Gianni Infantino, jumping onto the trajectory from which his former boss, Michel Platini, had been ejected, became the reform candidate for the presidency of Fifa after these events of incomparable scandal. Born in Brig, another Swiss Alpine town not far, in fact, from Blatter’s birthplace and spiritual home of Visp, Infantino studied law at Fribourg University in Switzerland, then worked as the secretary general of the International Centre for Sports Studies at the University of Neuchâtel, before joining Uefa in 2000. He worked his way up and had been known since 2009 as a cautious, deeply ambitious secretary general, from the graduate class of Swiss administrators educated to service the forest of sports governing bodies nestling in the country. Infantino had worked closely with Platini, secured the financial fair play regulations and increased Uefa’s own income while the organisation strengthened its anti-racism stance and supported some progressive social programmes. He had tied his rise to Platini’s star, too, and was also associated with the increasingly presidential style at Uefa and the lack of further stand-out reforms. His polished manifesto for the Fifa presidential election made the promises the world’s football supporters, media and campaigners needed to hear: ‘transparency’, ‘good governance’, and to implement the organisational reforms proposed by Domenico Scala. But at its heart was the language Infantino had seen the national football associations always understood: more money. There were–literally–large dollar signs printed in the middle of his document, as if to underline for them that Infantino knew what big bucks looked like.
In the frantic weeks preceding the 26 February 2016 election after Blatter and Platini were banned on 21 December 2015, the money promise at the centre of Infantino’s offer was perhaps overlooked, in favour of the perception of him as the European candidate for reform. That was partly because of the unattractiveness, to many, of his opponent, the president of the Asian Football Confederation who finally replaced Mohamed bin Hammam in 2013: Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, a member of the extended ruling family in Bahrain. He was thought to be the favourite, able to garner enough support in Asia and Africa to win, yet his candidacy was beset by allegations that he had been involved in the crackdown against popular dissent in his country during the Arab Spring of 2011.
The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) wrote to Fifa in November 2015, objecting to Salman’s fitness to stand, alleging he had ‘aided and abetted gross human rights abuses’, including against Bahraini footballers. These complaints were rooted in Salman having chaired a commission whose role, the Bahrain Ministry of Information had announced, was to identify athletes, including footballers, who had taken part in a pro-democracy protest rally in Bahrain, and ‘breaches by individuals associated with the sports movement during the recent unfortunate events in the Kingdom of Bahrain’. Prior to the commission meeting, two prominent Bahraini footballers, with other athletes, had been arrested and severely tortured, BIRD wrote in their letter to Fifa, and the Bahrain FA, of which Salman was the president, had also promised a crackdown on dissidence.
Salman had vehemently denied the allegations and insisted that this commission never sat, but his ruling family had without question conducted a brutal response to the pro-democracy outpouring. Prince Ali bin Al-Hussein of Jordan, who was boldly standing again, criticised Sheikh Salman and accused him at least of not having defended footballers who had been persecuted. Nicholas McGeehan, the Gulf researcher for the campaign group Human Rights Watch, was scathing of Salman’s candidacy:
‘Since the peaceful anti-government protests of 2011, which the authorities responded to with brutal and lethal force, the al-Khalifa family have overseen a campaign of torture and mass incarceration that has decimated Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement. If a member of Bahrain’s royal family is the cleanest pair of hands that Fifa can find, then the organisation would appear to have the shallowest and least ethical pool of talent in world sport.’
In that context, Infantino seemed like a gleaming candidate to stand for integrity and reforms desperately needed to Fifa’s processes and structures. So, it was not greatly emphasised that his experience in football administration at Uefa, and his antennae for the route to the Fifa votes, had clear similarities with the Blatter and Havelange candidacies in their time. Infantino, like those two presidents before him, flew all around the world–the equivalent of five times, he said–to talk directly to as many voting FAs as he could, particularly seeking crucial numerical support among Africa’s fifty-four FAs. He noted that he had begun his whistle-stop campaign in Cairo, and finally ended it in Cape Town.
