Gianni Infantino’s tedious FIFA fairytale was all straw men and smoke bombs

Almost exactly one hour and just shy of 5,000 words after telling his audience that he has been “pretty quiet in the last few months”, FIFA president Gianni Infantino finished his opening remarks. Ordinarily, if the boss of world football’s governing body told 400 journalists he had been to North Korea to persuade them to co-host a Women’s World Cup with South Korea, or that Friday’s decision to scrap the sale of beer at stadiums was taken because of concerns about “the flow” of fans around this city state on congested matchdays and not because its royal family was annoyed with western journalists banging on about migrant workers, human rights and how Qatar won the vote to stage the tournament, we would definitely have asked him about that. Despite controversy over Russia and Qatar hosting World Cups, Infantino said he tried for a global tournament in North Korea “I was at an event a few days ago to explain what we’re doing at this World Cup for disabled people — how many journalists are here?” he asked FIFA’s head of communications Bryan Swanson, who was sitting beside him. Infantino’s speech was condemned as “an insult to the thousands of hard-working women and men who have made the World Cup possible” “Infantino’s comments were as crass as they were clumsy and suggest that the FIFA president is getting his talking points direct from the Qatari authorities,” said Nicholas McGeehan, a director of human rights consultancy FairSquare and an expert on migrant workers’ rights in the Middle East. Infantino had more examples of “new” FIFA’s munificence to share, his tireless pursuit of global peace, western hypocrisy, a story about how Qatar’s foreign minister got 160 female footballers out of Afghanistan for him only for the west to let him down again, a few teasers on how much money FIFA is going to make from this World Cup, which will delight its 211 member associations, which explains why they love him so much and want to hand him another four-year term as Daddy Warbucks next year.