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‘A puppy around Trump’: All eyes on smiling Infantino as World Cup crisis grows
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- ‘A puppy around Trump’: All eyes on smiling Infantino as World Cup crisis grows
The article below is an excerpt from the Miguel Delaney : Inside Football newsletter.
Members of Inside Football and Independent Premium subscribers get the full column – alongside more bonus reporting from inside the Premier League – every Friday. Become a member for just £3 a month here .
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As the headlines from Iran began to deepen in gravity, and the potential ramifications for the World Cup only increased, you might reasonably have expected Gianni Infantino to be distracted, even concerned.
That wasn't the case, though, as he attended the International Football Associations Board (IFAB) in Cardiff on Saturday. Infantino was described as being on "top form", where you wouldn't have thought anything was amiss at all.
It could be said this reflects Fifa 's almost blasé public attitude to what is potentially the World Cup's biggest ever crisis – a host has bombed a qualified country – but there is more going on.
The only giveaway that the crisis in Iran was being treated with the seriousness it warranted came when the lights were down, and a Welsh opera singer was performing. It allowed the Fifa hierarchy to check their phones for live news.
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When anyone spoke to Infantino, though, he was all smiles.
It is exactly this charm that has served him well in the interpersonal elements of the Fifa role, but also in launching himself into membership of the "elite class"; up there in the orbit of the most powerful people in the world.
That's where a mere football official now operates. Former colleagues who know him find that alone maddening.
In February, Fifa made a big show of the 10th anniversary of Infantino's ascension to the role – with two major parties – but there was much less about any discernible change over that time. On Infantino's first trip to IFAB, in Wales in 2016, he travelled with EasyJet. This time, it was a private jet supplied by Qatar .
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The Swiss official is also said to have "changed" over that period, according to many who know him. The descriptions generally tell the story of a previously forgettable, if adequate, lawyer who soon showed he always had an "ego" through the "showmanship" of the Champions League draw, to a figure who visibly delights in being around real power.
And it is within all of that that there is a more pertinent discussion about how and why decisions in the game are actually made, right up to how Fifa is going to navigate the Iran question
Some of this may sound like the kind of 'suited administrator' detail that you haven't really subscribed to Inside Football for, but it directly affects what you watch. It is why the World Cup is 48 teams, why the Champions League has become a bloated mess where everyone talks about "growth" rather than whether a club with a wage bill of under £400m can ever actually win it.
The Independent has already written extensively on the absurdity of the "executive president" structure in football bodies, which inexplicably invest random men with so much power. There has similarly been constant coverage of how Fifa's structure does not lend itself to robust discussion on complex issues like Iran . As of Thursday, Inside Football has been told that the Fifa Council – its highest body – still hadn't met on the subject. There are even more complications with the Iraq national team, currently concerned over whether they can make their play-off with either Bolivia or Surinam in Mexico , due to the conflict preventing both air travel and the ability to secure visas.
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All of which plays into a key question: is Infantino working for Fifa, as its president simply representing all member associations, or is Fifa essentially working for Infantino?
Does football governance need more actual football expertise and debate? And while there would usually be sympathy for bodies like Fifa in having to navigate geopolitics way beyond their control, issues like Iran are different because of how much Infantino has immersed himself with Donald Trump .
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