Gianni Infantino’s final words of the 76th Fifa congress were the least surprising of an otherwise intriguing week.
“I wanted you to be the first to know,” the Fifa president said with a straight face of his decision to seek re-election next year, which has been an open secret since before his previous victory in 2023, as Fifa’s statutes were altered to permit such an outcome a few months earlier. (Having introduced a three-term limit after Infantino replaced Sepp Blatter in 2016, Fifa’s governance, audit and compliance committee ruled in December 2022 that his first 39 months in office did not count, as he was completing his disgraced predecessor’s term).
