There is a scene that sums up ten years of stewardship better than any financial statement. On Sunday 5 July, hours after a referee sent off American forward Folarin Balogun in the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, FIFA’s disciplinary committee overturned the sanction. The decision came after a phone call from Donald Trump to Gianni Infantino. The FIFA president confirmed it publicly, while insisting that world football’s judicial bodies act independently. Nobody who has followed Infantino’s trajectory since 2016 was particularly surprised. The man who promised to clean up an institution mired in the corruption scandal known as FIFA Gate ended up building something rather different from what he promised, a personal power machine that turns every announced reform into an instrument of permanence. Ten years after that manifesto titled Taking Football Forward, it is worth asking what remains of the promises and what was erected in their place.
The mechanism
The expansion of the World Cup from 32 to 48 nations for the 2026 edition, currently underway in the United States, Canada and Mexico, was presented as a gesture of inclusion towards Africa and Asia. It also functions, and above all, as an exercise in electoral loyalty building. More teams means more grateful federations, more matches to sell to broadcasters, more tickets and more exposure for sponsors. In an interview granted to Bluewin, Infantino already hinted that FIFA is studying a 64 team format. The logic is not sporting, it is electoral arithmetic.
The tournament’s hosting model followed the same calculation. The single host country, a historic rule of the World Cup since 1930, began to crack almost as soon as Infantino took office. The 2026 edition was split between three North American countries to share infrastructure costs and multiply the federations benefiting from the organisation. The 2030 edition will go even further, staged across Spain, Portugal and Morocco, with opening matches held in South America to mark the centenary of the first World Cup, a formula that scatters the tournament across three continents and raises, among other things, an environmental cost that FIFA has never publicly quantified, given the volume of intercontinental travel such a format demands from teams, staff and supporters alike. The single host model has not disappeared, though. It returns in 2034, when Saudi Arabia will host the tournament alone, with nothing to share with anyone.
The Forward programme runs on the same principle, only with money instead of places. Created the same year Infantino took power, it distributes resources to FIFA’s 211 member federations, more than double what was granted before his arrival. The amounts grew steadily with each cycle, from five million dollars per federation between 2016 and 2019, to six and then eight million for the 2023 to 2026 period. FIFA presents these figures as global football development. They are also, in a less publicised way, the material foundation of an electoral coalition built federation by federation, cheque by cheque.
FIFA’s official budget for the 2023 to 2026 cycle was revised upward to 13 billion dollars, double what was collected in the previous cycle.
The institution’s total revenue, which stood at around 7.6 billion dollars over the 2019 to 2022 cycle, was officially budgeted at 13 billion for the current cycle, with some sector economists projecting figures as high as 15 billion, driven by ticket prices for the expanded World Cup itself. That money does not circulate in a vacuum. It flows towards the same 211 federations whose votes decide who runs the institution every four years.
The result of that strategy became visible in April 2026, when the Confederation of African Football and the Asian Football Confederation announced, according to reports from the specialised sports governance press, a joint endorsement of Infantino’s re election that would amount to 101 of the 211 available votes, before the 2027 electoral process had even officially opened.
There is no need to read too much into that number.
A candidate who secures half the electorate months before the vote is not being evaluated, he is being confirmed.
The only limit he removed himself
Of the four promises made in 2016, the most concrete was also the easiest to measure, and it is the one Infantino failed to keep. He promised to cap presidential terms at twelve years, a commitment made directly after the fall of Joseph Blatter, tainted by the corruption scandal the press dubbed FIFA Gate, which ended in arrests, court proceedings in the United States and Switzerland, and an institution widely considered beyond repair. Infantino presented himself at the time as the necessary break. He was elected in 2016, re elected in 2019 and 2023, and confirmed in Vancouver, on 30 April 2026, that he will seek a fourth term in 2027. FIFA’s Council does not count his first, partial and transitional term within the limit set by the very statutes Infantino helped draft. Under that favourable accounting, he could run the institution until 2031, fifteen years after his arrival, three more than the absolute ceiling he himself had promised.
The curve of his pay follows a slope almost identical to that of the revenue he administers. In 2016 he earned around 1.28 million euros a year. By 2024, FIFA’s official documents record 4.44 million euros, while tax filings submitted to American authorities put the figure above 5 million. FIFA is not publicly listed and does not answer to shareholders the way a public company would, yet its president is already paid like one. In April 2026, in New York, Infantino defended the World Cup’s steep ticket prices by explaining that the institution earns an entire cycle’s worth of money in a single month of tournament, in order to later fund the other forty seven federations. The argument serves to justify ticketing policy. It also serves, more quietly, to normalise the growth of his own salary.
