The ongoing FIFA psychodrama took its latest extraordinary twist of the summer earlier today when UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF wrote an open letter accusing FIFA president Gianni Infantino (without naming him) of breaking trust "through deception".
“Leadership in football is not a possession,” they wrote. “It is not about holding – or demanding – power to be held. It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it.
“When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”
That letter in full, to the world’s “football family”, is here:
The guts of today’s exclusive Sporting Intelligence investigation will delve into how Infantino’s predecessor Sepp Blatter was ousted from office in 2015 in the wake of that year’s corruption explosion, and what we might learn from that.
For anyone not aware of what happened back then, I’ll simplify it. By 2015, US federal prosecutors had proved corruption by a vast array of FIFA-affiliated officials, and they were charged with wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering.
But the US prosecutors only got to the point of making charges six years after asking for help from late, brilliant investigative journalist, Andrew Jennings, a long-time friend and colleague.
I’ll link his superlative 2015 piece about feeding the FBI the bullets to take down FIFA shortly. But in the later years of his life, Andrew, who had an extraordinary and staggering list of whistleblowers in his contacts book, introduced me to several key figures.
Those who follow this stuff already know that Andrew handed the FBI all the evidence they needed to take down Chuck Blazer, one of football’s most corrupt and colourful characters of the past three decades.
Chuck, an amiable and morbidly obese crook who lived in Trump Towers and rode around Manhattan on a mobility scooter with his parrot on his shoulder, was a FIFA Executive Committee member from 1996 to 2013, and the CONCACAF general secretary from 1990 to 2011, and an executive vice-president of the U.S. Soccer Federation.
But today’s piece will reveal who gave Andrew all the information he needed to prove that Chuck was hugely corrupt, and take you inside that world.
As soon as the FBI had their claws into Chuck, Blazer basically turned into a supergrass who handed many other FIFA officials to the FBI on a plate, and the collateral damage ended Sepp Blatter’s time as FIFA president. And that in turn ushered in the era of Infantino, the supposed reformer who is now fighting for his own sporting life.
Gianni Infantino has been a divisive figure since a few months after becoming FIFA president in 2016. Accused of ethics violations early in his tenure (which he denied), he then became close to war-monger Vladimir Putin in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, with his FIFA making scant efforts to uncover Russian state-sponsored doping, including in football.
He then cosied up to the Qatar regime that staged the 2022 World Cup, making zero effort to try to establish how many hundreds or thousands of migrant workers died building the infrastructure for that event, let alone pay compensation to their bereaved families. He did, however, find it in his heart to fly around the 2026 World Cup on a private jet supplied by, erm, Qatar.
Infantino created a peace prize for his buddy Donald Trump, another war-monger to whom he has been sucking up for several years. And he engineered the delivery of the 2034 men’s World Cup hosting rights to Saudi Arabia, whose de facto ruled, MBS, was, according to US intelligence, central to the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Infantino, on this evidence, thrives in the company of war-mongering murderers from autocratic regimes. I’d like to ask him about this but he no longer routinely answers any questions about it, let alone sits down for a proper interrogation of his modus operandi.
If this changes, Gianni, drop me a line! Your people have my email and mobile.
Yet Infantino’s summer troubles arose from something as mundane as trying to sell off shares in FIFA’s major events (not least the World Cup) to private investors, as first revealed by Martyn Ziegler, the best (by far) sports news reporter and investigative sports writer at The Times.
That first story is here, and the many, many follow-ups can be found in Martyn’s feed at The Times website, and mostly also at his X account.
To summarise some of the main claims, many of which FIFA have denied on Infantino’s behalf: he secretly plotted to sell shares in major FIFA events, perhaps for personal gain of perhaps $30m a year; he did this with hardly anyone else at FIFA knowing; he tried to bribe / blackmail some FAs into accepting this; he had an affair years ago that required UEFA to pay off a mistress. And on and on.
But this piece isn’t really about Infantino, per se. It’s about how long it took, precisely, for his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, to come tumbling down, and how, ultimately, it might be a tidal wave of actual whistleblowers, with documents, who might do the same to Infantino.
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