Fifa’s president is feeling African, gay and disabled. I’m feeling confused

‘I’m defending football here, and injustice’ was the standout quote, for me, from what has been described as a ‘bizarre tirade’ by Fifa president Gianni Infantino at a pre-World Cup press conference yesterday. But (Freudian?) slips aside, there were plenty of gems to choose from.

Other highlights of the rambling, hour-long diatribe include Infantino’s impassioned identification with the downtrodden, ‘Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled.’ He could have reached a crescendo by standing up and declaring ‘I’m Spartacus’ but left it at that.

Remarkably, with a straight if rather frosty face, and applying the sort of clumsy association that would be career-ending in a politician, Infantino justified his empathy with the oppressed by talking about his migrant worker parents, who toiled in terrible conditions in, er, Switzerland. He claimed to understand the discrimination faced by migrant workers, citing the bullying he had received at school because of his, er, red hair and freckles.

This moral lesson giving… It’s one-sided’ he fumed. Warming to his theme he hyperbolically condemned Europeans for 3,000 years of wickedness, for which, apparently, we should apologise for another 3,000 years. He thus raised the stakes from the modest demands of climate activists that Britain should atone for the industrial revolution or anti-slavery campaigners whose claims go back just a few centuries; for Infantino, it seems Europe’s crimes began in the mists of pre-history.

What provoked this outburst?  Part of it may have been the last-minute change to alcohol regulations, which rattled Infantino’s gilded cage. It had been understood that beer would be for sale in stadiums but that has now been rescinded by order of the Qatari government. Infantino stressed that all decisions on the World Cup were taken jointly by Fifa and the Qatari authorities but by that he seems to mean the Qatari’s insisting and Fifa acquiescing. The loss of face, the ire of sponsors (Budweiser) and the exposure of the true power balance may have driven Infantino into an aggressive public assertion of his authority.

Infantino’s insecurity must also have been fuelled by what might be described as a series of micro-aggressions by a group of countries, including England, who will defy Fifa’s plea to avoid political gesturing during the tournament.

Some will wear ‘OneLove’ armbands in protest against discrimination, discarding Fifa’s more neutral messaging. Denmark has designed a somber all black ‘protest strip’ in solidarity with the migrant workers that have died in great numbers building stadiums. And Australia released a collective statement in the same cause.

Some of the protests may be feeble and tokenistic (England and Germany even flew out in planes with names referencing LGBT issues – in England’s case ‘rain bow’ in Germany’s ‘diversity wins’), but it is all embarrassing for the hosts and Fifa, and makes the governing body look powerless. Infantino denies this of course: ‘We are 200 per cent in control’ he is reported as saying, which sounds like a clear case of protesting too much. If you need to say it, can it possibly be true?

To be fair to the Fifa president not everything in his speech came across as petulant and defensive. There were a few valid points, though he sometimes had to adopt awkward postures to support them. He stressed that change only comes through engagement and is a lengthy process, pointing out that women were only fully enfranchised in his native Switzerland in the 1990s. This was fair enough, though it did make it sound that he sees Qatar as essentially a backward country. He also likened the Fifa Qatar relationship to an adult dealing with a naughty child.

Infantino sounded almost sane when he talked of his exasperation at having to defend decisions made ‘12 years ago, when none of us were involved’ and when he said ‘we have to make the best of it’, it sounded like a brief slip into the plainly spoken truth.

But the majority of this cri de coeur was the ramblings of an out-of-touch but under-pressure member of the global sporting super elite, peeved beyond measure by people daring to criticize his fiefdom. ‘We are organizing a football tournament. We are not organizing a war.’ Indeed. But at least it’ll all be over by Christmas.