On his record at Uefa, he stressed the increase in income which he had secured, partly from a change by which Uefa, rather than each individual national association separately, sold the TV rights for European Championship qualifying matches. In the 2014–15 financial year, Uefa’s income grew from €1.7bn the previous year, to €2.1bn, and Infantino could stress that ‘solidarity’ payments to each country’s FA, including the smaller ones, had also greatly increased. He made a promise which echoed down Fifa’s history from Havelange’s pledge in 1974, that he would expand the World Cup to forty countries’ teams, which appealed to smaller countries who struggle to qualify, and, presumably, enlarging the TV experience Fifa can sell. In the section of his manifesto headed with the big dollar sign, Infantino promised each of Fifa’s 209 countries’ FAs a hugely boosted $5m over four years in financial assistance, and $40m for the confederations. Particularly attractive to the delegates from other continents gathered at the Hallenstadion in Zurich, many of which still struggle for the basics, Infantino also promised $1m a year for travel costs.
He was, though, still considered an outside bet; the replacement for the fallen Platini, callow at forty-five, lacking a little in stature, having only ever been the secretary general, never a president. Salman was the president of his large confederation, and a ruling figure in the Gulf, whose money was becoming so dominant in the top strata of football and in the granting of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. His manifesto promised reform, too, and transparency, but when he took to the stage at the Hallenstadion, he carried an aura of power, and, I thought, of inherited entitlement. There seemed also to be a reassurance to the FAs and football barons, alarmed at the corruption fallout and seeing the prosecutions by the US law enforcement authorities as an invasion.
‘At the end,’ he said, asking for their votes, ‘I am one of you.’
Infantino, by comparison to the Sheikh, had the look of a schoolboy dressed in his best for his big day, his tie ever so slightly askew. He worked his way through a speech which was impressively multi-lingual but lacking grand inspiration for delegates who had heard interminably many of these before, until he reminded them of his $5m commitment, and made a clinching promise:
‘The money of Fifa is your money!’ he shouted to them from the stage. ‘It is not the money of the Fifa president, it is your money!’
There was, in response, a ripple of spontaneous applause. Many of those in the Hallenstadion said the mood in the hall changed. Kohzo Tshima of Japan, a new member of the executive committee, was quoted by Graham Dunbar of the Associated Press, saying: ‘Gianni’s speech was a president’s speech,’ and that his words changed the atmosphere.
Infantino overturned the expectation of Salman in the first round of voting, for which a two-thirds majority was required, edging him by three votes, 88–85. Candidate Tokyo Sexwale, a South African former ANC activist in the apartheid era turned multi-millionaire businessman, who had been encouraged in growing Fifa activities by Blatter, withdrew before the voting, seeing that the African FAs were not behind him and he had too little support. Jérôme Champagne, who had declared himself and run an energetic campaign with a platform of detailed proposed reforms, received only seven votes. Prince Ali held the balance for the second round, which would be won just with a majority of the votes. Having been a critic of Salman’s, and supported by Uefa when he stood against Blatter at the last election in May 2015, almost all his votes went to Infantino in the second round.
Declared the winner, with 115 countries’ football associations for him, beating Salman whose vote nudged up by only three, Infantino was overcome. He did not look like his old boss, Platini, who had long learned to accept that podiums and triumphs were his given destiny; he looked more like a Swiss student, who could not believe he was really there, actually becoming the president of Fifa. Accepting hugs and handshakes, patting his heart, giving gestures of thanks to the arena, Infantino gathered himself to make a victory speech.
‘We will restore the image of Fifa and the respect of Fifa. And everyone in the world will applaud us,’ he promised. ‘I am convinced a new era is starting.’
At the congress, before the vote, the internal changes proposed by Scala and his reform committee had been passed by 87 per cent, 179 of the 207 voting FAs (Kuwait and Indonesia were suspended at the time). The new structures had a long gestation, beginning with Blatter’s appointment of Mark Pieth in 2011. Pieth told me that he had suggested Scala’s appointment for the job of implementing the proposed reforms:
‘I didn’t know him intimately, but people told me good things about him,’ Pieth said, explaining that he was impressed by Scala’s sense of independence. ‘He had stepped down three times in his career when he didn’t like what he saw; he would not be held hostage.’