It is worth recalling where Infantino came from, to measure the distance travelled. Joseph Blatter fell in 2015, swept away by a joint investigation from the United States Department of Justice and Swiss authorities, which ended with dozens of officials arrested, prosecuted or banned, and left FIFA’s image reduced to a byword for a briefcase stuffed with cash. Infantino, then UEFA’s general secretary, presented himself as the man untouched by that mud, the Swiss technocrat capable of separating football administration from the personal loyalties that had sunk his predecessor. Ten years later, the separation between management and personal loyalty that he promised is precisely what has vanished, replaced by a meticulously documented network of favours, case by case.
He also promised to keep sport separate from politics. Instead, he acts as a head of state without a territory. He attends G20 summits, poses for photographs alongside authoritarian leaders, and comments on world geopolitics with the ease of someone who holds a permanent seat at the table. He was seen alongside the Emir of Qatar during preparations for the 2022 World Cup, backed the awarding of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, and travelled to Riyadh in May 2025 to take part in events devoted to Saudi football, a kingdom under sustained criticism from human rights organisations for its treatment of migrant workers and its record on free expression, criticism Infantino has never echoed in public. On 5 December 2025, in Washington, he presented Donald Trump with the first FIFA Peace Prize, created specially for the occasion, weeks after Trump himself had publicly complained about not winning the Nobel. A consolation prize, tailor made.
The live proof
The Balogun case is not an isolated episode, it is the practical demonstration of the entire mechanism, unfolding in real time as this piece is being written, on the eve of a final that will crown the most expensive and most heavily marketed tournament in the sport’s history. The forward had been sent off following a VAR review for a challenge deemed dangerous and reckless on Bosnian defender Tarik Muharemovic. The automatic sanction, a one match suspension, left no room for interpretation under FIFA’s own disciplinary code. Even so, a body presented as independent folded within hours, faced with a call from the very man Infantino had honoured seven months earlier.
American Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly called the original decision unfair, in language unusual for a senior diplomat commenting on a sporting matter, describing the situation, in his own words, as one where the United States had been cheated by the red card. The Belgian football federation is keeping the case open, citing legal certainty and equal treatment. Dozens of members of the European Parliament are pushing for an inquiry into Infantino’s role in the decision. UEFA, in a statement that avoids mentioning Trump’s call directly, noted that an automatic suspension following a sending off is not a discretionary option for sporting bodies and requires no further ruling to take effect. Belgium’s foreign minister was blunter still, warning that if a single phone call really does explain the decision, then football’s most basic rules are being trampled.
The London based organisation FairSquare has been documenting this pattern of political closeness for months. In December 2025 it filed a first complaint with FIFA’s own ethics committee, over the Peace Prize awarded to Trump, and has since received nothing beyond an acknowledgement of receipt, with no further word on the case’s progress. This week the organisation moved the matter onto more dangerous ground for Infantino, the ethics commission of the International Olympic Committee, of which he has been a member since 10 January 2020 and before which he swore to respect the Olympic Charter and its code of ethics.
The complaint filed by FairSquare with the International Olympic Committee documents five separate breaches of the political neutrality rules binding its members.
The new complaint already carries the backing of the Norwegian football federation, which joined the process in June, and of fifty members of the European Parliament who formally urged FIFA to demonstrate its commitment to fairness and accountability. Neither ethics commission has announced any sanction. FIFA has not disclosed the opening of any formal investigation into the first complaint, filed more than six months ago.
The Balogun affair did not land at just any moment. Weeks earlier, Pierluigi Collina, FIFA’s head of refereeing, had been forced to publicly defend the integrity of the 2026 World Cup, after Egypt questioned the officiating decisions that sealed its elimination against Argentina. An institution already facing doubts about the consistency of its own referees ended up demonstrating, weeks later, that not even its disciplinary committee can withstand a call from the American president. The coincidence excuses nothing, it makes matters worse.
The World Cup final is played on 19 July in New York. That same day, Infantino will hand over the trophy alongside Trump, exactly as had been planned before the red card scandal ever broke.
The power Infantino has built over ten years does not depend on these commissions acting. It depends, precisely, on their continuing not to, on the gap between what statutes promise and what institutions actually enforce…
G.S.
