"The Man Who Thinks He's God." That was FIFPRO president Sergio Marchi's headline for a statement released during last year's Club World Cup. It's a long way from buying rounds for journalists in a Cardiff hotel bar — which is exactly what Gianni Infantino did the night he was elected FIFA president in February 2016.
Ten years on, Infantino earns $6 million a year, flies on a jet provided by the state of Qatar, has Vladimir Putin, Mohamed bin Salman and Donald Trump on speed dial, and recently rented office space at Trump Tower in New York. The man who sold himself as soccer's answer to corruption and cronyism has become something else entirely — and the game's insiders are too afraid to say so publicly.
The numbers are real. So is the contradiction.
Give Infantino this: FIFA's finances have been transformed. Annual revenue has grown from $502 million in 2016 to $2.66 billion, with projections of $9 billion for 2026 alone thanks to the expanded 48-team World Cup. Distribution funds to FIFA's 211 member associations have grown eightfold, with $5.1 billion invested into global football development over his tenure. For smaller associations — the ones that actually vote in FIFA elections — that money is real and it talks louder than any editorial criticism.
He was also elected on a specific platform: expand the World Cup, grow development funding, and clean up the organisation after Sepp Blatter's era of bribery, racketeering and DOJ indictments. On paper, he's delivered all three.
But the gap between the mission statement and the lived reality of this World Cup is jarring. The cheapest tickets for the USMNT's opening game against Paraguay in Los Angeles were priced at $1,200 under FIFA's dynamic pricing model. Scotland fans — watching their first World Cup since 1998 — are calculating costs of £5,000 to £10,000 per supporter just to attend the group stage. New Jersey is facing a $48 million transport bill while FIFA pockets an estimated $11 billion from the tournament. The state's governor, Mikie Sherrill, put it plainly: "FIFA is providing $0 for transportation. Zero."
Infantino's response was to announce a $20 bus scheme via Instagram. For a tournament generating nine figures in revenue, it's the kind of gesture that summarises his entire presidency — grand in ambition, tone-deaf in execution.
The silence around him says everything
What's most revealing isn't what Infantino does — it's what everyone else doesn't say. When ESPN approached a leading national football association for comment on FIFA's ticketing scheme, the reply was blunt: "Ha, we won't be doing that!" Former predecessor Blatter — hardly an impartial observer — noted dryly that across all 211 national associations, "there is not one single association who is opposed to the work of the president."
That's not consensus. That's omerta.
Lise Klaveness of the Norwegian Football Federation has been the rare dissenting voice, calling Infantino's FIFA Peace Prize for Trump — announced unilaterally in December 2025 — "a breach of FIFA's own statutes of political neutrality." Human rights group FairSquare filed an eight-page formal complaint. The IOC investigated him for wearing a red Trump cap at a White House meeting. He was cleared, but the image stuck.
- Infantino created the FIFA Peace Prize for Trump without apparent consultation
- He wore a MAGA-style cap at a White House "Board of Peace" meeting
- He attempted to force a public handshake between the Israeli and Palestinian FA presidents at FIFA Congress in Vancouver — Rajoub walked offstage
- He arrived three hours late to FIFA Congress in Asuncion after attending a world leaders summit in Riyadh — senior UEFA officials, including Aleksander Ceferin, walked out in protest
- New Zealand and Canada both rejected his requests for presidential-level security convoys
Michel Platini, Infantino's former boss at UEFA and hardly someone with the moral high ground, nevertheless identified something real: "He likes the rich and powerful people, the ones with money. It's his character." Sources close to Infantino frame the Trump Tower office rental, the trophy on the Oval Office desk, and the Peace Prize as pure salesmanship — "headlines create publicity." That logic works until the product being sold is the World Cup and regular fans can't afford to get in the door.
What his legacy actually looks like
Infantino has been re-elected twice, unopposed, and will stand again in 2027. He's expected to serve until 2031 — the maximum under FIFA statutes, a limit he's already exploited by discounting his initial three-year term from the clock. Sources say he won't seek a fourth term, citing the "exhausting" nature of the role. Whether that holds is another matter.
The 2026 World Cup is his defining moment. If stadiums fill, the football delivers, and the spectacle justifies the price tags, history will record him as the man who turned FIFA from a criminal enterprise into a $9 billion-a-year operation. If hotels track 20% below expectations — as Fortune reported in May — and supporters are priced into renting school buses while Infantino flies Qatari private jets, a different verdict takes hold.
The man who bought beers in Cardiff is now staying at a 17th-century castle when he returns to Wales. That's not a metaphor — it actually happened. Sometimes the story just tells itself.
