Dean Young, Liverpool South Socialist Party
FIFA President Gianni Infantino has caused controversy, not for the first time, with leaked information about his attempts to sell shares in the ownership of the World Cup to private investors. Basically trying to privatise the World Cup.
Before the recent World Cup, the largest ever, Infantino had already racked up an impressive list of controversies such as awarding Donald Trump, by all accounts a close friend of his, a ‘World Peace’ prize. That aged well. Infantino was also gifted a prize by Putin called the ‘Order of Friendship’ in 2019, shortly after the Russia 2018 World Cup.
Added to this is the fact that in the recent World Cup, hosted in the US, Mexico and Canada, FIFA stepped in to overturn a red card given to US national team player Folarin Balogun after Trump told Infantino to do so!
That is not the end of his list of accomplishments. FIFA under his leadership has also implemented ‘dynamic pricing’, a very controversial concept in which ticket prices spike upwards based on the demand. This resulted in ticket prices being thousands upon thousands of dollars for games, something common in US sport but certainly not in football.
Was football always this way?
A key turning point in the history of football’s commercialisation was 1974 when João Havelange, a Brazilian son of a Belgian arms dealer who spoke positively of Nazi Germany and a supporter of the Brazilian Junta, was elected as president of FIFA by portraying himself as an anti-imperialist. He went on to take FIFA to new levels of corruption – via the use of a patronage system on FIFA committees (with the perks of vast expenses accounts to representatives of FAs around the world). He also paid lavishly for representatives from neocolonial nations to attend the FIFA Congress, essentially buying up votes.
This shows that football is not immune to the pressures of the world situation. The bureaucrats who lead football’s institutions often have close ties with the most outrageous military dictatorships and finance capital.
Football commercialised in the mid 1970s amid the collapse in the post-war boom; new markets were needed for capital to expand itself and to increase profitable ventures. Today it is similar but capitalism is in an even worse situation – global economic stagnation or downturn. Football, the world’s sport, is a lucrative business. Therefore the capitalist class demands football opens itself up for further exploitation.
But fans won’t accept this. The fight against the Super League in 2021 which resulted in it being cancelled, the fight against domestic league games being played abroad and crucially fights against ticket price increases at various clubs (such as Liverpool recently), suggest any pro-market reforms won’t be accepted lying down. Even Infantino’s plans have been destroyed after continental football associations such as UEFA threatened to refuse to participate in future World Cups!
What is needed is for the world’s game to belong the people it exists for – the world working class and poor! It is the world’s game because it is played by working-class and poor people from the favelas of Brazil to the back streets of post-industrial Britain (with everywhere else in between!) Football clubs should be community-owned, democratically controlled by fan associations and the wider community the teams serve. There should be a cap on ticket prices, such as the ‘twenty is plenty’ campaign. The global bureaucracy of football should be swept to one side – with those who are employed by the likes of FIFA accountable to a global network of football fan associations and councils.
Football in a socialist world
All of this would only be possible within a socialist world. Football may not be at the forefront of all people’s minds in this transformation but think of all the talented footballers who never get a chance to entertain the world because they are born in such poverty that they cannot play at a grassroots level (or can’t even afford boots, a ball or a kit). Capitalism holds back the cultural development of humanity alongside its productive capacity. The unleashing of human potential internationally cannot even be described fully.
Gianni Infantino in such a world would be confined to being merely an awkward footnote in history. Perhaps one day he might be the topic of a tie-breaker question in a pub quiz.
