Adam Crafton

speaker

3,906 appearances 28 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard yesterday

Adam Crafton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 12.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Pablo Torre Finds Out · How FIFA Tried (and Failed) to Sell the Soul of Football · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

And I don't think it's a secret that Gianni Infantino has probably been looking at some of these US sports leagues and looking at some of these commissioners and looking at people like Roger Goodell and thinking, hang on a minute, I'm the king of soccer, right?

And the king of soccer should have a bigger salary than this little, I'm teasing it, this little parochial American sport, NFL.

Right.

And he may not be wrong in that, but when you're already earning sort of $6 million a year from a non-profit, it's hard to make the argument that that should go towards 20 to 40 to 60.

Now, FIFA have denied that there was ever an intention to have a commissioner or anything like that, or that it was about Infantino's salary.

They say it was all about accelerating the growth of global soccer.

But I think there's another possibility, which is if you create this spin co, if Gianni maybe only has another four years as FIFA president, if he was to win next year, because his term is up end of this year, maybe he spins off to be a commissioner or whatever you give the job title of this commercial venture, which he's helped set up and he's got the relationship with the investors and all of that kind of stuff.

So I think those are sort of some of the theories behind it.

And it might just be because he really wants to develop soccer in Montserrat.

That could be all it is.

A Super League in the planning for years crumbled in less than two days as every corner of football united against it.

I think there are a lot of people who feel that way, for sure.

But there's also a lot of people who feel that Manchester United, for example, should never have been the subjects of a highly leveraged takeover by the Glazer family who owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL.

There's a lot of people who feel that Paris Saint-Germain shouldn't essentially be owned by Qatar, that Newcastle shouldn't be owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.

So we shouldn't pretend here that Europe hasn't sold out

in many ways, at certain points, whether it's to US private equity, whether it's to, as we say, leverage takeovers, whether it's to sovereign wealth funds.

This isn't a question.

And I think this is something that media sometimes allows it to become.

It becomes good v. evil.

And actually, I think in this case, it is almost very bad against quite bad, right?

Showing 941–960 of 3,906 · page 48 of 196