FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s remodeling of the Club World Cup marks a new low in placing financial demands over basic sporting integrity. Football has long been ruled by money — but under Infantino’s lead, FIFA just makes up the rules as it goes along.
Though his job is ostensibly to manage world football’s governing body, you’d be forgiven for assuming International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) president Gianni Infantino earns his $4.6 million annual salary exclusively for saying ridiculous bullshit.
The Swiss administrator’s most recent eyebrow-raising remark saw him call Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Inter Miami “one of the best teams in the world.” This is less a reflection of his deep-rooted passion for US club football than a half-hearted attempt to justify his recent move to shoehorn Leo Messi’s team into the upcoming Club World Cup.
Infantino has pushed for an expanded, thirty-two-team tournament for years, and now that it’s finally happening in early 2025, he’s clearly willing to bend the rules to ensure it’s a success. Given Inter Miami’s early playoff exit means they aren’t even the best team in MLS, it’s hard to argue they’re one of the thirty-two best on the planet. But then again, even a vague attempt to find justifications for making up the rules as you go along actually improves on Infantino’s normal behavior.
Infantino once claimed to understand migrant workers in Qatar’s plight (thousands of whom died in the construction boom leading to the 2022 World Cup), arguing “I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied, as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child I was bullied — because I had red hair and freckles. Plus, I was Italian, so imagine.”
His response to dozens of women in Tehran being arrested just for trying to watch a match he was attending with the stated goal of improving gender equity in Iranian football was, “We cannot solve all the problems of the world in FIFA. But we can always bring a smile.”
Infantino’s best line as FIFA president might actually be his first, delivered in 2016 when he was ushered in as a reformer after his predecessor Sepp Blatter was unceremoniously barred in the wake of a massive corruption scandal.
“We enter now into a new era. Some groundbreaking reforms have been approved. A president has been elected — a president who certainly can and will implement all these reforms in order to make sure the image and reputation of FIFA come back to where they belong. We’ll make sure that everyone will be happy with what we do,” he said, initiating a bizarre habit of referring to himself in the third person.
In nearly a decade, a president tasked with repairing FIFA’s already shambolic reputation has somehow proven more detrimental to the game than Blatter. Infantino has overseen FIFA’s transformation into an organization that exists solely to serve capital’s — and his own — bidding, at the expense of the world’s most popular sport.
The Next Genius Idea
Infantino’s latest pet project, the expanded Club World Cup, will see what was once a seven-team winter tournament that felt like a set of friendlies (albeit with hefty cash prizes dangled in front of them) instead become a massive, thirty-two-side quadrennial tournament.
The old Club World Cup was at least easy to ignore. An expanded roster of clubs and FIFA already scrambling to build the hype are making that more difficult. Especially because, like most things FIFA touches, it’s shaping up to be a farce.
The natural assumption for something calling itself the World Cup is that there’d be a transparent method for determining which teams can qualify, on merit, as the thirty-two best in the world. But that’s clearly not the case: the selection of Inter Miami demonstrates that Infantino can just independently pick who he wants to participate. The demands of money undermine any semblance of the competition itself having any integrity.
Cynics would say a panicked Infantino only did this to ensure Messi — and all the media attention that follows him — will take part in a tournament struggling to drum up interested sponsors and broadcasters. They’d be right.
That Infantino is willing to cherry-pick which teams qualify for his shiny new tournament’s maiden outing, which happens to be hosted by a Messi-obsessed United States, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. If anyone’s expectations are upset, it may well be Infantino himself, when he comes to grips with the fact that simply adding on more and more fixtures might not actually be a cure for everything.
Better Fewer but Better
Football is by far the most popular game on the planet. And surely there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing?
In addition to significantly pumping up the Club World Cup, Infantino has overseen the growth in the men’s World Cup from thirty-two to forty-eight teams. The 2026 World Cup, which will be hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, will be the first nearly fifty-team tournament, and will feature 106 games over six weeks. The overstuffed competition will come packed with tons of meaningless group stage games, as three of four teams will often go through to accommodate the extra teams.
These monster tournaments can only be hosted by a handful of countries (or multiple countries working together), making it ever more difficult for fans to follow their teams as they cover greater distances. That will certainly be the case in the 2030 World Cup, which will be hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, while also featuring games a mere twelve-hour flight away in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Though sold as a nod to the centenary of the inaugural World Cup, which was held in Uruguay, the South American jaunt also conveniently helped push Saudi Arabia’s bid for the ensuing tournament, as rotating World Cup hosting rules ensured the next tournament couldn’t be in Africa, the Americas, or Europe.
