Gianni Infantino and FIFA Represent Everything Wrong with the World. Here's Why

FIFA president Gianni Infantino is in some hot water right now. After a disastrous proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup collapsed, people are calling for him to resign. Now, your response might be to say something along my lines of, Simon, I don't care about football.

And, well, you're in luck, because neither do I. But let me tell you why you should care about this story specifically, because it's not about football. Not really.

It's about power, corruption, and the capture of institutions by global elites, or what we might colloquially call wankers. This story, though superficially about sport, tells us more about the modern world we live in today than most major political blow-ups. Hence why we thought it was perfect for this channel, Homefronts.

So let's kick off, shall we? That's a sports term. I hope I did it right.

The man who tried to sell football. Right. The first thing to say here is that I am not a football guy.

For me, a center back is the location on my body that hurts after I stand up too fast. But thankfully, I have enough writers chained up in the basement to be certain that at least one of them cares about the intersection of politics and sport. But don't worry if football isn't your thing.

We're going to broaden the picture out as the episode goes on to take in a whole range of bad actors in a whole range of professions. For now, though, let's start with what was effectively a business proposal. Casting my back to late July.

The United States had just finished hosting a World Cup that was commercially one of the best ever, scoring a record-smashing $15 billion in revenue. President of FIFA, Jani Infantino, was on the high to end all highs. But just like bald Icarus, he would soon fly too close to the sun.

The sun, in this case, being a Kushner investment vehicle. On the 28th, Infantino revealed a new proposal for investment into the World Cup known as FFE, or the FIFA Forward Enterprise. The plan was simple.

FIFA wanted to bundle its commercial and event operation machine – that includes things like sponsorships, licensing, tournament operation, ticketing, hospitality, and broadcasting – into this FFE vehicle, where FIFA would retain control, but up to 20% could be sold to outside investors in private capital.

If all went to plan, it would raise $4.2 billion on a $20 billion valuation. The lead investor was set to be Thrive Eternal, a firm owned by Joshua Kuchner, brother of President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared.

Advisors and hired executives included Disney CEO Bob Iger, as well as former Liberty Media boss Greg Baffay. Now, as part of this proposal, FIFA wanted to make one thing very clear. They were not selling the World Cup.

Private investors would have no authority over sporting regulations, and FIFA would retain control over 80% of the board. From this, the money would be used to develop football or soccer, depending on where you're from, across the globe. It makes sense in theory.

In practice, it made people rather mad. Immediately, the plan faced a lot of backlash, mainly because of the argument that when you let private investors in, it would turn the World Cup into another for-profit commercial enterprise that people didn't ask for. It also was a slippery slope.

Show the internet. investors wouldn't have any institutional power over the board to start with, but many argued that the chance of it staying that way over time was about as likely as learning the offside rule or being able to explain what a Ronaldo is.

Others criticized the proposal on principles, stating that the World Cup was never FIFA's or Infantino's to sell. They were simply the stewards of it.

That's a key point, by the way. FIFA is not meant to be a commercial body in the regular sense of the word, but a non-profit that just happens to make a lot of cash on the side. But making more money for shareholders is absolutely not a part of its mission, hence why so many were upset.

The major confederations of countries' football associations said they'd been blindsided by the whole thing, and Infantino gave them virtually no time to read through the proposal in any great detail. The deal was framed as a take it or leave it, with a deadline of mid-September for FIFA member associations to come on board.

Crucially though, the associations were offered vast funding increases if they voted in favor.

Increases that would evaporate if they didn't sign up in time. In Infantino's own open letter, after promising a $10 billion development package, he told them, In exchange, all that is required is your continued trust. And if that sounds a whole lot like a bribe to you're not alone.

The way it worked out, associations could either get on board and receive $40 million, or fail to get involved and receive only $10 million. The short window for discussion also felt to many like a pressure tactic, like a sleazy salesman warning you that this car would only be available at this price for the next couple of hours.

Hesitate, and you might lose everything.

But if it was an attempted bribe, it didn't quite go how Infantino expected. A lot of football associations threw a fit over this. Federations like UEFA, who handle the European side of the game, the AFC, who manage the Asian side, and CONCACAF, who look after the North American side, accused Infantino of deception and a fundamental breach of trust.

There has even been talk of Europe boycotting the next World Cup altogether, meaning that most of the world's best footballing nations wouldn't be in it. As a result, the only source of tension would be whether Brazil or Argentina would win.

Given that the World Cup without UEFA would be absolutely useless to investors, UEFA's stars basically collapsed the deal.

Within just three days, Infantino had withdrawn his FFE proposal. But if this was just the story of Infantino making a tit out of himself, we wouldn't be featuring it here. No, what makes this worthy of the home front's treatment is the way it highlights how corruption and power work in the modern world.

And when you want to highlight corruption today, there are few organizations on Earth that can hold a candle to FIFA. The Broken Carousel The important thing we need to say here is that FIFA was already beyond broken by the time that Infantino came into the picture.

