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I used to think Fifa’s recent practice of holding the World Cup in autocracies was because it made it easier for world football’s governing body to do the things it loved: spend untold billions of other people’s money and siphon the profits without having to worry about boring little things like human rights or public opinion. Which, let’s face it, really piss around with your bottom line.
But for a while now, that view has seemed ridiculously naive, a bit like assuming Recep Erdoğan followed Vladimir Putin’s election-hollowing gameplan just because hey, he’s an interested guy who likes to read around a lot of subjects. So no: Fifa president Gianni Infantino hasn’t spent recent tournaments cosying up to authoritarians because it made his life easier. He’s done it to learn from the best. And his latest decree this week simply confirms Fifa is now a fully operational autocracy in the classic populace-rinsing style. Do just absorb yesterday’s news that the cheapest ticket for next year’s World Cup final in the US will cost £3,120 – seven times more than the cheapest ticket for the last World Cup final in Qatar. (Admittedly, still marginally cheaper than an off-peak single from London to Manchester.)
Like all dictator-curious populists, Fifa loathes its people – the fans. Thinking back, I’ve even been at tournaments where the governing body has sponsored show trials. In South Africa in 2010, we had something called the Fifa World Cup Courts – 56 courts where Fifa indicated it had finally outgrown fast food tie-ins and slapped its branding on justice itself. Or rather, on summary justice – which became an official tournament partner as cases were rushed through to appease the governing body. A group of Dutch women who’d worn orange minidresses to a game as stunt-marketing for Bavaria beer were arrested. Fifa filed criminal charges against the company.
Again, in retrospect that all seems rather small beer (sorry). Orange-coated faux fans are positively encouraged these days, but only if they come in the sole form of US president Donald Trump, whose bromance with Infantino has been one of the more mesmerisingly weird developments of his presidency.
But then, just as power-playing moguls place themselves on each other’s company boards, so autocrats love other autocrats. Back in January, many of us were still vaguely startled to see Gianni given a great seat at Trump’s inauguration, barely two rows behind the tech oligarchs, where he was able to laugh uproariously at the bit of the speech where Trump announced he’d be renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. (Just a little niggle between Fifa co-hosts.) But now that we’ve seen Infantino pop up everywhere from Gaza peace conferences to regular turns in the Oval Office, it almost feels strange when he isn’t part of Trump’s malarial travelling court – the Dontourage, if you will.
Whether Infantino will at some point end up in the woodchipper, just like everyone does with Trump, is unclear. For now, the president is enjoying having his tummies tickled. A week ago, at the World Cup draw, Trump obligingly suggested the NFL give up the rights to calling its sport football in the United States. “But when you think about it, shouldn’t it really be called … this is football,” Trump waffled. “There’s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn’t make sense when you think about it.” This is what happens when the president gets booed at the Super Bowl, instead of being given an inaugural award like he was at Infantino’s fever dream of a draw. Yes, even though you couldn’t believe the shamelessness until you actually saw it with your own eyes, it was incredibly credible that Infantino would indeed confect some nutty “Fifa peace prize” and award it to Trump.
In recent history, both the Olympics and the World Cup have shown they are always able to covertly or overtly override local laws of the host country for the duration of their sporting event. Fortunately, though, this is unnecessary in the US, where being ripped off for sports tickets is effectively the 28th amendment. Furthermore, this World Cup is already shaping up to be the sort of reciprocally abusive arrangement we’ve seen when the tournament previously tipped up in non-democracies. Trump can use it to threaten Democrat mayors with loss of city hosting rights, while Infantino can charge genuinely crazy money and have Fifa run the entire secondary ticketing/scalping market without interference. Everyone’s a winner, as long as they hold all the cards.
And the peasants – the fans – just have to suck it up. Fifa elections have effectively been hollowed out by the strong-arm practice of buying off the votes of smaller nations via disproportionately large grants. The dictator makes sure countries know what’s good for them. The gravy train rolls on. So if you fancy getting rid of Gianni and everything he represents, I’d love to know the mechanism you have in mind. Maybe one day football will have some kind of revolution, in which hordes of endlessly oppressed people who actually like the sport will storm Infantino’s Zurich palace, and loot all the valuable gifts of obscure provenance. But it won’t be soon, unless one or more of the big football markets gets it together and pulls out.
Until then, we’ll just have to accept that there is simply no one who cares less than Infantino, and simply no sport that hates its fans quite as much as football. In fact, if only those fans could afford the tickets, they’d have the receipts to prove it.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
English (US)