One big thing about deals with the devil. Faustian pacts. Soul exchanges. The get-you-in-front-of-me-Satan dynamic. The key thing here, an element that often gets overlooked, is that consideration must also flow the other way. This is in the end an exchange, and one you don’t get to default on. When Pauly buys a share in the restaurant, well, Pauly buys you too.
Watching Gianni Infantino on stage this week at the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Awards you wondered about this. There he is, our dear leader, alongside an iconic squad of fellow global rain-makers. To his left is a generic square-jawed galactic commander mail-order wellness powder type. On the edge of the group is a US politician who just looks like money made flesh, face as hard and blank as a government bond.
Front and centre is a man with the hair of one of those haunted end-of-days Soccer AM presenters called Checkers or Doucheface who has by now been pared back to a single mirthless joke about Gazza and a pair of retro trainers, but who turns out in this case to be Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who clones dogs and calls them his children, and who is, as the Council noted enthusiastically, Making Argentina Great Again.
And in the middle is Gianni, beaming in that familiar way, with those strangely flat eyes that look from some angles as if they’ve been painted on and pushed through the holes in his head, carrying as ever the look of a man addressing you from the prow of his private asteroid, always on the brink of announcing that a child has been born made entirely from gingerbread.
Infantino has taken sport on to some genuinely terrible stages. What is the Atlantic Council? According to its own blurb it’s 700 government, business, military and media leaders, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the head of Pfizer.
You have to wonder about this. If you don’t actively want to present yourself as sinister, maybe don’t have scrolling graphics that look as if they’re designed to represent the Guild of the Inner Circle of Ancient Child Harvesters. Leave out the stuff about history’s fourth great inflection point or the reaping of ripe fruit.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see something a bit off in a group of super-powerful egomaniacs warning you the world is being reshaped by super-powerful egomaniacs. And this is of course a Trump-inflected group these days, out there raging against authoritarianism, reassuring us that we, the elite, are here to fight against the elite.
In the middle of this is Infantino, who was given the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin in 2018, who was introduced as “a force for peace”. It is probably incorrect now to dismiss him as simply a random Swiss man, a mere passenger in all this. Infantino is undeniably good at it, with a brilliant ear for the right note of schmaltz. But you also have to wonder. Because at some point it is also time to pay the ferryman. And now something else is coming for him.
The other item on the agenda this week was the debate over the presence of Israel in international sport, and most urgently in the World Cup qualifiers. There is no real argument here any more. It is not possible, no matter what your deep emotional loyalties might be, to argue with the idea Israel shouldn’t currently be playing international sport.
The cognitive dissonance is too much, even if you love Israel and actually understand what it is, why its existence has always been threatened, if you have a supra-Lineker understanding of this dynamic that goes beyond the Ewoks versus the empire worldview. I’m a friend. I respect the right to reply with righteous force to the abominations of Hamas, which is a truly terrible entity and the most bizarre left-wing-style cause going.
And yes, you could point out the hard sporting logic doesn’t stack up. How many countries have actually been banned from sport for their military actions? Germany and Japan just after the war. Apartheid South Africa. Russia after its full invasion of Ukraine. Otherwise, that’s it. And we live in a world of endless rolling war.
The US killed millions of people in Vietnam. The Soviet Union was an unceasing purge. Both still did sport. North Korea is welcome in World Cup qualifiers. Myanmar played the other day. Saudi Arabia is implicated in hundreds of thousands of deaths in Yemen. They’re hosting the 2034 World Cup. America hosted one during its extended Gulf wars phase and has another next year. Why are we only now drawing a line? And why only here?
But this also doesn’t work. Those are also wrongs that should also have been sanctioned. Whataboutery is still just that. And this is not workable any more. We have evidence, denied by the Israeli government, of genocide. Tens of thousands of people are dying. This is no longer reasonably pitched retaliation. It’s also terrible for Jews, who are not Israel, but who will be treated like Israel, because so many people want to do this.
If sport is to retain any value it cannot be used to normalise abnormal behaviour. We can’t condemn the jackboot state actions of our World Cup hosts, or protest against the deaths of migrant workers, or maintain that hardline political entities should not own community sports clubs, and also be cool with this.
Otherwise, what are we actually doing here? Pack away the flags, roll up the grass, shred the bunting. What is the point of this global theatre if not to try at least to present some better form of human interaction, to exist as a point of leverage, however puny, in the way its members act?
Things are moving now. There is for the first time a sense Europe has moved towards the prospect of a ban. Uefa may discuss this, although nothing has been scheduled yet. The UN has talked up a suspension and the UN had a key say in the banning of Yugoslavia in 1992, one obvious precedent.
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And now we have Israel’s game in Norway on 11 October. There will be protests and statements. Norway and its federation president, Lise Klaveness, made dissenting noises about Saudi Arabia, although in the end didn’t boycott anything. Russia weren’t actually banned in the first instance. People just refused to play them. Next week could be the start of something similar.
But it will, and this is where the sports politics get interesting, be messy, and messy because of the way deals work. President Trump is already involved. A spokesperson for the US state department said this week: “We will absolutely work to fully stop any effort to attempt to ban Israel’s national soccer team from the World Cup.” OK. But how?
Here Gianni re-enters the stage. And Fifa is faced with a problem here. Get into bed with a dictatorial extremist and you may just find yourself in bed with a dictatorial extremist. Gianni has cosied up to Trump so abjectly, has hoisted his legs so far into the stirrups, that he will have to find some kind of fudge on this. His speech in New York was the first indicator of how that might play out.
“Wow,” Gianni began, “Wow, what an emotion,” before going on to deliver some well-worn untruths. We will unite the world in North America. No you won’t. Fifa is an organisation that invests 100% of its revenues in developing the game. Is it though?
But as Susan Glasser has written in the New Yorker of Trump’s speechifying: “If you can bear to listen to the lies, threats, and disinformation that emanate from his public appearances, there’s much to be gleaned.” In other words, there is usually a “Trump tell”, the actual thing he’s going to say. And Infantino did reveal his likely approach right at the end.
“Like all of you, I suffer when I see children suffer. I cry when I see mothers crying, whether it’s in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Libya.” Yes. Got it. Today I feel like a crying mother. This was the prelude to the thing. “There are 80 countries where there are conflicts. So let’s just work more. Let’s just bring people together more. Let’s just create occasions for people to get to meet each other and know each other a little bit more. We want the world to succeed. We want to unite the world.”
This will be the line. This is how Infantino will try to reconcile these things, the waffle about peace, love and understanding, the evidence of genocide, the sound of his master telling him to heel. He’ll go with the worldly shrug. He’ll go with 80 wars. He’ll talk about unity and bringing together.
He even tried some overt misdirection here, some real-time sportswashing, talking about the magic of the ball. “Look at this. You see how they smile? Look at how they smile. They receive a ball, and they smile. This is a magic object that transforms the face of children into happy children, into smiley children.” Yes, we get it by now. Don’t look up. Follow the ball. Never mind that the children are still poor, or starving, when the ball goes away again.
But this is also real, and something has to happen here. There is potential for a major governance schism. Uefa manages qualifying. Fifa manages the World Cup. Trump manages Fifa. Trump doesn’t care what Uefa is, doesn’t care about the system. Will we see semi-boycotts, a pulling-out, a hand-invited Trump team of peace placed in the Group of distant death?
Anything is possible. Who knows, that pressure may even do for Gianni in some way. Although probably not. As ever the art of the deal seems to be talk a lot, don’t say much, and stay as close to the real power as possible.