Gavin Cooney

in his opening address to delegates yesterday, that FIFA not only has a power to unite the world, FIFA has a responsibility to unite the world because politics won't.

And that would be a defensible viewpoint from Gianni Infantino if he didn't consistently align himself with political figures who are doing the very opposite of uniting the world.

I think it's to kind of give kind of a powerful image to support that view that he has that football can unite the world, that this is, you know, above politics.

This is, you know, to give the children hope that football can be something very different.

I would imagine that that's what is motivating there.

Again, his slogan being football uniting the world.

He's talked previously in really...

very very kind of sentimental terms of you know a football is not a football this is a magical object that transforms children into happy children and like this kind of this whole this is his whole shtick now at the moment so that's maybe i i assume that's maybe why um why because he's like he's he's popped up as effectively political events like he's he's addressed

Davos, this is Infantino.

He was there at Trump's founding of the Board of Peace, sitting there wearing a Trump 47 red baseball cap.

So I think it's of a piece again with Gianni Infantino's view that he, as the head of FIFA, has the power to bring together the world.

And this was an affliction that dogged his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, if we remember that Qatar were never meant to host the 2022 World Cup.

in the eyes of Sepp Blatter, the plan was Russia would host the 2018 World Cup and the USA would host the 2022 World Cup and there would be this kind of iconic, in the eyes of Sepp Blatter, this iconic image of the two old Cold War powers handing over the World Cup to each other in a view that, you know, this is the end of history, now we're all getting

on together and football has brought the world together.

Because Blatter wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, I don't know if Gianni Anfantino has his eye on his own Nobel Peace Prize.

He could, I suppose, just award him his own FIFA Peace Prize if he really wanted one.

But this is what happened.

yeah maybe he doesn't need it though i mean he's going to he's going to run for a third term he'll almost certainly run unopposed and in a kind of a remarkable uh twitter situation uh remarkable situations he's got endorsements from i think it's the uh the african and the south american confederations before he even announced his candidature so um i don't think he needs you know this powerful political image to kind of get him over the line with in that respect

He seems to remain very popular among many of his membership base, partly because the World Cup has become such an enormous financial cash cow that he's distributing more money to these national associations than ever before.