For old times’ sake?” I never believed it would actually happen. Not until this week, when, for the first time, there was a sense, as the The Godfather makes so abundantly clear, that you really can get to anyone. Gianni Infantino is beleaguered.
Gianni Infantino is re-beleaguered. Gianni Infantino has been beleaguered for almost six weeks, since news emerged of his grotesque undercover plan to sell off, for related personal gain, the shared global property he’s employed to preserve, protect and safely pass on. There has been hopeful talk in that time of toxic status attained, a base being hollowed out, a rival presidential candidate next March.
Entrenched dictatorial power runs even deeper. Infantino is already the man who sold the world, not once, but twice, most recently to Donald Trump in return for a peace prize, a scrunchie and a fawning presence around the sub-table of power. Chuck in a Football Jesus turn at the lighted lectern a few weeks from now, arms whirling like a street magician, reeling off the usual stuff about caring and sharing, égalité, fraternité, fiscal stimuli.
Look deep into those weirdly flat painted-on eyes, cold and hard behind the papier-mache mask of power. But something has shifted this week. It was never going to be the gnats around his ankles that did for Infantino: another thundering newspaper column, the latest stern denouncement from – whoah, hang on – former Manchester United utility defender Mikaël Silvestre.
Hard power is something else, however. And two things have now happened, both responses to the threat of a Uefa lawsuit, which I believe has no really serious notions of ultimate victory, but which may turn out to be an expert chess move, a zugzwang that leaves the king having to go somewhere, but with no safe spaces left to hide. The first response was Josh Kushner’s statement this week after being named as a party to discovery in Florida.
Kushner was the money guy behind the Fifa Forward fiasco. The person you come to for finance and macro-favour just happens to be, by an accident of talent and destiny, the brother of the president’s son-in-law. Kushner said he “would not have gotten involved” in Fifa’s plans had he known the full picture.
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