For decades, FIFA has been considered one of the most brazenly and spectacularly corrupt organizations on the planet.

A 2015 US investigation alleged a 24-year culture of corruption, including senior footballing officials, getting more than $150 million in bribes. and kickbacks to influence decisions in the paying party's favor.

You also had the farcical World Cup selection process, in which highly unsuitable nations won the right to host under extremely opaque circumstances. The tiny, non-footballing nation of Qatar hosting in 2022 is the most infamous example, but Russia in 2018 is arguably one of the most reminiscent of Mussolini's Italy hosting it in 1934.

I'm sure in each of those cases, enormous hydrocarbon wealth had nothing to do with the decisions. So, FIFA's credibility had been shredded for years, but things got much worse in 2016.

That year, in comes Infantino, who ran for president of FIFA on a platform presenting himself as a reformist candidate, the man to restore the integrity and dignity of the organization and rescue it from the sleazy corruption of the previous era.

But Infantino turned out to be much worse than his predecessor. Many saw Infantino as a potential savior, others as the latest villain on the carousel. But Infantino's actions were considerably more destructive behind the scenes.

And let's make the distinction clear. Old FIFA's corruption was about bribery, secretly enriching oneself through shady backroom deals and smoke-filled rooms at the cost of the integrity of the game. Infantino's FIFA, by contrast, was all about stripping the copper wiring out of the smoky backrooms to make a quick buck while the entire building collapsed.

For example, in 2017, just a year into his tenure, he removed the heads of FIFA's ethics bodies, Kormel Bobeli and Hans-Joachim Eckert. Bobeli and Eckert were reportedly still working on hundreds of investigations at the time, with many calling their removal the end of FIFA's reform effort. So much for Infantino the savior.

Then, in 2018, Infantino pursued a secretive proposal involving the addition of $25 billion in outside capital, backed by SoftBank, to rework major FIFA competitions. It collapsed after major resistance, especially from UEFA. And maybe that sounds familiar to you.

The other major thing that Infantino did was cultivate powerful contacts both inside his organization and outside it. FIFA has 211 member associations, and everyone, from the high-flying Argentines to the minnows of San Marino, gets a single vote.

It's very democratic, but part of Infantino's strategy was to dramatically increase development distributions to the associations.

He calls it democratizing football, and to be fair, those smaller associations and poorer nations really need that money. In some places, it's even done a lot of good. But politically, it gives the FIFA president enormous leverage over large swathes of that membership.

After all, if you are a tiny association that desperately needs that money, why would you bite the hand that feeds you? And the blatant corruption was still there for all to see. FIFA engineered the 2030 tournament's hosting arrangement between South Africa, Europe, and Africa.

Because of FIFA's rotation rules, that meant only an association from Asia or Oceania could bid to host the 2034 tournament. Saudi Arabia emerged as the Seoul declared, bidder and won easily.

FIFA described the bidding process as thorough, whilst critics argue that the compressed process and structure effectively handed it to Saudi Arabia on a silver platter.

Outside the game, Infantino started to cultivate billionaire oligarchs and trillionaire governments, and this is where the president of the United States comes in. Trump and Infantino are, to put it mildly, buddies.

The FIFA and US presidents have been seen a lot with one another over the past couple of years, building a relationship that is probably lovely for them personally, but potentially highly corrosive on football.

Trump particularly has grown to see football as another arena in which American executive power can assert itself. For example, FIFA created its brand new Peace Prize in 2025 and awarded it to him, largely because Trump was furious about not getting a Nobel Prize.

It's not clear that anyone else was even in the running to win it, and nobody is sure whether there is even going to be a 2026 edition.

Or look at the 2025 Club World Cup, in which Infantino was seen giving Trump a replica trophy from the tournament. Trump even stood on stage with the eventual winners. And then there's everything that happened at the 2026 World Cup, which proves how much influence the Trump administration had over the tournament.

During the 2026 edition, Iran happened to qualify, but 15 Iranian Federation members were denied US visas, and the Iranian national team had to base itself in Mexico as a result. Or how about Somali referee Omar Abdul Qadir Aten? FIFA selected him, as Africa's top referee, to manage World Cup matches, and he even had a valid visa.

But he was refused at the border on security grounds, and the evidence behind it has never been produced. In both cases, Infantino said there was nothing that FIFA could do because FIFA can't control US immigration decisions.

Although we have a sneaking suspicion that if the roles were reversed, and Morocco say were to refuse players' visas in 2030, Infantino might not be so quiet.

And when Follerin Balogun, the informed striker of the American national team, was given a contentious red card, Trump personally called Infantino to get the automatic one-match ban overturned.

Infantino acknowledges the call, but says he didn't interfere with the disciplinary process, which just happened to work out perfectly in Trump's favor, suspending the ban before an important match against Belgium. That's a match, by the way, which the US ultimately lost 4 to 1.

This is all worth noting because it's not like Infantino's FFE plan was pitched to ransom investors. The key investor was a firm run by Jared Kushner's brother, and one would assume he would stand to make spectacular money should the new project leave the World Cup being held more frequently or monetized in new ways.

