Gavin Cooney

And the fact that Infantino can say, I am Arab, I am disabled, I am gay, I am a migrant worker,

Also kind of does encapsulate the unbelievable expediency of FIFA that really increasingly you have to wonder what they actually stand for.

Beyond that, we want to make as much money as we can to fund the game globally through the World Cup.

And as a result, we will kind of just go along with whatever the host country wants.

So in Qatar, it was pushing back against the Western media and it was taking the beer from the stadiums at the last minute.

minute in the u.s it's uh you know it's the ticket pricing um it's uh you know it's it's the it's kind of allowing the embracing american the american capitalist view of sports as entertainment deserving of only the the richest people in the world and we can see it as well with infantino's extraordinarily close relationship with donald trump right i mean we mentioned uh

We mentioned the Peace Prize there, like extraordinary, like to give this guy a Peace Prize a couple of months before he starts bombing one of the countries competing at the World Cup.

And he's consistently popping up for photo ops at the Oval Office.

FIFA and Infantino defend that as a kind of a bear hug strategy, that we need to get close to Donald Trump to restrict some of his impulses and get some, you know, get some control over him to be able to carry this off, you know.

And, you know, this is, it's not just FIFA doing this, you know, Mark Rutte of NATO, for instance, has done something pretty similar and even more toe-curling because I don't think Infantino has called Trump daddy or at least hasn't done it publicly.

But he has...

Evidently, nobody thinks they can beat him.

It's a 211-member association, one member, one vote.

So England, Germany, Norway have the same say as the Cook Islands.

And the more money that the World Cup generates, the more money that is handed out to national associations for their own football infrastructure projects and to fund the game there, and the more money that cascades down, the more comfortable...

the incumbent becomes.

So if nobody runs against Infantino, it's because nobody believes that they can beat him.

And certainly while he's a much mocked and criticised figure in Europe, as kind of this interview has kind of shown, he's got big support outside of Europe, you know, in the Asian Confederation, in South America, in Africa.

And when it's one member, one vote, he's got the, he's basically, to use a phrase of his friend Donald Trump,

He holds all the cards.