Pieth described his general perception of Fifa as like a system of patronage: FA delegates from around the world who had done very well in Blatter’s era and benefited from his development money and appointments. He said Blatter had given him the familiar defence to the suspicion of corruption, emphasising that he never took money to which he was not entitled.
Pieth said he had replied: ‘Yes, but giving can be a problem, too.’
When he first arrived at Fifa to examine its governance, Pieth said he had asked Blatter why he was implementing reforms, what his motivation was for cleaning up, as he could have got away with just carrying on as before.
‘That was a good question, we can see now,’ Pieth told me. ‘Because he killed himself [with the implementation of an independent ethics committee and other measures]; it was an own goal.’
That was when Blatter, he said, told him: ‘I want to leave the house by the front door.’
‘We said: ‘OK, even if you have not excelled in the past, you can leave this place [with changes] that your successors will find it difficult to dismantle.’
Yet in a book, Reforming Fifa, written after his committee stepped down in 2013, Pieth recorded that, surprisingly, the greatest opposition to the recommended reforms had come from Uefa. In particular, Uefa refused to vote for limits to the terms a Fifa president could serve, and for Fifa to carry out integrity tests on proposed executive committee members, arguing the regional confederations should do it themselves.
Pieth saw it as a reluctance to sanction these reforms by Platini–who did go on to a third election as Uefa president–and others who expected to be taking over from Blatter when he finally stepped down: ‘They were less than happy to see the ground rules change fundamentally just before they came into office,’ he wrote. ‘… They feared for their power basis; the real issue was football politics.’
This was a major factor in the decision of his committee to disband, Pieth said, along with fury in the autumn of 2013 when it became clear Blatter was preparing to stand again in 2015.
‘Uefa was blocking the rest of our reforms, and we would have been confronted with yet another congress where they were blocking the introduction of limits to terms of office,’ he said. ‘We would have looked silly.’
At that 2013 congress when Pieth’s committee stepped down, Scala was appointed to chair an audit and compliance committee, which would recommend and oversee the reforms. He was a corporate finance executive, a long-term director of Stock-Exchange-listed companies in Switzerland, with a straight-talking, jovial way about him. He soon showed he was comfortable being outspoken about the governance crisis Fifa was in, and that he saw a stark absence of internal compliance structures comparable to those accepted as normal in large companies. After working at Fifa for some time, Scala, too, perceived it as an operation in which delegates and FAs benefited from the largesse and patronage of the president. But he also sympathised to some extent with Blatter’s view that the major corruption, as alleged in the US indictment, was endemic not at Fifa in Zurich, but in the confederations.
‘There are certainly questions to answer at Fifa itself,’ Scala told me, ‘but I did not see evidence of systemic corruption. It was systemic in some confederations, and member associations, over which Fifa has no direct control; in fact via the executive committee, the confederations control Fifa.’
Scala called for the confederations and national FAs also to undertake reforms, including basics such as annual audits, independent ethics committee-style structures and integrity checks for their own officials.
In the reforms Scala ended up presenting to the 2016 Fifa congress before Infantino’s election, he had compromised on term limits, offering three terms of four years as a maximum. That still seemed a long time for one person to head an organisation governing world football and handling billions of dollars, but it was significantly shorter than the twenty-four years Havelange had spent cementing the modern culture, and the twenty-one Blatter had planned before he agreed to step down. The other main reforms were designed to reshape Fifa into having a recognisably modern internal form, corporate-style checks and balances. The twenty-four-person executive committee was to be replaced by a thirty-six-member council, which would be responsible for setting overall strategy and direction, to which a separate executive board of professionals would work and manage Fifa and its projects day to day.
This was itself a compromise: Scala is understood to have told the executive committee, when he first presented proposals in July 2015, that they should all ideally resign, and twelve people with no connection to the past should take over. That plan was said to have been met with a stunned silence, and so the new council, with that unwieldy-looking number of members, was proposed as a Plan B.