But is the fact that this plot would have funneled money to one of the extended Trump clan a coincidence?

Well, you can decide. It's not about football. Now the issue here isn't necessarily about football or even about Trump.

It's that FIFA sells the World Cup as something above politics, but the 2026 tournament demonstrated that the host government ultimately possesses very real coercive power over it. World Cups have effectively under- Infantino become instruments through which global political power, enormous amounts of money and FIFA's own interests all intersect.

So from that perspective, if you're Infantino, at what point does access to global elites in this way become influence over them and vice versa?

When institutions are concentrated around single individuals, who's supposed to police that boundary? Because what Infantino has been able to do is more akin to that of a dictator seizing power than it is to an official, faithfully stewarding a global sporting organization.

He's weakened internal opposition, removed guardrails on his own power, engendered a system of finance-based loyalty, and cozied up to elites.

With those guardrails gone, he was effectively free to make pretty extraordinary decisions around the sporting body that regulates a cultural touchstone for so many nations. Is it any wonder that he tried to milk the cow until it was dry? Old FIFA's corruption was measured in millions of dollars.

Infantino's FIFA measures it in GDP percentage points. Now, Infantino couldn't just do this unilaterally. Most of the rules within FIFA still exist as they ever did before, at least on paper.

FIFA has statutes, ethics procedures, councils, votes, and independent committees who have a say in how things are run. It has confederations involving thousands of people and governance requirements that the organization is supposed to stick to.

For example, the FFE proposal we mentioned would have required a majority of support from FIFA's members, hence that $40 million incentive to sweeten the deal.

But all of this, as we keep saying, isn't about football. It's about how this crisis within FIFA is indicative of the world in which we now live. A world where the rich and powerful, through various wealth networks, political classes, corruption, and dodgy business deals, have reached a point where they don't even need to hide their corruption.

Instead, they actively bandy it about in the public eye, openly, brazenly, to the extent of bragging about it to the media. This is not merely a symptom of Trump or Infantino or any other leader across the world who follows the same tactics, for that matter.

Rather, it's a symptom of a world where power and money have become so concentrated that the new elite no longer have to pretend that they give a f**k.

Maybe we're stretching the point a little here, but it seems to us that Infantino's capture of FIFA was not too dissimilar to how a modern autocrat captures a country.

Removing those who could independently investigate him, pulling down guardrails, offering lucrative gigs to loyalists, and concentrating all power in one person's hands while at the same time keeping checks and balances alive on paper, well, that's a template that pretty much everyone from Viktor Orban to Donald Trump has embraced with varying degrees of

Success.

Now, an important thing to note here is that this doesn't mean the only recourse is despair.

Infantino's plans came crashing down because he overreached, pissing off some of the most powerful confederations on the planet. As such, not only is Infantino's job now imperiled, but so is the ongoing FIFA monopoly over the beautiful game as UEFA and others explore options to set up their own rival football competitions.

Sort of like how Orban came to realize only too late that he was still answerable to the Hungarian electorate, so too does Infantino seem to have discovered a the last week or so that he's not some omnipotent king as to where things go from here that is still an open question as of august the 11th the asian north american and european football bodies are

Doing everything from publicly accusing infantino of deception to demanding an independent investigation to leaking stories about infantino and his mistress to calling for his resignation outright the fifa president faces re-election in march of 2027 at the 77th fifa congress just a couple of weeks ago as a shoe-in but this whole scandal with the ffe has

Seriously damaged his chances of course trump has since weighed in as well publicly backing infantino stating quote fifa would be making a terrible mistake if for any reason they even considered replacing johnny infantino he is fantastic having just presided over the most successful world cup by four times ever presented if he is gone it will never be as

Successful or profitable again end quote which you could see is yet another symptom of the new world order where the trump administration tries to weigh in on elections everywhere from hungary to brazil to fifa with mixed results infantino in short has not been defeated not yet com nabal south america's confederation and caf the african confederation are

Still generally supportive of the president even despite all the scandals in the aftermath of ffe's collapse infantino called senior fifa officials in morocco in a kind of bizarre loyalty test and they all passed that alone tells you what an uphill battle uafer and others will be fighting to remove him the absurd thing is that no one following football wants

Any of this they just want to be able to watch the damn match and ideally follow their team all the way to the finals should they make it without paying absurd amounts to make distant investors ever richer well that's true about so many aspects of modern life from the albanians protesting against a nature reserve being turned into a five-star luxury resort

They won't be able to visit to british water bosses making millions while flooding the nation's rivers with sewage there's just this feeling today that the world is rigged that life for most people just keeps getting incrementally shittier while the elite concoct wild schemes to inflate their bank balances at the expense of regular folk infantino's ffe pitch

May have been particularly egregious but he is far from the only offender and football fans are far from the only victims he just happens to be one of the few examples who overreached so dramatically that it may yet all come crashing down in flames around him at which point the investors at kushner's firm will simply move on to the next shiny thing thank you

For watching