Since Infantino, like many football administrators, sees gender equality in sports as realizing women’s football can also be monetized, it’s no surprise that the women’s World Cup has been expanded as well, but at least to a still-manageable thirty-two teams. And if making the tournaments themselves bigger wasn’t enough, Infantino long pushed an ill-fated plan to double the World Cup’s frequency.
FIFA isn’t solely at fault for piling on the play – the Union of European Football Associations, European football’s governing board, has expanded the European Championship and the Champions League in recent years, while introducing yet another international tournament in the Nations League. Many other continental confederations have followed suit.
While this has meant ample opportunity for advertisers and billions in TV revenue, it’s turned every waking moment into a vast sludge of nonstop football, dulling the importance of what were once marquee matches, and cheapening competitions. Actually following games for match-going fans (or even streaming them all for the armchair ultras) is becoming an untenable financial burden.
It’s also rendered players into nothing but pawns to be wrung out for profit. Injuries are up and fatigue and sloppy play are unavoidable. The difference between just fifteen years ago is immense. England and Real Madrid star Jude Bellingham had logged 251 matches for club and country by his twenty-first birthday. That’s more than 2000s England stars David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, and Frank Lampard had played at the same age combined.
The congested cash grab is clearly unsustainable. Players are threatening to strike, while international players union the International Federation of Professional Footballers, or FIFPRO, and the European Leagues have filed a legal complaint against FIFA over the overcrowded international match calendar.
While some, like legendary former Bayern Munich player and current executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, have shifted blame onto the players by claiming “by always demanding higher salaries, they are forcing clubs to generate more revenue with more games,” his argument ignores the vital role administrators like Infantino have played in allowing sketchy investors and outright despots to enter the sport and inflate transfer fees and wages.
Sportswashing Made Simple
While sportswashing in football has a decades-long tradition, and brought it to the next level by overseeing the decision to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar, Infantino has fully embraced it. This has normalized a state of affairs where football’s first global function (besides bringing in TV revenue) is to launder the reputation of autocratic regimes.
Infantino was so enamored with the Qatar World Cup that he actually moved to Doha. And he apparently enjoyed building gleaming football stadiums on sand caked with the dried blood of dead migrant workers that he’s spent years maneuvering for Saudi Arabia — where a ghastly 21,000 migrant laborers have died since the state’s vast collection of petro-dollar-fueled megaprojects called Vision 2030 was announced in 2016.
Infantino helped orchestrate a number of schemes, including the 2030 World Cup’s bizarre multicontinental hosts and dramatically truncating the bidding process to help dissuade other potential hosts. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia bid to host the 2034 World Cup unopposed.
Saudi Arabia’s sporting influence is by no means limited to football, but the blatancy with which Infantino has slapped a “for sale” sign on the global working class’s most beloved game is particularly sickening. And this gets to the heart of the underlying problem with Infantino’s reign, and what it signifies about wider shifts in football’s administration and growth-at-all-costs perspective.
Institutions like FIFA were never really democratic. But even by its traditional standards things have gotten worse. Infantino was recently reelected — without opposition, naturally — for a third term. Despite a three-term limit, the FIFA Council announced just before the 2022 World Cup that it had (unprompted and after eight years) determined that Infantino’s first thirty-nine months in charge actually didn’t count, opening up another potential term to start in 2027.
Football has never been further from those it’s actually for. As long as the money keeps flowing, Infantino will receive little opposition from FIFA members. Which means that innovative new approaches to the game — like a forty-eight-team World Cup held on three continents, or yet another club competition that no one, much less the ground-down players, cares about — will continue to be handed down from on high. If the idea is so painfully bad that it seems like there’s little to gain from it, like the biannual World Cup, maybe, just maybe FIFA will pull it back and wait for us to stop whining before trying to trot it out again.
Without any form of democracy in football’s institutions, ideas that make actually watching matches increasingly difficult will continue to be championed. Constantly trotting out shit no one wants shouldn’t be so easy when a game is as popular as football. Fully democratizing FIFA is a tall order, but at the very least we should start with change at the top.