Do critics of FIFA’s plans to ‘sell off’ the World Cup not remember Qatar 2022?

Say what you will about Gianni Infantino – and I fully intend to – but you cannot accuse FIFA’s president of lacking either vision, or ambition. This, after all, is the man who took over an institution then a byword for bloated cupidity, and has made his predecessors’ wringing of loot from the game look like tinkering with the petty cash. Who presided over a World Cup (Qatar 2022) that much of its international audience was obliged to watch with a figurative clothes-peg affixed to its nose, and evidently thought, “We can do so much worse.” Then improbably succeeded in just such a goal, staging a tournament that will stand long in the memory as a monument to rapacity, autocracy, bigotry, lickspittle pandering and accusations of cheating chiefly in the former bastion of democracy that is the USA.

All this now seems a mere preamble to Infantino’s latest big idea: he wants to sell off the World Cup. Or at least break off a sizeable chunk of it – the golden globe at the top, say – and flog that. Not that FIFA would put it like that, of course. FIFA never does put it like that. It has duly emitted some characteristic miasma about football being an “extraordinary engine of human and social development” whose “remarkable commercial value” must be shared more evenly around the world. The best way to achieve this being to start a company charged with running its tournaments and other commercial operations, called FIFA Forward Enterprises, then hive off 21 per cent to private investors led by a venture capitalist named Joshua Kushner, with close connections to Donald Trump. That Trump is perceived to have his fingers in Infantino’s new pie seems a matter of weary inevitability. The lopsided bromance between the president of FIFA and the president of America, the fawning acolyte and the preening unclothed emperor, has shuffled from one gilded trough to another.

Infantino’s plan has drawn widespread condemnation, with many (including European governing body UEFA and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham) repeating the line that football is not FIFA’s to sell. Even Sepp Blatter, Infantino’s immediate forerunner as FIFA president, has said as much, which given the depths of corruption FIFA plumbed on his watch surely deserves some kind of special medal to adorn his brass neck. But quite plainly, football is very much FIFA’s to sell. They have sold it to Russia. They have sold it to Qatar, blithely untroubled by slave labour, grievous human rights violations and the sponsorship of terrorism – let alone by the unsuitability of that location as a venue, requiring the timing to be shifted by half a year just to stop players being vaporised on contact with the atmosphere. For the 2034 edition, they have sold it to Saudi Arabia, next to whose regime Qatar’s starts to resemble that of Denmark. They have shaken down the fans with ticket prices inflated to eye-watering levels, and ripped up the rulebook to gratify advertisers or the whims of Trump. The notion that this is a step into the abyss implies that football has not already plummeted down it.

In their respective fiefdoms, the intertwining worlds of Trump and Infantino are novel only in their sheer scale. Infantino’s strategy will be familiar to pork-barrel politicians everywhere. By funnelling funds to that majority of national football associations who rely on FIFA for most of their income, Infantino has locked in their support, and this new enterprise promises more moolah for them still. You might call it buying a power base; he would call it, yep, sharing football’s remarkable commercial value more evenly. According to the Times, he would claim no reward for this selfless endeavour other than an estimated tenfold increase in salary, to north of $60m, were he placed in charge of the new footballing body. Truly, the man is a living saint of the game.