Infantino’s greed has brought him too close to the sun

Daedalus warned Icarus: he could fly, escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth with those wings made of bird feathers and held together with wax. But he must not fly too close to the sun; everything would melt, his wings would fall off, and he would fall. Icarus, overcome by a sense of omnipotence, ignored the warnings, flew towards the sun and fell. Gianni Infantino’s version – having made a sense of omnipotence his calling card – is perhaps the greatest reinterpretation of the Greek myth. He believed he could do anything, until he got too close to the sun. He had ended the World Cup almost as a triumphant figure: there were many problems, but they all took a back seat. He had raked in a fortune by transforming football without telling anyone (with hydration breaks, the half-time show in the final, and sky-high ticket prices), yet it was a success he could claim as his own. So much so that he now seemed set for re-election: by March 2027, he would effectively be the only candidate to succeed himself.

But the World Cup wasn’t the success of a man in love with football, as it turned out shortly afterwards. It was an experiment: look, investors, at how I can milk football and rake in the cash. And it can be milked even further if you jump on board; now TV rights are worth more because more adverts can be squeezed in, there are ever more clients willing to spend a fortune to be part of the show, I can overturn suspensions for key players, just so as not to diminish the appeal; I’ve created 104 Super Bowls. Then, once the stage was set, his plan became clear: to sell shares in the World Cup to private investors, turning it into a perpetual money-making machine, even if it meant multiplying the number of World Cups, teams, matches and commercial breaks. It’s something quite different from sport, but now that football has demonstrated its full capacity to generate revenue when exploited with cynicism and contempt for the game itself, Infantino wanted to press on, to take it to extremes. He stepped into the sun, and the wax melted. That plan was too much: football, whilst certainly a business machine, does have its limits; it belongs to the people who follow it.

And so, little by little, everyone backed out: UEFA, for the second time, appeared to be the champion of the people’s football (a feat already achieved by the founders of the so-called Super League, behind which – would you believe it – Infantino was found to be), the confederations rebelled, his closest allies distanced themselves, and those who had documents tucked away – because Infantino’s all well and good, but if he goes too far, here they are – brought them out. And so, one scandal after another, Gianni remains standing, but with fewer and fewer shoulders to lean on. He pleaded with Trump in every possible way to back him. Trump was the only friend he had left (along with a few shameless federations) and, in the end, he wrote a post saying that sacking Infantino was a mistake. But it seemed more like the kiss of death than a show of support. After all, the downward spiral began during the World Cup, when Trump himself said he’d phoned Infantino to have Balogun’s suspension lifted. Someone should have told him to stop. But Gianni, who in March risks meeting the same fate as Icarus, also saw himself as Daedalus and took his own advice.