With the impudence and opportunism that characterizes him, the Swiss lawyer Gianni Infantino, former president of UEFA, president of FIFA and witness for years to the festival of corruptions that has presided over world football in this first quarter of a century, was marked yesterday an allegation against the cynicism that the West develops in the perception of the World Cup that begins today in Qatar. He is not without reason in his discharge against the hypocrisy coming from nations that have colonized, mistreated and purged entire continents, hiding a good part of the robbery in Switzerland, where the vaults of its banks keep unspeakable memories of human misery. FIFA has its headquarters there, in a building that betrays the organization, a bunker that conveys an immediate sensation of secrecy and opacity.
It is difficult to find a more hypocritical and opportunistic character than Infantino. At all times it has been what the occasion asked of him to thrive. He was the likable presenter of the Champions League draws, a competition he would now love to knock down, and the suave ambassador for UEFA to the main European football chancelleries, sometimes in situations so unpleasant that he could only fit in thanks to his flexible nature. moral. Unforgettable some of the scenes that were experienced inside the Bernabeu after the famous Real Madrid-Barça match in 2011, the one with Messi's masterpiece in the first Barca goal, the expulsion of Pepe and the "here you are the fucking master" that Pep Guardiola led José Mourinho.
Infantino, as Swiss as Blatter, his pitiful predecessor at FIFA, intends to set himself up as an apostle of morality, along the lines of a fairly common species of sport leaders and especially in football. Disturbed by the aroma of power and the unfortunate effect it produces on him and many of his kind, Infantino has come to the conclusion that a State governs, without a seat or vote in the UN, but with a lack of control and the secrecy of autocratic states. He is not the first to have FIFA go to his head, nor will he be the last.
Before the Brazilian João Havelange detected the immense possibilities of FIFA to raise money and disregarded any ethical limits that affected his business –elected president in 1974, he ardently defended the 1978 World Cup dispute in Argentina, at the height of the criminal dictatorship of the military–, soccer had functioned as a formidable popular claim, but with a parochial mentality, not exempt from abusive and classist behaviors, disguised by a semi-amateurist idea that observed soccer players as semi-slaves.
FIFA has allowed all kinds of intolerable acts and decisions that benefit its fabulous business. If you have to set yourself up as convenient martyrs, people like Infantino have no problem leading causes that only hide a desire for greed and egomania. Infantino yesterday defended the cause of Qatar with pathetic fervor as a victim of Western cynicism. In full delirium, he set himself up as a first-person example of the racism that permeates Europe and more specifically Switzerland, his native country.
Without the slightest scruple, he presented himself as the man subjected in his childhood to segregation from his peers because his last name was Italian and his pretty curls annoyed his peers. With that and another couple of insubstantial shavings, he has decided to consecrate himself as the spokesman for a morality that FIFA has historically been unaware of and to get closer to the hottest sun. Today is Qatar. Morning? Whatever suits your adaptable interests.
