Memorable performance: FIFA President Gianni Infantino on Saturday in Qatar.
Image: dpa
Only the head of an organization who doesn’t have to fear any real resistance can do the way the FIFA President preached head and neck in Qatar. Not even from the German Football Association.
DFor the fact that Gianni Infantino, President of the World Football Association FIFA, has just asked the representatives of the national associations not to get bogged down in ideological and political debates during the weeks of the World Cup, he got quite lost in a political and ideological debate on Saturday. One should almost be happy about it. At least one was allowed to document again how the eternal self-protection lie of sport – we are apolitical, ugh, ugh! – pushed his next protagonist into a performative contradiction.
But one should almost be happy because the man who preached to himself at the press conference in Doha is not in charge of an ordinary religious community, but in FIFA, which organizes the most important game in the world. And because once again you have to fear that it wasn’t just his compass that led him into this contradiction, but that of the World Cup hosts and sponsors from Qatar.
