Jonathan Wilson
speaker
3,871 appearances
25 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 1 Sep
Jonathan Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.
Appearances
Because you have a situation where football is in a unique position of, I mean, FIFA presidents are always accused of kind of acting like heads of state, but then football is such a large enterprise and it concentrates its international power in a single office in a way that no other sport can match, right?
And so you have this situation where
someone is able to kind of rub shoulders with other heads of state and is able to kind of move in circles that never would have been accessible to them otherwise, is able to ride on private jets and to kind of
to live like a bit of a king.
I think that's a very seductive role.
And it's probably not a coincidence that the last three men who've occupied it have all run into trouble in different ways and have all sort of been accused of different things.
And none of those presidencies have ended well.
And so you wonder beyond a certain point, what is the value of having a FIFA president?
What is the value of having one person in this role across multiple electable terms versus
a rotating presidency for the sake of just an idea and a half-baked theory, or potentially sharing it between the different confederations to make sure that power isn't, for instance, centered in Europe or South America.
It goes to Asia, it goes to Australasia, to North America, Central America.
So I think that's the thing to look at, because to ignore it and just to say, well,
hey you know what don't worry there's a reform candidate on their way well that's what infantino was supposed to be 10 years ago and and here we are so these are big conversations i think which go beyond
infantino's own individual future but it's a really interesting topic beyond kind of the frustration and and just how disillusioned all of us presumably are with it it is an interesting topic because it's the game's future and we've kind of seen we've seen sort of the worst case scenario right right in front of us right we've seen the sort of the potential for private equity to come in and generally that doesn't lead to many good things and and so these are the questions that have to be asked after infantino's own future is is resolved but yeah i'd say
What a model.
What a model.
Infantino will desperately try to rally support.
He may well be able to get up to... I think I'm right in saying there's four FIFA members who can't vote at the moment, so you'd need 104 to be re-elected.
I think at this stage it could be fairly close, but to be honest, the momentum is so against him...
The 2014 World Cup, I mean, he wanted the company to look into the viability of it and to produce studies on it.
Showing 561–580 of 3,871 · page 29 of 194
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