The president was now to be non-executive; not responsible as Blatter and Havelange had been for running every aspect of Fifa but, as the elected head of the council, setting strategy and ensuring the executive worked to it. Pieth’s and Scala’s committees also proposed as a basic principle that Fifa should end the secrecy about what Blatter and the other top executives earned, which had long been a focus for complaints, because major corporations publish them as a measure of transparency and accountability. Scala proposed the standard corporate practices of having an independent committee to determine the correct level of pay, and for Fifa to publish them.
That was common sense and was passed by the congress but once Infantino was installed as the president it was to provoke a toxic and unexpected clash, very quickly indeed.
There was little public sign of it in the first weeks after Infantino cleared his desk in the Uefa house of football by Lake Geneva, and moved to one at the House of Fifa on the hill above Lake Zurich. Just three weeks later, Fifa issued its lawsuit for ‘restitution’ from the defendants charged by the US indictments, positioning the organisation as the victim, rather than involved in the corruption. The accusation, that the defendants ‘looked for ways to line their own pockets and siphon off opportunities’, could hardly have been stronger had it come from the most vitriolic of critics over the years. As a piece of legal positioning, a break with the past and a reclaiming of Fifa’s purpose, it was intended to be very forthright indeed.
Infantino would indeed see the World Cup expanded, gaining approval for a forty-eight-country tournament to be played first in 2026. He also set in train ‘Fifa Forward’, a more sophisticated and accountable system for paying out the huge new money he had promised to pour into development. Each FA would have its own development plan; they would receive a basic $100,000 for their running costs, then an additional $50,000 was to be available to fund each of the specific initiatives, some of them very basic, like employing a secretary general, a technical director, organising a league, promoting women’s football, a good governance programme, a grass-roots or refereeing development strategy.
Infantino’s new system was also promising to address the criticism that too much of the GOAL project money had been vulnerable to siphoning off by the recipients, by having stronger detailed involvement by Fifa, and independent audits.
‘We are introducing enhanced oversight controls to ensure that this increase in football development spending is transparent, carefully managed and effective,’ Fifa promised.
The chairman of the development committee which would run the new programme and allocate its multi-millions of dollars to the national football associations of the world was Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain. Defeated in the election for president after Infantino thumped home his promise to send more of Fifa’s millions to the voters, Salman was now in charge of delivering the money. When the programme was launched, he said: ‘We are making a qualitative step to improve the impact of Fifa’s development projects and better serve the member associations and confederations.’
But some internal rumblings that all was not well inside the new Infantino era at the House of Fifa suddenly blared out at his first congress, in Mexico, on 14 May 2016. Domenico Scala suddenly resigned, and dropped a very strong public statement to announce it. He said that the independence of crucial reform committees had been fundamentally undone: his own, the ethics committee, appeals committee and governance committee. The new thirty-six-person council, he said, had been given by the congress the new power to sack members of these independent committees, including chairmen, which had, in his view, profoundly damaging consequences:
‘With this decision, it will henceforth be possible for the council to impede investigations against single members at any time, by dismissing the responsible committee members or by keeping them acquiescent through the threat of a dismissal. Thereby, those bodies are factually deprived of their independence and are in danger of becoming auxiliary agents of those whom they should actually supervise,’ his statement read.
‘I am consternated about this decision, because it undermines a central pillar of the good governance of Fifa and it destroys a substantial achievement of the reforms.’
And because of it, and because he believed the committees would now be a sham process lacking independence, he was resigning–as Pieth said, Scala had done this three times in his career, on points of principle.
It was true, a rule passed almost unanimously, late at the congress without any discussion, did give the council the right until the next year to appoint and dismiss members of those committees. Scala suspected that it was a ruse to do exactly what he was warning against: sack him as the chairman of the audit and compliance committee.
Just days later, a conversation had by the council in a meeting at this congress, before the measure was recommended and adopted, was leaked to the media. It was a glimpse into the new Fifa in unguarded, unpolished discussion, and it proved Scala’s suspicion to be correct. The tape was tremendously damaging to Infantino, and disillusioning. Just three months into the job, he told the council members that he still had no contract with Fifa because he had rejected the one proposed to him by Scala. It was part of Scala’s new official responsibility to chair a new compensation sub-committee, which set the president’s salary.
