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

Infantino continues to dissilusion

In Borbely’s place, FIFA hired Maria Claudia Rojas – a former administrative judge with no experience for the actual position. Der Spiegal claims, largely based on Football Leaks papers, she speaks no English and very little French, only works a few days a month, and has been known to liaise with questionable characters in her homeland – a country notorious for endemic corruption – such as Luis Bedoya, a former member of the FIFA council who had been banned from football for life for racketeering.

One of Rojas first acts was, surprise, surprise, to drop the investigation into Infantino despite not even reading the entire case put forward by Borbely.

Der Spiegel writes ‘[Infantino] places people who are grateful, beholden and, therefore, innocuous to him in positions of authority.’ To give further credence to this theory one only has to look at who the Swiss appointed as general secretary.

As I have previously mentioned, the new role of FIFA president was to act more of the face of the organization and leave the day-to-day running to the general secretary. However, Infantino appointed Fatma Samoura to the position – a former United Nations worker that, according to Der Spiegel, ‘knew almost nothing about football.’

In an alleged leaked email, FIFA chief strategist Kjetil Siem wrote:

"“Trust in GS [general secretary] has dropped dramatically … The lack of understanding on knowledge of the football industry, the partly chaotic, emotional and ad hoc micromanagement leading style has demotivated people. .. Why is he [Infantino] allowing this to continue?”"

The result of both appointments all but give Infantino carte blanche to run the organization with little chance of any internal ramifications.

Furthermore, Infantino was accused of removing the word ‘corruption’ from FIFA’s code of ethics (‘bribery and corruption’ was changed to just ‘bribery’ in Article 27).

FIFA says it was simply for reasons of clarity when translating to other languages and Infantino had nothing to do with the amendments. However, Football Leaks revealed alleged emails between Infantino and Vassilios Skouris, the man who replaced Eckert as the chair of the Adjudicatory Chamber of the Ethics Committee, discussing changes to the code.

So is Infantino a better man than Blatter to lead football’s most powerful organization? In my own opinion, no he is not. Similar to the case at CONCACAF, the name on the president’s door has changed, but it’s business as usual.