Keir RADNEDGE
THE INSIDER
This year’s FIFACongress did little more than outline the president’s absolute authority
Nothing to see here. That was the message emanating from the 74th FIFA Congress in Bangkok.
FIFA talked to itself through its press releases and social media channels, but no one in world football’s super-glued governing body dared an official face-to-face engagement with the outside media world. Hence, fans may have missed the event. Its debates and decisions did not make waves around the world, not even the sporting world and barely even the football world. This is partly because no debates of any significance took place.
No FIFA president has ever enjoyed such power as Gianni Infantino
Debates, under the presidency of Gianni Infantino, are not needed. After all, who would dare show any sign of dissent, particularly among the 70 per cent of national associations who depend entirely on FIFA largesse for their existence, survival and continuing subsidised competitive presence amid the diverse plethora of World Cups?
No FIFA president has ever enjoyed such power as Infantino, the man who rose to the political pinnacle in 2016 by happy accident. His accession to the top job was a surprise even to Francois Carrard, the man in charge of the reform committee created by Sepp Blatter a year earlier in response to the FIFAGate scandal.
Carrard was a Swiss lawyer who had earned a reputation as a peerless sports law fixer in the 1980s by helping Juan Antonio Samaranch turn the International Olympic Committee from a quirky Lausanne-based event organiser into a world sporting powerhouse.
Carrard died in January 2022 and left a largely contentious memoir, By The Way (Chiselbury Publishing), which has just been published. In it, Carrard describes how Blatter contacted him “as a total surprise” in July 2015 to chair a hastily-created commission to redraft the FIFA statutes.
On arrival in Zurich, Carrard discovered the self-protective FIFA executive committee was one step ahead of him. It had already appointed to the commission two members from each of the six confederations. Carrard saw members of the FIFA staff “tense and fearful” and considered the besieged Blatter as “isolated and lonely.”
Crucially, as events have proved, time constraints denied Carrard his demands for a couple of highlyregarded independent additions to the commission and another proposal for an independent advisory board. He also failed to persuade the exco to delay a vote on the reform proposals from an extraordinary congress in February 2016 until 2017.
Carrard’s conclusion in the reform report suggested the proposals should be “the beginning of a new era for FIFA.” It was, but in a manner prompted by “a totally unanticipated developme
