Dear Sepp,
Some years ago, my previous company SKINS announced the world's first Official Non Sponsorship of FIFA — a rolling, non multi million pound non deal, complete with a non available product range and a full page advertisement in your local Swiss newspaper informing you, and everyone who read Swiss newspapers, of our considerable non association with you personally. It was, we felt at the time, a fairly complete way of saying we thought you were corrupting the game we all loved.
I'm writing today to announce a companion piece. Call it the Official Non Apology — a gesture that, much like the original, contains rather more sincerity than its jokey packaging suggests.
Because here's the situation, Sepp: your successor has just had the President of the United States phone up FIFA and get Folarin Balogun's red card suspension lifted, days out from the US playing Belgium, so the tournament's most powerful co-host could field the player it wanted. Not appealed. Not reviewed. Asked for, and delivered, the way you'd ask a maître d' for a better table. Gianni Infantino, the man who told the world he'd arrived to clean up what you left behind, appears to have simply said yes.
This is the same Infantino who invented a prize — the FIFA Peace Prize, unheard of the week before he needed it — for the specific purpose of hanging it around Donald Trump's neck. Not for peace. For access, for a photo opportunity, and, it now turns out, for a sitting president who treats world football's governing body less like an institution and more like a concierge desk he can ring from the Oval Office.
Here's the bit that would be funny if it weren't so telling: Belgium won anyway. 4-1. All that leaning on FIFA, all that quiet abandonment of due process, and the player it was engineered for didn't even move the result. What it did move was opinion — and not the way the White House presumably had in mind. Most of the football-watching world outside the United States was, by kick-off, openly hoping Belgium would win, not out of any great love for Belgian football but because a result for the US would have looked like a result for interference. I suspect a lot of Americans have no idea that's how it read from the outside, and that's a shame, because it should matter to them. Nothing was gained. The suspension was quashed, the game was lost, and the one durable outcome is that a fair few more people around the world now associate the United States, a little more firmly, with an administration willing to bend the rules because it could. That's not a scoreline. That's reputational erosion, and Infantino signed off on it for free.
So. The terms of this Official Non Apology, for the record:
We do not apologise for the Hypocrisy World Cup, run with the International Trade Union Confederation, which took the treatment of migrant workers building Qatar's World Cup infrastructure and put it in front of the one audience that could actually move you — the CEOs and chairmen of Coca-Cola, Visa and McDonald's, among others, who ended up calling for your head.
We do not apologise for the campaign that followed, nor for helping ensure you didn't get a fifth term to go with the previous four.
We do not apologise for the eBay listing inviting bids for FIFA's silence, which remains, on reflection, one of the better ideas we've had (thanks Seb).
What we do owe you — and this is the bit that isn't a joke — is an apology for the implied promise underneath all of it: that getting rid of you would fix FIFA. It didn't. It turns out the presidency wasn't the disease, just the most visible symptom of one, and the structure underneath was always going to find someone willing to sell what you'd merely rented out. You oversaw an organisation that took cash-stuffed envelopes and moved votes around in ways nobody could quite explain. Grubby, but at least it was FIFA's own grubbiness, kept in-house, the sort of corruption institutions have been quietly practising on themselves since institutions existed. What's happening now is a foreign head of state getting a refereeing decision reversed by picking up a phone, and the lickspittle running the sport deciding that he would do his bidding. That's not FIFA being corrupted. That's FIFA handing over the keys and holding the door open.
I don't think this makes you a good custodian of the game, Sepp. You weren't one. But I spent many years telling the world the problem was you specifically, as though the office might behave itself in better hands. Infantino has spent the years since disproving that more thoroughly than any campaign of ours ever could.
One last irony, because this saga seems determined to keep producing them. Last week the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump's push to end birthright citizenship failed, being in fairly obvious conflict with the Constitution. And it turns out Balogun himself is a walking rebuttal to the whole idea: born in the US purely by circumstance, to Nigerian parents on holiday, because his mother was deemed too far along to fly home before he arrived. He's American by exactly the principle Trump was trying to dismantle. The President went to considerable lengths to keep a player on the pitch whose own citizenship exists only because of the constitutional protection he'd just failed to remove. You couldn't write it. Nobody would believe you.
So — sized appropriately, terms and conditions apply, void where prohibited, I'm sorry. Not for what we did. For believing it would be enough.
Jaimie