‘It was a proposal which I found insulting,’ Infantino told the council. ‘It was less than half of what the previous president was earning the last year. Last year, it was published, 3.6m [CHF]; the offer made to me was less than half of this amount.’
Infantino also told his new colleagues that he had heard from Cornel Borbély, the chair of the ‘investigatory’ arm of the ethics committee, that Scala had filed a complaint against him. The basis of it was that Infantino and his wife were looking at a house in Zurich costing 25m CHF, which Infantino said was ‘complete nonsense’–and that he was claiming expenses, when he had not signed his contract of employment yet.
The ‘insulting’ salary package Scala had determined for Infantino was quickly clarified: it was 1.95m CHF. That was in fact more than half the 3.6m CHF Blatter was paid the previous year. Scala had made it clear it was not an offer; this was the new system, in which the president’s salary was considered by an independent committee, and they had decided that 1.95m CHF was right for the new non-executive-style presidency, and compared well with other, very highly paid roles in similar-sized companies or organisations elsewhere. The two were undoubtedly at odds, and it was understood that Scala did pass on, as he believed he was duty bound to, complaints about Infantino, which grew in the following days, as some employees were made redundant and further stories emerged, including that Infantino and his family had been flown by private jet to meet the Pope in Rome.
The acceptance of the flight on a benefactor’s private jet was potentially toxic. Jérôme Valcke, Blatter’s faithful secretary general, had been dismissed from his job and then in February 2016 banned from football for twelve years by the ethics committee, for a series of alleged scandals including excessive use of private jets. Valcke was embroiled in a World Cup ticket scheme found to be improper, and was also accused of trying to sell the TV rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to the Caribbean, presumed to be Jack Warner, at an undervalue. The ethics committee stated it had been found that Valcke ‘deliberately tried to obstruct the ongoing proceedings against him by attempting to delete or deleting several files and folders relevant to the investigation’.
On the use of private jets, the ethics committee said: ‘By travelling at Fifa’s expense purely for sightseeing reasons as well as repeatedly choosing private flights for his trips over commercial flights without any business rationale for doing so, Mr Valcke gained an advantage for himself and his relatives.’
On 17 March 2016, the attorney general in Switzerland announced he was conducting criminal proceedings against Valcke ‘on suspicion of various acts of criminal mismanagement and other offences’, in response to complaints made following the Fifa ethics committee investigation. The ‘presumption of innocence applies’, the announcement stated.
Valcke’s lawyer was reported to have said that his client had done ‘absolutely nothing wrong’. I did contact him asking to talk to Valcke and discuss this alleged wrongdoing, but he did not respond.
After all that, and the expectation of reforms and a more befitting culture, the revelation that Infantino had taken a private jet could hardly have sounded a more dispiriting note. But on the leaked tape, as shocking, frankly, as hearing the new Fifa president, who had come from Uefa standing on values of integrity and transparency, describe nearly 2m CHF as an ‘insulting’ salary, was the quality of what came next. The council, with the exception of David Gill, the FA’s representative, who sounded flabbergasted at the turn of the conversation, was as unctuously indulgent of Infantino as the congress sycophants would habitually be of Blatter.
The new president was immediately told that the council shared his astonishment, that ‘people are trying to set traps everywhere’, and that he had their support. Not one suggested to Infantino that 1.95m CHF was not all that bad and that he had no right to refuse it; in fact the opposite: it turned out that the chairmen of the six confederations had all signed a letter asking Scala to step down. He had refused, and there were no powers for the council to remove him; under the reforms only just adopted, that could be done only by the congress. Then, on the tape, another of the council members is heard saying that Scala should be dismissed, and they should seek the new power from congress to dismiss members of the independent committees. Infantino then actually agreed with that proposal, saying: ‘If somebody brings the question to the congress, I advise the congress. It is a democratic decision.’
