Astead Herndon

And he actually, he's got this kind of quite interesting multicultural background.

As a child, you know, he's spoken about being pretty poorly and needing a blood transfusion.

He was kept alive by blood from donors from England and also from Belgrade.

So what's now Serbia, former Yugoslavia.

And then he has this kind of story of emerging as a soccer bureaucrat.

So he was originally in the legal department at the European Confederation, which is called UEFA.

There's the different confederations around the world.

And he was there, and he was one of the beneficiaries of kind of the collapse of FIFA in 2015, 2016, because this space emerged where he was able to

kind of deliver himself to be kind of like a changemaker.

Yeah, well, their relationship was born out of the bid.

So the bid during Trump's first presidency, Infantino kind of got himself into the Oval Office a couple of times.

That was how it started.

But what actually happened was, whereas...

A lot of people obviously turned on Trump kind of towards the end of his first presidency and certainly after January the 6th.

Infantino didn't.

There was no point where Infantino publicly distanced himself from Trump.

He played a pretty judicious game where he kind of, either because he liked Trump or because he was a smart political animal and recognised that there was a chance he might have to work with him again.

He stayed close.

You know, he went to Mar-a-Lago.

Yeah.