Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s mother nicknamed her son the “little rebel”. He was, according to his cousin Renato Vitetta, bouncy and spirited. He loved to play football on the beach when he visited relatives in Italy.
“Let’s just say he wasn’t the best player,” Vitetta said in a documentary on Infantino. “He was always lively and he enjoyed having fun and I remember his mop of red hair and his mother nicknamed him ‘little rebel,’ he was always good fun to be with.”
That famous red hair, the physical “disability” that made him suffer so much as a child that he tried in that roundabout whataboutism so beloved of the bereft of ideas, ethics and decency to equate it with the sexual, racial and human rights abuses in Qatar at the 2022 World Cup.
In a bizarre, hour-long monologue at the World Cup, he started thus: “Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker ... As a child I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. I was bullied for that.”
Indeed. A bald white guy with feelings defending a regime without feelings comparing being a ginga to being a migrant worker in Qatar — an Arabic-African disabled gay migrant worker, nogal.
Of course I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker. But I feel like them because I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country.
— Gianni Infantino
He didn’t feel like a dead migrant worker like the 6,500 from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who died in Qatar in the 10 years after they won the bid for the 2022 World Cup.
He didn’t feel like a poorly paid migrant worker, many of whom experience “wage theft, including unpaid salaries and denial of end-of -service benefits”, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2023.
But, then, as Infantino continued in his monologue: “Of course I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker. But I feel like them because I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country.”
Is that why Infantino loves bullies so much? From Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman to Donald Trump, bullies who want others to feel powerless and humiliated. He knows what bullies want and how to give it to them. Trump, according to his niece, Mary Trump, who wrote in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, had a penchant for “name-calling and teasing kids too young to fight back”.
Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy, referred to as a “reform school”, where the bully was bullied in return: “[Trump] went from a world in which he could do as he pleased to one in which he faced punishment for not making his bed and got slammed against the wall by upperclassmen for no particular reason.”
Infantino, the bullied, was all over Trump the Bully at the presidential inauguration this week. He giggled when Trump said he would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He managed to get off his knees in supplication for long enough to gurgle with happiness because he had been name checked by the orange ogre in a speech.
“What an incredible honour, what an incredible privilege at the victory rally. President Donald J Trump, in his speech, mentioned Fifa, mentioned myself, thanking us, looking forward to the events we are organising here, of course, the World Cup mostly,” he said on social media to the sounds of the Fifa in-house orchestra.
“Well, this is Fifa at the maximum of its respect; being mentioned by the new President of the United States of America in his victory rally, in his victory speech, is unique, is beautiful. I would like to thank President Trump, with whom I have a great friendship, and to assure him that, together, we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world, of course, because football — or soccer — unites the world.”
Does it, though? The world does not feel very united now. It feels disconnected from truth and decency, led by liars and louts, the bullied admiring the bullies so they aren’t next to be called a name or pushed up against a wall.
He was a “little rebel” as a red-haired kid. That’s long gone. He needs a new nickname. Perhaps “Ankles”, because that is all you see of him when he crawls so far up the backside of bullies.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.