person of the week
Step back, Mister Infantino!
By Wolfram Weimer
11/22/2022, 8:11 am
The FIFA President embodies the cynical greed and open corruption of the Football Association. With strange performances and taunting words, he continues to aggravate the scandal surrounding the Qatar World Cup. It’s about time Europe’s mighty football federations finally called for a fresh start.
Dear Mr. Infantino (only for despots),
(Photo: IMAGO/Bildbyran)
if you like it polite, you still address yourself as President. Those who are lenient call you a tragic figure. In truth, you are a soul seller. You sold the soul of football and the values of democracy with it. You are running this sale in such an obscene manner that you are embarrassing all football players and football fans in the world. It is impossible for you to be re-elected as FIFA boss in 2023. You should rather resign as soon as possible after this embarrassing World Cup. I hope that the big European football federations, who are committed to a wonderful sport and its values, will finally ask the big question of power and simply walk out if they buy re-election majorities again. Proud democracies like France, England, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Germany can bring down your golden FIFA temple if they act boldly. Because a World Cup without these countries would no longer be a World Cup. Or do you see it differently, Mr. Infantino?
You have been running the business of world football’s governing body since 2016 and it can be said that you do the business well. During your tenure, you sold the World Cup to despots twice in a row, once to Russia and once to Qatar. With the contracts for the 2022 World Cup, you have achieved record income of 7.25 billion euros. Even the good 6 billion from Russia were really big dollar cinema. According to the AP news agency, you have now increased FIFA’s reserves in Switzerland to 2.4 billion euros. You can also treat yourself to an official annual salary of 2.7 million euros a year – you only earn seven times as much as a German Chancellor.
But let us all pay the price for all that money. They force us to become extras in your game, the main rule of which is that everything in this world can be bought. For years, your FIFA has been a hermetic world sickened by corruption, vanity, greed and megalomania. But this World Cup, which you so arrogantly defended, becomes a beacon. Because the truth is quite simple: This World Cup in Qatar betrays fundamental human rights. She does sportswashing in an obscene way. Sportswashing for an intolerable women’s apartheid in the Arab world. Sportswashing for an unacceptable homophobia. Sportswashing for a slave system of worker degradation and a racism that sees South Asians as inferior to Arabs. Sportswashing for a despotism that neither tolerates freedom of expression nor opposition, but instead cruelly silences them in secret service cellars. And greenwashing for the biggest polluters and beneficiaries of fossil energy pollution.
Human rights apply everywhere
It’s all bad enough. But they top off the bitter theater by mocking critics and consciously relativizing the standards of human rights. With their bizarre appearance at the opening press conference, they have degenerated FIFA’s integrity into a game of persuasion. If you defend serious human rights violations in Arabia by saying that Europeans had already done evil things in the world centuries ago, then you are playing the classic argumentative game of dictators and man-slaughterers. In doing so, you legitimize evil and humiliate basic values to chips in history, which you can play here or there or not at all in the game of life.
But what is special about human rights, Mr. Infantino, is that they apply always and everywhere, regardless of what happened somewhere else and when. They are not available in slices, but are untouchable. But they finger them as if they were bartering goods. With this you open up a completely new dimension of the abyss of your FIFA world. Being corrupt and greedy is a sad thing. But to whitewash the torture chambers is a revelation of the moral. Because where human rights are violated, people are hurt.
“When I saw the FIFA President, I was shocked. And at that moment I was ashamed to be a part of this event,” said Denmark’s sporting director Peter Möller on behalf of many Europeans. Did you hear that? Or Wenzel Michalski, Germany director of Human Rights Watch, who commented on her appearance: “Infantino calls the criticism of Qatar hypocrisy and pretends that the beams are bending.” What do you think of Nicholas McGeehan, Director of FairSquare, who believes “the FIFA President is getting his arguments directly from the Qatari authorities”.
Maybe that’s how it is. After all, you emigrated from Europe and have been living with your family in a luxury apartment in Doha for many months. You know what: you’d best stay where you think the best of all worlds is.