Gazprom and even the IOC gave in to pressure on Monday and is now operating the complete exclusion of Russia and Belarus – all this reveals that Fifa has an enormous problem has: Gianni Infantino. A self-promoter who is under criminal investigation in Switzerland; a Fifa boss who has fled to a second home in Qatar, allegedly because he has to accompany the World Cup there. This is also an excuse that offends the mind: is the honorary president now running across construction sites in the blue Anton? Or is he just operating the coffee machine in the emirate’s media office?
Even a partial move of Fifa to Moscow was up for debate – an indication of a dangerous dependency
The Swiss has been leading Fifa since 2016, and this phase became the most scandalous in a world association that was always rich in scandals. And thorny questions are still open: such as how Infantino came to the throne. At that time, who leaked insider knowledge about a million-dollar agreement between his predecessor Sepp Blatter and his boss at Uefa, Michel Platini, to the Bern federal judiciary? Infantino suddenly fell into a vacuum left by his colleagues – and from then on maintained such a discreet exchange with the Swiss federal prosecutor that the latter lost his office as a result.
Imbued with imagined statesmanship, the Alpendorf Fifa boss is an expert on toxic compounds. He is currently in the process of smashing FIFA. A part is outsourced to the USA, other parts have been relocated from Zurich to Paris, where Head of State Macron even wants to waive taxes on football staff. France’s great war diplomat and election campaigner should now think again about this.
And then there is the dedicated line to the Kremlin. To Vladimir Putin. The fact that Fifa flirted with a partial move to Moscow suggests that their boss has dependencies that are both silent and threatening, and the – now unsuccessful – sleight of hand with the RFU team makes this suspicion almost a certainty. Uefa and other major associations in England, France, Italy and South America (and also the DFB, as soon as it has credible representatives in international bodies again) – they all have a duty to finally free football from Infantino’s shadow.
