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In an ever more complex world, it is always good to have figures who can simplify things for us. A single person, making it crystal clear where they stand and what for, can be the light in the darkness that helps you navigate today’s turbulent waters.
That’s why I’m so grateful for Gianni Infantino. The man is the ultimate guide to geopolitics, and a waypost for anyone confused by the moral labyrinth they find themselves living in. Whichever way he’s pointing, you can feel confident you should be headed in the opposite direction.
Take Russia’s ongoing exclusion from international events such as Fifa tournaments and the Olympic Games. The efficacy and implementation of sporting bans and boycotts may seem a near-impossible conundrum, to be debated by wiser heads than our own. Then this week you hear Fifa’s president say he wants Russia’s ban lifted because “it has just created more … hatred”. And you remember that in December he awarded a peace prize to a man who immediately seized a Venezuelan president and threatened to invade Greenland and attack Iran.
So it’s helpful to remember the upside down nature of the times we’re living in – as well as the pusillanimous servility of those running some of the planet’s most powerful sporting organisations. Because otherwise it might be quite difficult to resist the plausible arguments to let Russia return to international competition, especially as they begin to be echoed back and forth between football and the Olympics.
A day after Infantino’s comments, the International Olympic Committee president, Kirsty Coventry, gave a coded message to the same effect, insisting sport should be a “neutral ground” where athletes “compete freely, without being held back by the politics or divisions of their governments”. As statements go, it registers about as much shock value as Lucas Paquetá’s return from West Ham to Brazil.
At surface level, you can’t argue with the idea that sportspeople from different countries and cultures should be encouraged to forge relationship across the political barriers that divide them. The world does indeed need to recognise its shared humanity. And this was the same argument for granting Russia the 2014 Sochi Olympics, right before Vladimir Putin turned it into an opportunity for systemic state-sponsored doping, crackdowns on LGBT rights, and, oh yes, the annexing of Crimea.
Coventry is vocal about the Olympics’ commitment to EDI, so presumably welcoming Russia back is a big tick for her equality, diversity and inclusivity agenda. After all, it’s not anyone’s fault if they’re born in a country with a belligerent authoritarian regime. Unless they’re the child of a United States immigrant, in which case it very much is their fault and they deserve to be separated from their parents and detained.
As for Infantino, he just wants everyone to know that sporting bans don’t work, which is obviously why Russia has been petitioning him so hard to lift theirs. Poor Gianni, he just wants everyone to get along. He still has the Order of Friendship that Putin awarded him in 2019, after Russia had hosted the World Cup the year before. And what kind of a friend would you be if you gave up on someone just because they invaded a neighbouring country?
One of the odder things that sport encourages us to do – along with standing in the winter cold en masse, screaming obscenities at people whose shirts are a different colour to ours – is to ask us to take it seriously. We outsource our moral judgment to its quasi-religious sense of neutrality. We believe that because it contains and focuses our most competitive, survivalist and even violent instincts within a 100-yard box, it raises us above our baser instincts and to a higher plane.
On the field, everyone stands supposedly equal, even while committing themselves to codes and behaviours formed by European countries when they were still stealing other people’s land for the good of mankind.
And as sport has commercialised into a mega-industry, there’s a correlative inflation of its spiritual – or humanist, as you prefer – significance. And that remains even as its own fixation on growth tips the balance of its purpose – from making money to function, to functioning to make money. The Olympics remains one of the greatest shows on Earth; but you can admire the athletes’ efforts in Milan this month while remembering that even since the nadir of Salt Lake, bribery and bid-rigging has continued to dog the organisation that stages it.
As for Fifa, one of the world’s most lucrative not-for-profit organisations, its recent history of corruption needs no letter of introduction – although a group of whistleblowers and academics did provide one last year. It argued the organisation is even more poorly governed than it was a decade ago, when its officials were being arrested for fraud, racketeering and money laundering.
In the meantime, they have actively hollowed out their own stated values, be those anti-discrimination, solidarity or human rights. They continue to give World Cups to nations where homosexuality is punishable by death and ban on-field LGBT+ advocacy. As for the exploitation of migrant workers during the construction of the Qatar World Cup, well, in 2024 Fifa rejected the advice of its own committee to accept its part and help compensate them.
The ultimate evidence of the hollowness of Fifa’s values is, of course, the frankly creepy gold bauble that Infantino presented to Donald Trump in lieu of the Nobel that his dear friend wanted. A man standing in front of an ugly naked guy, telling him he’s wearing the finest raiments. Let’s bear this in mind when the same man confidently tells us how playing youth football against Russia can help repair a geopolitical fracture threatening the stability of the entire planet.
Sport’s soft power is curdling in the hands of its supposed leaders. Actual leadership requires people prepared to say the things that the powerful, the rich, and the committers of crimes don’t want to hear.
This week Pep Guardiola has spoken passionately about the horrors of conflict on innocent people, from Ukraine to Sudan to Palestine. The IOC and Fifa would rather not. You can’t trust politicians to do the right thing, says such silent, neutered morality. But here we can promise you that we will do absolutely nothing at all.
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