Uefa Calls Boycott and No Confidence in Infantino

The football public of Europe has worked itself into a fine moral lather over Zurich, and nothing sharpens the appetite for a hanging so much as the conviction that one is hanging a man in the name of democracy. Uefa has called for a boycott. Uefa has declared no confidence in Gianni Infantino. The continental press treats this as an uprising of the game’s conscience against a man who has made himself intolerable to it. The public wants a villain deposed by continental acclaim, which is precisely why continental acclaim will not depose him - because Fifa is not, whatever European sportswriters imagine, a parliament in which fifty-five outraged delegations constitute a majority. It is a congress of two hundred and eleven members, and the arithmetic of that body has nothing to do with the moral temperature of Munich or Madrid.

This is the democratic vanity operating in the story: the assumption that righteous indignation, if loud enough and old enough in its lineage, must eventually translate into votes. Uefa is the aristocracy of world football, the inventor of the game’s grammar, the continent that still believes its displeasure ought to carry the weight of a papal bull. But Infantino did not build his throne on European approval. He built it, with considerable cunning, on the small federations - the island nations, the desert confederations, the countries whose national teams have never troubled a quarterfinal - by seeing to it that Fifa’s development money, its redistributed television and sponsorship millions, flowed toward them with a generosity no predecessor had shown. A federation president in Vanuatu or Chad does not lie awake worrying about the composition of the Club World Cup calendar. He worries about whether the money for the training pitch lights arrived, and under Infantino it generally has. That is not corruption in any interesting sense; it is patronage, which is the oldest form of politics there is, and it is why a no-confidence resolution passed by the rich continent that needs the money least will be received in the poor confederations that need it most with the mild interest one reserves for the complaints of a wealthy relative.

The actual quarrel, stripped of its vestments, is about revenue and calendar - about who controls the expanded Club World Cup’s earnings, who decides how many weeks of the season belong to the clubs and how many to Fifa’s showpieces, and who gets credit for the coming spectacle of a World Cup awarded to Saudi Arabia. Uefa did not discover its taste for democratic accountability last week; it discovered a threat to its market position, and dressed the threat in the language of principle because that language photographs better than a dispute over broadcasting windows. This is not cynicism on my part - it is merely a description of how institutions behave when their revenue is at stake, which is exactly how institutions have behaved since the invention of the ledger.

What the boycott call actually accomplishes is something almost admirable in its indirection: it lets Uefa’s own membership, restless clubs chief among them, blow off pressure that might otherwise be aimed at Uefa’s own president, while Infantino absorbs the theatrical blame for arrangements that a great many federations, once the cameras are off, find perfectly congenial. The strongest version of the case against him - that he has hollowed out the congress’s independence, stacked its committees, and turned the presidency into something closer to a monarchy - is not wrong. But a monarchy sustained by the consent, however purchased, of two-thirds of its subjects is not toppled by a strongly worded communiqué from the wealthiest province.

Somewhere in a federation office with peeling paint and one working air conditioner, an official is reading the news of Uefa’s fury and quietly calculating what a change in Zurich might cost him in development grants next season. He will vote his invoice, not his conscience, and he will be entirely right to think that is what conscience looks like when the lights need paying for.