FIFA didn't have a Blatter problem. It had a presidency problem — one that Blatter exploited for twenty-one years while the sport looked the other way. When he finally fell, in 2015, the response was to install Gianni Infantino and tell ourselves the new broom would be different. Here we are.
Let me be precise about where we are, because this has moved fast. Infantino's secretive plan to raise $4.2 billion by selling a chunk of future World Cup profits to outside investors — including a New York firm connected to Joshua Kushner — collapsed in the last week after it leaked to the press and most of world football recoiled in something between disbelief and fury. UEFA's 55 member federations voted to boycott FIFA events while the proposal was live. CONCACAF said FIFA leadership had "stopped putting football first." Lawyers acting for UEFA have since notified FIFA that the body is actively considering legal action, arbitration and regulatory complaints arising from the plan and all related matters, and has asked FIFA to preserve all evidence. The British Prime Minister — not a football body, an actual head of government — went on the record to say he does not believe Infantino is the right man to lead football forward on the world stage. And UEFA has formally declared it has lost confidence in FIFA's leadership and that no option should be off the table.
One man's judgement did all of this. Let that settle for a moment.
Now, the three specific failures, in sequence, because each one tells you something the others don't.
The sell-off is the big one, but start with the Balogun affair because it tells you the most about how this presidency actually operates. During the World Cup — which Infantino has rightly been credited with running successfully as a sporting spectacle — the US striker Folarin Balogun received a red card against Bosnia. Automatic one-match ban. Standard application of rules that exist for a reason. Then Donald Trump, who has described his own knowledge of football as approximately zero, made a series of phone calls to Infantino asking for a review. AP confirmed that Trump personally called Infantino to review the red card decision. The suspension was lifted. It was reportedly the first time in 64 years that a player who received a red card during a World Cup was allowed to play in the next game. Belgium, whose match was directly affected, protested and were told their appeal was inadmissible. UEFA called the decision "unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable." Trump posted on Truth Social to thank FIFA for reversing a "great injustice." Infantino said there was nothing he could do, despite the outcome suggesting there was quite a lot he could do.
Then the Peace Prize. In December, FIFA awarded Donald Trump its inaugural "FIFA Peace Prize." I will leave you to sit with that sentence for as long as you need.
And then the sell-off — which is the part that should end a presidency, if anything should.
The proposal offered FIFA's 211 member federations one-off payments of $20 million each, with a mid-September deadline to accept. The new commercial entity, valued by FIFA at $20 billion, would have taken control of the soccer body's money-making commercial and tournament operations — assets that the 211 members already effectively own. FIFA's own chief operating officer, in a statement to the Associated Press, said staff felt deceived by their boss. Senior FIFA figures including Arsène Wenger publicly distanced themselves from it. The whole thing was dropped, and then UEFA served the preservation letter, which is what lawyers do when they're getting ready to go to court.
Now, a point that I don't think has been made clearly enough in all the noise: I'm not going to tell you Infantino committed a crime. I don't know that, and neither does anyone else yet. What I will say is that the process itself — the absence of any process, really — is the story regardless of what was in anyone's heart.
If FIFA genuinely needed $4.2 billion — and its finances don't obviously suggest it does — the legitimate route is a mandate from the 211 member associations, then a competitive process to establish whether $4.2 billion is the best price available. Without that, nobody, not Infantino, not his lawyers, not any consultant paid to produce a valuation document, can tell you whether $4.2 billion was a good number or a giveaway. A secretly negotiated deal with a single buyer is the one process that structurally guarantees you will never find out. That's not an allegation of bad faith. It's a question about basic governance. And there is no good answer to it.
The Blatter comparison is unavoidable, so let me make it accurately rather than lazily. Sepp Blatter was never convicted of anything — he was acquitted twice. What ended him was FIFA's own ethics process, combined with the accumulated weight of scandal around him and the patience of his federation finally running out. He was brought down, at the sharpest point, by a two-million-dollar payment. The deal we're discussing here is four billion, two hundred million. If a payment a fraction of this size was enough to end one FIFA presidency, the arithmetic of the current moment should tell you something about the scale of accountability now required.
So what should happen? An independent inquiry — not FIFA's ethics committee marking its own homework, but a genuinely independent panel, mandated and funded by the confederations, with publication guaranteed in advance of commissioning. This has been done before: FIFA appointed Michael Garcia as an external investigator after previous controversies. The problem last time was that FIFA received his report and buried it rather than publishing it, which rather undermined the exercise. The publication guarantee has to be written in at the start. Switzerland, where FIFA is registered and where Swiss prosecutors ran the Blatter proceedings, has jurisdiction if things rise to that threshold. The push has to come from the confederations — several of whom have already said what they think — because there is no internal check strong enough to compel this from within.
This is the part that has never really been fixed. FIFA's governance is structured in a way that gives almost no meaningful internal constraint on a sitting president. We watched that play out for two decades under Blatter. The difference then is that it took two decades to become undeniable. The current situation has become undeniable in the space of a World Cup month and its aftermath, which is either progress of a kind, or a sign that the problems are getting bigger faster than football's ability to deal with them.
I've spent a lot of my career picking fights with sports bodies that protect themselves instead of the sports they're meant to govern. I've lost some of those fights. The ones that ultimately got somewhere always shared a common feature: enough people who had enough to lose by the scandal continuing decided that the scandal was now costing them more than confronting it would. UEFA appears to be at that point. CONCACAF appears to be at that point. The British Prime Minister has said his piece. FIFA's own staff have said their piece.
The only question left is whether the 211 member associations — who own this organisation, who are its ultimate constituency, and most of whom were apparently offered $20 million each to sign away part of what they own by a deadline they weren't meaningfully consulted about — will decide that's enough.
I'm watching the same thing you are. But I've watched sport long enough to know that institutions don't fix themselves. They get fixed when the people who fund them, govern them and staff them collectively decide the current arrangement is no longer tolerable. That moment is either now or it isn't. If it isn't, the next version of this will be worse.