Gill did protest, saying if congress was going to be told that Scala had to step down and have the new powers to dismiss put to a vote, it would create ‘an unbelievable situation’.
Then Infantino himself indicated that Sunil Gulati, the USA FA representative on the council, was going to be an emissary to see if Scala would step down.
‘If he doesn’t, we will in any case ask for this provision to pass by the congress.’
Infantino talked about the future when they would have a new chair for this committee which set his salary, who would be ‘a real world personality’.
The tape confirmed the worst interpretation of the measure which had prompted Scala to resign: Infantino and his council really were seeking the power to remove the chairman of an independent committee if they objected to what he was doing. The fact that it was Scala, who was seen generally as a strong, steadying reformer while Fifa executive committee members were being arrested, indicted and dumped for prodigious corruption, and that it was because Infantino found a 1.95m CHF salary ‘insulting’, comprehensively ended Infantino’s honeymoon period. The publication of the top executives’ earnings for the first time in the 2015 financial report also included Scala’s, and showed he had given up $200,000 when resigning in principle at the perceived threat to the reforms’ independence.
Suddenly the young, reforming Swiss executive who had vanquished the dispiriting prospect of a Sheikh Salman presidency was exposed to look greedy, money-driven and Machiavellian, and the council supine and shifty in support. There was an outcry, particularly in Switzerland itself, then more stories were leaked, of expenses allegedly claimed by Infantino, appointments and sackings without due process, and soon the ethics committee was formally investigating the freshman president.
Just after this ugliness was exposed, with the pressure building on Infantino to justify himself, one week after the congress Fifa suddenly sacked Markus Kattner, the acting secretary general since Jérôme Valcke’s departure in February 2016, who had been at Fifa for thirteen years. Fifa sources said that the US lawyers installed at the House of Fifa dealing with the criminal investigations, Quinn Emanuel, had ‘uncovered’ irregular bonus payments to Kattner.
Days later, Fifa–equally suddenly–announced the results of a Quinn Emanuel investigation into years of earnings for Blatter, Valcke and Kattner. They were very fat, and included huge bonuses for successful organising of the World Cup. Fifa gave a headline figure of around $80m between the three of them over the previous five years. There was plenty to be stunned and outraged by: Blatter was on a most recent basic salary of 3m CHF awarded after he won the post-arrests election in May 2015, with a 1.5m CHF potential annual bonus, and a performance-based bonus of an extra 12m CHF if he worked a successful four years, which clearly he didn’t. In December 2010, Fifa now revealed, Blatter had been paid an 11m CHF bonus for the World Cup in South Africa. In 2011, they had each been awarded contractual bonuses if the 2014 World Cup in Brazil was a success: 12m CHF for Blatter; 10m CHF to Valcke; 4m CHF to Kattner.
The Fifa announcement alleged it was a ‘coordinated effort’ by them to ‘enrich themselves’, arguing that effectively they were authorising each other’s contracts, and there were multiple amendments when contracts were extended or bonuses paid. Julio Grondona, the long-serving Argentinian chair of the finance committee in Blatter’s time, had approved many of the contracts, including all of Blatter’s, as was the required system at the time. Blatter had had the authority to approve Valcke’s contractual terms under Fifa’s old regulations, and Valcke and Blatter to approve Kattner’s. In a remarkably outspoken announcement, featuring quotes from the Quinn Emanuel lawyer, Fifa said some of the dates of contracts being approved were ‘ominous’. For example, on 30 April 2011, shortly before the presidential election at which bin Hammam was then still running against Blatter, and could have won and not retained Valcke and Kattner, both were given eight-year extensions to their contracts. The new contracts handsomely increased their salaries, to 1.4m CHF and 960,000 CHF respectively, with a bonus. If their contracts were terminated, they were guaranteed full pay for the whole of the term to 2019, and also Fifa was committed to pay fees and costs for any legal actions in relation to their employment.
‘These two provisions appear to violate mandatory Swiss law,’ Fifa alleged.
Kattner’s contract was then extended to run until 2023, an extension granted on 31 May 2015, just four days after the US indictments and arrests had plunged Fifa into trauma and disgrace.
