“Four more years! Four more years!” chanted no one as Gianni Infantino swept to victory in Fifa’s presidential elections once again. Competing against no other candidates, he beat nobody, and was thus elected by no one to the sound of deferential applause at Thursday’s presentation in Rwanda.
Infantino is now into his seventh year as the most powerful man in football. Fifa presidents are only supposed to serve a maximum of three four-year terms, but Infantino found a loophole and it was “clarified” just before the Qatar World Cup that his first three years didn’t count, rather he was finishing Sepp Blatter’s work. It seems inevitable he will serve this term and then another, taking him to 2031 when presumably his brain will finally hatch, and 15 years would be quite the stint for a man who declared in his very first speech: “The new Fifa is a democracy, not a dictatorship.”
