Gianni Infantino looks the perfect villain. There’s the egg-like dome, the unflagging grin, often directed at Donald Trump, and the uncomfortable match of tailor-made suit with white trainers. The Swiss son of a railway station worker spent this summer’s World Cup flying around North America on a Qatar-owned jet, attending 44 games in 39 days. Each time he appeared on the stadium video screen, spectators jeered — partly because he had jacked up the prices of many tickets to thousands of dollars each.
Back then, Fifa’s president with his $6mn pay package seemed impregnable, heading for his third straight unopposed re-election next year. But he hit a crisis in late July, when his plan to sell a stake in the World Cup leaked. Fans were repulsed. The European, Asian and North and Central American confederations called for his ousting. Former Swiss footballer Ramon Vega said this week he will run against Infantino in March’s presidential elections. Stronger candidates are expected to declare before the deadline of November 18.
Yet Infantino will probably survive. In fact, he might be exactly the Fifa president that most of the world’s football associations want.
Infantino was born in Brig in the Swiss Alps in 1970. In his own telling, he had jaundice as a baby and needed a blood infusion to survive. After the Red Cross scoured Europe for two matching donors, a helicopter delivered the life-saving fluid to Brig’s hospital. Infantino says the story made the front page of the Swiss tabloid Blick.
That’s his self-image: a born fighter. He’s certainly a self-made man. Brig lies just across the border from Italy, in the canton of Valais, and his parents were poor Italian immigrants. Vincenzo and Maria each at different times ran a kiosk at Brig station, with Gianni sometimes in tow. In 2022, in his notorious “Today I feel . . . ” speech, delivered just before Qatar’s World Cup, Infantino said he could feel Qatari, African, a migrant worker, gay, female and more “because I know what it means to be discriminated . . . at school, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles . . . Plus I was Italian, so imagine.”
He loved football, and ran a team for Brig’s Italians, but played the game poorly. His sister Daniela recalled, “He once said he had two left feet.” His only assets were brains and ambition. He excelled at school, was a gifted linguist even by Swiss standards, and studied law.