It was clear that they had earned on a vast scale, although Blatter’s actual salary was not as high as $10m, which had been speculated over the years. Because they had not been published, the world had not known that they were paid huge bonuses for pulling off the World Cup, which did make billions for their employer. Many Fifa staff, in particular, most of them good, smart, multi-lingual professionals who love football and try to do a good job, even minding the pennies while the bosses brought disgrace on the organisation, were appalled at the scale of it. In the eyes of many, it damaged Blatter, who had mostly been a charming and benevolent boss to junior employees in the vaulting corridors of the headquarters.
It was, though, odd that so long after the indictments, with Quinn Emanuel having been embedded in Fifa House for a year, they and Fifa should suddenly, with a scandal looming over Infantino, release all this detail about the earnings of Blatter and his senior executives. The salaries and bonuses of Blatter, 3.6m CHF in total, and Valcke, 2.1m CHF, had just been published by Fifa at its congress anyway, without a murmur that there was anything irregular. There was also an accusation made very pointedly, a persistent theme throughout the lengthy announcement, that Scala was to blame for some of these earnings. The new compensation sub-committee, which he chaired and which came into force in 2013, had approved these astonishing contracts, the new Fifa repeatedly stated. Coming barely three weeks after Scala’s public resignation on a point of principle, and the leaked tape which cast Infantino in an awful light, Fifa and Quinn Emanuel were now publicly suggesting Scala had sanctioned excessive pay which could amount to malpractice. Quinn Emanuel said it was referring the contracts and payments to the ethics committee, ‘has shared this information’ with the Swiss attorney general and ‘will brief the US Department of Justice’ as well.
Scala never responded to this; he left his resignation statement as his final word. It was pointed out on his behalf that the contracts of Blatter, Valcke and Kattner were agreed in 2010–11 when Scala’s committee was not in force, and, when it was, it had no power to end the contracts. The extensions and bonuses, while they are vast, were approved according to the contracts and rules in force at the time, it was said. When Blatter and Valcke’s salaries were first published in the 2015 financial report, Fifa said officially that it had carried out independent comparison ‘benchmarking’, which found their earnings in line with companies of similarly massive turnover. There was a strong feeling that the contract details of Infantino’s predecessors had suddenly been revealed in this shocked announcement to help the new president with his difficult battle for credibility, so early in his dream job.
On 5 August 2016, the ethics committee, whose chairmen and members could under the new powers passed by the congress now be sacked by the Fifa council, presided over by Infantino, cleared him of any wrongdoing. It found that the private flights did not involve conflicts of interest, because, it was understood, the rich individual who bestowed on Infantino the use of his jet was not involved in football. Complaints about how Infantino had hired and fired people in his first months, ‘as well as Mr Infantino’s conduct with regard to his contract with Fifa, if at all, constituted internal compliance issues rather than an ethical matter’, the ethics committee said in a statement.
‘As such, the final report… concluded that no ethical breaches had been committed by Mr Infantino.’
And that was that. Infantino, pictured with a beaming smile, issued an official statement saying he was pleased that the truth had prevailed:
‘With this matter now resolved, the President and Fifa administration will continue to focus on developing football as well as their efforts to improve the organisation,’ he said. ‘Tangible progress has been made in key areas such as ensuring that those who have acted against the interests of football are identified and held to account, improving Fifa’s governance and repairing its reputation, and restoring trust with its stakeholders. This critical work will continue.’
On 31 August 2016, the new chairman of the compensation sub-committee announced that it had ‘agreed’ with Infantino a basic gross salary of 1.5m CHF. With pension and benefits, this was understood to be very similar to the 1.95m CHF he had turned down before the congress. Then in September 2016, the Fifa ethics committee announced an investigation into the revelations about the contracts of Blatter, Valcke and Kattner, stating that it related to possible bribery, conflicts of interest and general conduct, while Kattner faced a charge related to allegedly leaking information about Infantino to the media. It stressed there was a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
And so, in these ways, the old guard at Fifa was supplanted by the new.