Uefa Calls Boycott and No Confidence in Infantino

The announcement concerns Uefa and Fifa, two governing bodies now declaring war on one another over who shall sit at the head of football’s table. What it does not concern - because the question was not asked - is the body that actually plays the game: the muscle and tendon and lung of the footballer who has run himself into the ground filling out a calendar neither institution consulted him about, and the body of the fan who has stood in the cold or paid the fare to fill the stadiums that make both Uefa’s and Fifa’s fighting over money worth the fighting.

I know the shape of this argument. Two authorities quarrel over legitimacy - who has the confidence of the confederations, who has overreached, who called for a boycott and who deserves one - and in all of that quarrel, conducted in the language of governance and no-confidence votes, the actual laboring body of the sport does not appear as a party to the dispute. It appears only as the thing being fought over, the way a house is fought over by two men who never built it.

Consider the inventory. It is the players’ bodies that absorbed the expansion of Gianni Infantino’s tournament calendar - the enlarged World Cup, the new Club World Cup squeezed into an already impossible year - bodies that took on more matches, more travel, more risk of the tendon tearing in the eighty-ninth minute of a fixture added for reasons of revenue and reach rather than reasons of rest. Nobody polled the hamstring. It is the fan’s body, standing for ninety minutes on a terrace or sitting through a rearranged kickoff time chosen for a broadcast market on another continent, that funds the very confederations now trading accusations of no-confidence. That fan was not in the room when Uefa decided to call for a boycott, and will not be in the room when Fifa decides how to answer it. The dispute is conducted entirely between men who sit at tables; the evidence of what the game actually costs, in bodies, is gathered nowhere in the proceedings.

One might answer that this is simply how institutions govern themselves - that Uefa, as a confederation with standing, is exercising exactly the check it is entitled to exercise, and that a no-confidence declaration against a sitting president is democracy doing its proper work inside Fifa’s own structure. I will not pretend that is nothing. A body of executives holding another body of executives to account is not the same as no accountability at all. But note carefully what “stakeholder” means in this fight: it means the men who administer the confederations, not the men who play under them, and certainly not the men and women who buy the tickets. The vote of no-confidence, whatever it settles, will settle it entirely among people whose bodies bear none of the wear the dispute is nominally about. That is the contradiction, plainly stated: an argument over the health and future of a sport, conducted exclusively by people the sport does not physically require.

I think of a young academy player somewhere in England or Portugal or Senegal, training this week to try to make a first team, whose whole working life will be lived inside whatever calendar these two institutions negotiate between themselves - a calendar decided the way a landlord decides a lease, with the tenant informed only after the terms are set. That player’s body will absorb whichever settlement Uefa and Fifa reach. That player will not be asked whether he has confidence in Gianni Infantino, and Gianni Infantino, for his part, will not be asked to run the fixture list himself and see how his own knees hold up.

The boardroom will vote on confidence. The body on the pitch, the one actually being spent, was never asked if it had any confidence left to give.