I Watched the Football, Gianni. That's the Problem.

Not done, apparently

A few weeks ago I wrote that I wasn't sure I trusted the football any more. That piece is here, and I meant it as a one-off, a thing I needed to get off my chest and then leave alone. Then Gianni Infantino responded to the criticism FIFA had taken over the World Cup, and I find I'm not done after all.

I want to be precise about the "responded", because the format matters. This was not a press conference where a journalist gets to ask him a question. It was a fifteen-slide post on his personal Instagram, reposted to FIFA's eight million followers. The head of world football answered a summer of serious scrutiny with a carousel of slides and no questions taken. Hold that thought, because it turns out to be the whole story in miniature.

What he actually said

He told his critics, "those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens", to stop "spreading hate and false rumours". He said the tournament "celebrated humanity at its best", with "100% safety and security, only joy and happiness". He said there were "zero incidents, zero violence, just joy, emotions, happiness, unity, and togetherness". And then the line that got the headlines: to those criticising, "please take a moment to reflect, meditate, pray or watch a football match".

My honest reaction was not anger. I keep coming back to this. It wasn't anger, it was disgust, and underneath the disgust, disappointment. Disappointment that the game has been in hands like these for as long as it has.

The gap is the tell

Here's the thing about "zero incidents, only joy and happiness". It was written in the same week that FIFA itself is investigating Argentina's players and staff for the brawl with Spain's players after the final. The same week FIFA is looking into allegations of racist abuse. Fans were arrested at multiple matches, including after the England semi-final in Atlanta. Immigration enforcement officers were stationed inside World Cup stadiums. Iran, whose own head coach called them the "most oppressed" team at the tournament, had backroom staff denied entry, had their fan tickets revoked, and had to move their training base to another country. A referee holding a diplomatic passport and a valid visa was refused entry to the United States.

None of that is my characterisation. It is all in the reporting, sitting right next to his claim of a flawless, joyful, incident-free celebration of humanity. When he was asked about the people denied entry, his answer was that critics "mentioned the few people denied visas and overlooked the millions who were approved". That is a man being told the roof is leaking and replying that most of the ceiling is dry.

Then there is the Balogun business. The United States forward had a one-match ban suspended so he could play in the last 16, after a phone call from President Trump. Of the 191 other red cards ever shown at a men's World Cup, exactly one other player has escaped his suspension. UEFA called the decision a crossing of "a red line", "unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable". Infantino's defence was that this sort of thing is "routine and widely accepted in some of the biggest leagues worldwide", and that "it's curious that the same countries employing these practices are the ones criticising". That is not a reassurance. That is being told you didn't see what you plainly saw.

The response is the proof

In the first piece I argued that the problem isn't any single decision, it's that FIFA has dismantled everything that could independently check it, so you can no longer tell a bad call from a bent one. This press conference, if you can call it that, is the same argument in a different costume.

Because look at what the response actually is. Faced with legitimate scrutiny, the head of the organisation does not engage with a single specific concern. He reframes the critics as haters "planting seeds of hate", tells them to "show some love", and suggests they pray about it. When the person running the game treats accountability as an attack and answers it with a sermon, that is not the behaviour of an institution with nothing to hide. Even the BBC's own sports editor, not a man given to hyperbole, called it evidence of a "siege mentality". An organisation that cannot absorb criticism is telling you something about how much it has to defend.

The phrase for it is the one that came to me the moment I read the headline. Tone deaf. Not evil, not even necessarily cynical in that moment, just completely, serenely out of touch. A man who genuinely seems to believe that the only possible reason to criticise the spectacle is that you hate joy. It's the same refusal you get from the supporter who watches his team kick, dive and shove their way through a match and comes away swearing blind it was all clean: look hard enough at what you want to be true, and the fouls simply stop registering.

In poor hands for a long time

Someone under the Reddit thread where I first saw this said that you'd have thought FIFA could never find anyone worse than Sepp Blatter, but congratulations, they managed it. Someone else pointed out that the man before Blatter, Joao Havelange, was himself caught up in a kickbacks scandal that eventually cost him his Olympic honours. I'm not interested in ranking them. Whether Infantino is worse than Blatter is a parlour game.

What actually gets to me is the length of it. Add those tenures up and the game has been run, one way or another, by people like this for the better part of half a century. That's what turns anger into something flatter and more tired. It isn't a scandal, it's a pattern, and the pattern has outlasted my entire life as a fan.

I did watch, actually

The line I keep chewing on is "watch a football match". The clear implication is that his critics are people who didn't see the thing, who missed the faces and the eyes and the emotions because they were too "consumed by hate".

But I did watch. I watched practically all of it, the same as I've watched every World Cup since 1986. That's the part he can't seem to compute. The mistrust didn't come from missing the football. It came from watching it closely: the joy and the rot, both, in the same tournament, and drawing the obvious conclusion about the people in charge. Plenty of us saw all of it. Seeing all of it is precisely why we don't feel like praying about it.

So I'll take the last bit of his advice and leave the rest. I'll watch the next one too. But I won't meditate on it, and I won't pray about it. And telling people to feel the emotions and stop asking questions isn't an answer. It's just a politer way of telling them to shut up.