H. L. Mencken

The socialist opponent has made a point of considerable sharpness, one that I shall acknowledge without gratitude: that UEFA’s rebellion is not a revolution, but a succession. He argues, with some accuracy, that UEFA is not proposing to change how football’s wealth is distributed, but merely who sits at the top of an unchanged pyramid. This is the first truth of the matter. The opponent sees that the mechanism of control - the chokepoint of television rights and World Cup sanctions - remains intact regardless of the name on the letterhead. To believe otherwise is to confuse the man with the office, the actor with the stage.

Where our frameworks diverge is not in the observation of the cage, but in our estimation of the bird. The socialist sees the cage and concludes that the bird must be replaced by a larger bird, or perhaps a different species of bird, to avoid the same bars. I see the cage and conclude that the bird is irrelevant; the cage is the reality, and the bird is merely the ornament that distracts the spectators from the rust. The opponent believes that if the “right man” sits at the top, the structure might bend. I believe that the structure is absolute, and the man is merely the variable that determines the rate of decay.

Let us strip the rhetoric. The opponent speaks of “legitimate authority” and “monopoly.” These are polite words for extortion. FIFA does not derive its power from Infantino’s charisma; it derives it from the fact that he holds the keys to the treasury. Remove him tomorrow, and the federations that depend on development grants will still depend on them. The confederations that trade votes for infrastructure money will still trade them. The executive committee will still consolidate power. The only thing that changes is the taste of the poison. If the poison is slightly sweeter, delivered by a more charming hand, the populace will drink deeper. This is the nature of the democratic temperament: it does not want to be cured; it wants to be soothed.

The opponent’s analysis is precise, but it stops short of the abyss. He identifies the mechanism but fails to name the audience that feeds it. The audience is the millions of fans who believe that their passion for the ball is a political act. It is not. It is a distraction. The real beneficiaries of the Infantino saga are not the fans, nor even UEFA, but the journalists, the pundits, and the politicians who construct this sentiment to sell papers or secure votes. They need a villain. They need a hero. They need a drama. Without the drama, the public might notice that the game is being played on an artificial calendar by men who are paid more than the GDP of small nations, and that the rules are written by men who have never kicked a ball.

Consider the Roman gladiatorial games. The emperor did not need to be a good man; he needed to be a consistent man. The crowd did not care if the emperor was a philosopher or a butcher, provided that the games were plentiful and the blood flowed in the expected patterns. The opponent wants a philosopher-king. I want to remind him that the philosopher-king is usually a tyrant with a library. The history of institutions is not a history of heroes, but a history of accountants. UEFA does not care about the soul of football. It cares about the valuation of its own shares. Infantino does not care about the soul of football. He cares about the continuation of his own tenure. The difference between them is negligible, like the difference between two shades of grey in a fog.

The public wants a change of face because it cannot bear the thought of a change of system. It is easier to blame the man than to blame the machine. So we will watch UEFA maneuver, we will read the declarations of no confidence, and we will feel the thrill of civic participation. And then, inevitably, Infantino will be replaced by a man who is slightly more European, slightly more compliant, and slightly more efficient at maintaining the monopoly. The pyramid will remain. The wealth will remain. The chokepoint will remain. The only thing that will have changed is the headline. And the headlines, as we know, are the opium of the masses, and the opium is always effective, provided one does not ask for the ingredients.

Rosa Luxemburg

The proposed reform addresses the moral outrage of European football’s governing bodies while leaving the arithmetic of global accumulation intact. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.

Your argument rests on a precise observation: that the moral indignation of the European press and the boycott threats of UEFA are structurally impotent against the voting bloc of the Global South within FIFA. You identify correctly that UEFA represents an “aristocracy of world football,” a legacy power whose influence is now divorced from its numerical weight. You argue that Infantino’s power derives from his ability to convert development funds into political capital among the “small federations” - the island nations and desert confederations who have never troubled a quarterfinal. This is a sharp diagnosis of the symptom. You are right that righteous indignation does not translate into votes in a body where one nation, one vote is the constitutional law. To assume otherwise is democratic vanity.

However, your framework stops at the arithmetic. You treat FIFA as a parliament where the conflict is between the moral conscience of Europe and the mercenary logic of the periphery. This is a liberal misunderstanding of power. It assumes that the votes of the small federations are bought in a transactional sense, a simple exchange of cash for ballots. This is too easy. It allows us to dismiss Infantino as a crook rather than analyzing him as a symptom of a deeper structural necessity. The votes are not merely bought; they are accumulated.

In The Accumulation of Capital, I demonstrated that capitalism, in its mature stage, cannot survive within the boundaries of any single national state. It must expand beyond them, not merely to sell goods, but to absorb new spheres of production and consumption, and to secure new sources of raw materials. FIFA is not a parliament; it is a transnational accumulation machine. Infantino’s strategy is not merely corruption; it is the political equivalent of imperialism. He does not just buy votes; he integrates the peripheral economies of sport into the central circuit of European capital. The development funds are not bribes in the vulgar sense; they are the cost of admission for the periphery to participate in the global market of football.

You criticize the European public for wanting a villain deposed by continental acclaim. I agree that this is futile. But your alternative is not a deeper structural critique; it is a cynical acceptance of the status quo as a matter of pure power politics. You imply that because Europe cannot win the vote, it should perhaps respect the arithmetic. This is the error of the reformist who believes that if he cannot control the state, he should at least understand its mechanics. But mechanics are not neutral.

The question is not whether UEFA can depose Infantino. The question is whether the structure that makes Infantino’s strategy necessary can be challenged without challenging the global division of labor that produces the surplus wealth Europe controls and the political dependency the periphery suffers. When UEFA threatens a boycott, it is not defending democracy; it is defending its own monopoly on the global market. It is the old aristocracy refusing to recognize that the throne has been built on new foundations.

Consider the Paris Commune of 1871. The Communards did not fail because they lacked the military strength of the Versailles government. They failed because they attempted to impose a socialist order on a society that had not yet developed the material and social conditions to sustain it, and because they were crushed by a coalition of reactionary forces that recognized the threat to their property relations. Here, the “reactionary forces” are not Versailles troops, but the integrated logic of global capital. Infantino is not an outsider to the system; he is the system’s most efficient administrator. He has solved the problem of over-accumulation in Europe by exporting the crisis of legitimacy to the periphery, where it is managed through redistribution rather than revolution.

Your analysis misses the democratic dimension entirely. You speak of the “small federations” as if they are passive recipients. But the voting bloc is not a monolith. It is a collection of distinct national struggles, each with its own relationship to the central capital. By treating them as a single “Global South” bloc, you repeat the error of the vanguardist who believes he knows what is best for the masses better than the masses themselves. The error of the European press is not that it lacks votes; it is that it believes moral superiority is a substitute for structural power.

We must ask: does the boycott reduce the system’s capacity to reproduce the conditions that made Infantino’s rise possible? Or does it merely stabilize those conditions by forcing the periphery to seek alternative patrons while leaving the global market intact? If the answer is the latter, then the boycott is a performance, not a strategy. It is a ritual of outrage that consumes energy without changing the balance of accumulation.

The reformist wants to clean the house. The authoritarian wants to burn it down and rebuild it without windows. We must ask who lives in the house, and who builds it. The answer lies not in the votes of Zurich, but in the conditions of labor that produce the spectacle. Until we address the commodification of the game itself, until we ask who owns the means of production of football, the boycott is merely noise. And noise, however righteous, does not move the arithmetic.