American soft power in Europe continues to reach new post-war lows. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been pursuing an antagonistic and expansionist foreign policy at the expense of our closest transatlantic allies. It is clear that significant, serious, and structural work must be done to repair this relationship in the coming years. Europeans and their leaders have every right to ask themselves why they should ever trust this country to deliver on its promises again. However, among the many hard answers there is an easy one: Gianni Infantino must be sacrificed on the altar of Transatlantic Relations.
Infantino, who sees himself as a world leader, spent much of the leadup to this summer’s World Cup jetting around and presenting himself as The Pope of Football. He handed President Trump a “Peace Prize” with unclear origins on his sole initiative, the most embarrassingly public part of a systemic cozying up to the Trump administration. What was initially easy to read as craven pandering took on a different light after the tournament, when Infantino proposed selling off the commercial assets of the World Cup at an artificially low price in a scheme which would have likely seen him dramatically increase his salary while enriching a Trump-connected private equity fund. It has become abundantly clear that Infantino did not cozy up to Donald Trump as part of a grand plan to protect his organization’s largest event – he did so out of ideological affinity.
If you’ve spent any amount of time at all in spaces Europeans discuss football in, you will see them blame America Writ Large for odious changes in the game such as mid-half commercial breaks. These changes, it must be stated, the United States had nothing at all to do with. No, the runaway commercialization of football is from the top. Infantino is operating with the same invulnerable attitude as the American elites he admires. Europeans increasingly see that American democracy has been corrupted by these elites; it will require a clear rejection of the idea that the powerful are invulnerable to correct this perception both at home and abroad. Aggressively investigating and prosecuting Infantino under existing American laws is the most visible, easiest, and lowest cost way to show Europe that the opponents of this corruption mean to put in the work.
Proving corruption should not be difficult because FIFA has done far less to hide it than they had to in the past. It was reported days before the start of the tournament that FIFA had been renting office space in New York’s Trump Tower, with sources saying that the space was largely kept empty. The true global firestorm came in the wake of FIFA exercising unprecedented broad authority to overturn Folarin Balogun’s suspension in a key match while doing little to dissuade anyone that a phone call from Trump is what led to this extraordinary show of legal power. A legal power which, by the way, was only put on FIFA’s books in 2019 during Infantino’s first term as FIFA’s president. Infantino made all of these decisions in United States jurisdiction, likely leaving a paper trail that can be found by a determined investigation. Unlike the investigations undertaken by the Obama-era justice department, Infantino was doing all this here; which means it should be easier for our investigative resources to nail him here.
It should be noted that bringing down a FIFA president due to a perceived slight against America is not unheard of. The aforementioned Justice Department investigations successfully overturned a much more clandestine corruption scheme to the widespread cheer of football fans around the world. The investigation was so thorough that it led to FIFA officials reportedly being scared to fly to the United States lest they be arrested. This fear can and should be restored. In a great first step, some states have already begun investigating FIFA’s shambolic ticketing process. The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee has sent a letter demanding that FIFA preserve all documents and communications related to their communications with US officials. Unless Johnny Baby has an impossibly clean paper trail to back up the extraordinary public corruption he has been engaged in, he should be called to answer for even the smallest provable crime.
Europeans have shown repeatedly that pulling this lever of power would mean something to them. Since the end of the World Cup every football association in Europe has rejected Infantino’s commercialization plan, with the Prime Minister of the UK going so far as to call on Infantino to resign. Investigating corruption is positive on its face; that public pressure on Infantino could restore a non-negligible amount of trust from our European allies makes this opportunity irresistible. The next Democratic government can buy an outsized amount of soft power among our European allies for the relatively small cost of some investigative resources. Although of course more costly work is required to fully repair Transatlantic relations, this is a shot unequivocally worth taking.