In the 1990s, I asked the CEO
of ATT whether there is not a conflict of interest in him being chairman of the
board tasked with holding the corporation’s management accountable. “The buck
stops here,” Armstrong replied as the dean of Yale’s business school looked on,
uncomfortably. Fortunately, I was a student in another school at Yale at the
time. Fast forward to 2026. The board of FIFA backed up its president, Gianni
Infantino in spite of the fact that he had overruled a red-card to favor the
U.S. team in that year’s World Cup and then he proposed selling a minority
share of FIFA to private investors—a plan that was almost universally viewed by
the regional football (soccer) associations as selling out the world’s game to
private financial interests so they might profit from the non-profit international
organization. FIFA had Infantino’s back, which prompted regional associations,
namely UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC to publicly raise a red flag concerning the very
credibility of Infantino for having tried to sell out a minority financial
interest in FIFA. Albeit sheer speculation, given U.S. President Trump’s
interest in financial transactions in relation to his political office, and
Infantino’s having acquiesced to Trump’s request that the one-game suspension
from a red card against a player on the U.S. team be revoked, I wonder whether the
two men hatched the idea of selling off a minority stake in FIFA to private
investors, which might have included Trump himself, his family members, and even
the Trump Organization. Such is the nature of collusion in what James Burns refers
to in his text, Leadership, as transactional, as distinct from
transformational, leadership.
Evincing ethical leadership,
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, AFC president Salman Al-Khalifa, and CONCAFAF
president, along with three general secretaries signed an open letter critical
of FIFA as well as its president. In the letter, the regional presidents assert
that Infantino’s proposal to sell a minority financial interest in FIFA instantiated
a “fundamental breach of trust” with the three regional, constituent
organizations whose president had signed the letter.[1]
Rather than targeting the plan itself, the letter goes after the character of
FIFA’s president, and thus indirectly the ethos of FIFA’s governing board in supporting
its president in spite of the “red-flag” fiasco and the private-equity plan. Infantino’s
judgment is also in the letter’s cross-hairs, for in addition to overruling the
automatic one-game suspension for a red card and attempting to profit
private equity investors, the man’s “apology” itself was rather pathetic. “The
letter . . . slams his so-called apology, which failed to acknowledge that the
idea to sell of the World Cup is innately wrong, but instead attributes the
mistakes to miscommunication. . . . [The letter] treats this as a failure of
communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgment.”[2]
In the letter, the three regional presidents are claiming that the apology’s claim
of miscommunication is actually a lie, and this renders the apology as a
subterfuge rather than as a valid apology. Lying in apologizing is not only bad
judgment, but unethical as well. So too, overruling FIFA’s own rule regarding the
automatic red-card penalty at the behest of a political official with a
vested interest in the matter can be regarded as a case of bad judgment and
unethical decision-making.
In short, whereas the letter
could have been written to castigate the private-equity proposal itself, and
even to add in a critique of the authority of FIFA’s president to overrule a referee
and FIFA’s own rule on red-card penalties, the focus is instead on Infantino’s
leadership, and in particular his judgment and ethics. That FIFA’s board had
given its president a full vote of confidence in spite of his lapses likely
prompted the regional organizations to step up to the plate with their own letter
firmly directed to Infantino’s character, and, by implication, those of the
members of FIFA’s governing board. Looking at Infantino’s financial proposal,
the three regional organizations, representing their respective members, wrote,
“we speak collectively today” to point out regarding Infantino’s behavior, “It
is not the conduct of a custodian of the game, but of one who believes the game
is answerable to him.”[3]
This damning accusation stands in juxtaposition to a photo of Infantino
standing in front of a Roman Catholic bishop at the swearing in of Columbia’s
new president at the time of the letter’s release. The Christian message of humility,
manifested in leaders by serving, is antipodal to the sheer hubris of
using an “apology” as a subterfuge by which to side-step rather than
acknowledge responsibility for one’s judgment and unethical conduct.
In 2025, I spoke with a former
deputy Secretary of the UN at Harvard. I asked her if the UN’s political and enforcement
impotence in the face of Russian and Israeli military aggression could be reformed
from within. Could the UN reform itself? The answer I received stunned me. “The
UN cannot be reformed from within because of the five veto-holding powers in
the Security Council,” the former UN official said. Something similar could
perhaps be said of FIFA in 2026 in that the abject failure of its board to hold
its president accountable rendered the organization itself beyond reform from
within. Accordingly, perhaps the three regional organizations could have taken
the decision to form a new supra-organization and thus sidestep FIFA for the
next World Cup.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
