Gianni Infantino is working the room. This week it's Tokyo, where the FIFA president is scheduled to meet the Asian Football Confederation on Wednesday — behind closed doors, at a five-star hotel, with the media largely kept out. Exactly the kind of setting FIFA power brokers prefer.
The trip follows a bruising few weeks for Infantino, who was forced to apologize to FIFA's 37-member ruling council in Zurich for what he called "mistakes" in assembling a now-scrapped $4.2 billion sell-off plan for the World Cup. That plan spooked a lot of confederations. Now he's trying to win them back, one meeting at a time.
The Asian vote could decide everything
Asia matters here. AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa was among the early critics of Infantino's World Cup subsidiary proposal, but reports from The Athletic suggest he may be softening. The confederation's members are far from united — Qatar has backed Infantino, Jordan has declared opposition. That split gives Infantino room to maneuver.
An AP tally puts 87 of the 211 FIFA member federations in Infantino's column. He needs a simple majority, and with the candidate filing deadline on November 18, the window for a serious challenger is closing fast. No sitting FIFA president has lost an election since 1974.
To critics, Infantino has dangled an independent review of FIFA's decision-making processes. Whether that's a genuine concession or a tactical retreat is the right question to ask.
The patronage machine runs on loyalty
Political scientist Jules Boykoff, who also played professional soccer, put it plainly to the AP: "FIFA is a massive patronage network. It brings in billions from the men's World Cup and distributes it to football associations around the world in exchange for loyalty."
He didn't stop there. "The funds that FIFA distributes to soccer bodies around the world are meant to develop soccer, but there's scant oversight. To say FIFA is in need of structural overhaul is to make an enormous understatement."
That's the backdrop to every handshake in every five-star hotel lobby. The FIFA Council meets again on December 16 in Doha — which, given Qatar's support for Infantino, is unlikely to be a hostile room. The election itself is in March. Right now, the math is moving in his direction.
