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Is FIFA any better off with Gianni Infantino as president than it was with Sepp Blatter?

By Karl Harrington

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND - JULY 20: A comedian attacked FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter with money during a press conference at the Extraordinary FIFA Executive Committee Meeting at the FIFA headquarters on July 20, 2015 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Photo by Philipp Schmidli/Getty Images)
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND - JULY 20: A comedian attacked FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter with money during a press conference at the Extraordinary FIFA Executive Committee Meeting at the FIFA headquarters on July 20, 2015 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Photo by Philipp Schmidli/Getty Images) /
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Gianni Infantino – is the new president any better?

Fans rejoiced as Blatter was out the door and an era of transparency beckoned under Gianni Infantino.

But, according to Football Leaks (via Der Spiegel), the former UEFA gerneral secretary was never the clean cut savior of football he purported to be. The documents allege Infantino made secret deals with both Paris Saint Germain and Manchester City to undermine the FIFA Financial Fair Play regulations back in 2014.

However, Infantino arrived at FIFA in the midst of genuine reforms under the no-nonsense chairman of the Audit and Compliance Committee, Domenico Scala.

Scala attempted to clean up the organization from top to bottom. He suggested an overhaul of the old guard and wanted independent ethics committees set up for national FAs where he claimed most of the corruption took place. He also lessened the responsibilities of the FIFA president making it a non-executive type role, and gave responsibility to an independent committee to determine the position’s pay.

But Infantino was barely in the door when Scala resigned. The reason was a new law passed by congress to give FIFA’s council the power to sack members of independent parties monitoring the organization.

A statement from Scala read (via Der Spiegel):

"“With this decision, it will henceforth be possible for the council to impede investigations against single members at any time, by dismissing the responsible committee members or by keeping them acquiescent through the threat of dismissal. Thereby, those bodies are factually deprived of their independence and are in danger of becoming auxiliary agents of those whom they actually supervise … it undermines a central pillar of the good governance of FIFA and it destroys a substantial achievement of the reforms.”"

Scala had believed he would be the first target and this was confirmed just days later in a leaked audio from a FIFA council meeting.

Infantino was heard calling the 1.95 million CHF a year contract offered to him by Scala as ‘insulting.’ To put the figure into perspective, Blatter, who had been at the organization for 40 years, had only received 1.65 million CHF more the previous year and as already stated it was a new, less strenuous presidency role.

The council was then heard calling for Scala to be sacked and for the  power to dismiss personal of independent committees.

The committee then dropped the axe on the chairmen of the Ethics Committee: Hans-Joachim Eckert and Cornel Borbely. In the past, the pair had sanctioned names as hallowed in the sport as Platini, Franz Beckenbauer, and Blatter, and had just started an inquiry into Infantino’s malpractices at the time of their dismissal.

“We were stopped because we ran investigations independently” commented Eckert, “also against Mr. Infantino personally.”

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