Uefa Calls Boycott and No Confidence in Infantino

It was announced with some ceremony that Uefa, the governing body of European football, has declared no confidence in Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, and called for a boycott to underline the point. One wonders what, exactly, a vote of no confidence accomplishes against a man who was not put in his chair by confidence in the first place.

That is the whole trouble with this story, and it is a trouble worth sitting with a while, because it is not really a story about football at all. It is a story about the peculiar helplessness of respectable institutions when they discover, late, that the rules they wrote no longer serve them. Uefa represents the confederations of Europe - the clubs with the money, the leagues with the television contracts, the history that makes football worth arguing about in the first place - and it has just done the equivalent of a large shareholder standing up at the annual meeting to announce he has lost faith in the chief executive, while still holding the shares, still cashing the dividends, and still showing up next year. A no-confidence vote in a body like FIFA is not a lever. It is a letter to the editor. It expresses feeling. It does not move furniture.

I confess I find something almost tender in it. Uefa is not a small organization, and its members are not naive men; they know precisely how FIFA’s presidency is elected, and by whom, and they know that the arithmetic of that election runs through federations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas whose loyalty Infantino has cultivated with the patient attentiveness of a man who understands that Europe’s opinion of him, however loudly voiced, does not carry a vote weighted any heavier than Vanuatu’s. So when Uefa calls for a boycott, the interesting question is a boycott of what. Not of FIFA itself - nobody proposes that Europe’s great clubs decline to appear in a World Cup, because a World Cup without England, Germany, France, and Spain would be a very fine tournament for everyone who does not sell advertising, which is to say nobody who matters to the people making this threat. So the boycott, whatever shape it eventually takes, will be a boycott of some meeting, some ceremony, some photograph - a gesture aimed not at removing Infantino but at being seen to disapprove of him, which is a different project entirely and a far more comfortable one.

I do not say this to mock the disapproval. The disapproval may be entirely justified; I have read enough about the man’s expanding calendar of tournaments and his gift for finding new countries willing to host them at great expense and greater discretion to think Uefa’s complaint is not invented from nothing. What I mock, gently, and with real affection for the art of institutional self-preservation, is the idea that indignation announced in a press statement functions as a check on power that was never structured to be checked by press statements. FIFA’s presidency is not accountable to European sentiment. It is accountable to the electorate that elected it, and that electorate has been paying rather closer attention to Infantino’s travel schedule than Uefa apparently has.

There is a picture worth holding in the mind here: a man standing at a podium in some new stadium, in some country not previously famous for football, accepting a handshake from a president grateful for the attention, while in Nyon a committee drafts a strongly worded letter. Both men understand exactly what is happening. Only one of them is worried.

The lesson, if there is one, is not about Infantino, who will do what men in his position have always done, which is to count votes rather than tempers. The lesson is about Uefa, which has just demonstrated, with great sincerity, that it possesses every instrument of moral authority and almost none of the votes, and has chosen to reach for the one it does not have.