By Andrew Warshaw
June 22 – Gianni Infantino may have emerged unscathed from the corruption scandal that brought FIFA to its knees before he took over as president, but that has not prevented continuing scrutiny of the way he is running the organisation.
Infantino took personal credit at the recent FIFA Congress for turning round FIFA’s fortunes both from a financial and transparency standpoint but questions persist about how he is perceived internally.
Infantino has been unable to shake off criticism of the way he purged FIFA’s senior governance officials two years ago, not least Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, who chaired the investigatory and adjudicatory chambers of FIFA’s Ethics Committee respectively, and chief governance guru Miguel Maduro.
Maduro has gone on the record as saying his removal was directly linked to his decision to block former Russian World Cup supremo Vitaly Mutko from keeping his seat on FIFA’s ruling council, hugely embarrassing for the Infantino administration.
The issue of governance under his leadership was raised yet again last week when Infantino addressed the media straight after the Fifa Congress. And yet again he defended his actions.
“We are not perfect and can improve but we have tried to be sincere and act in the best interests of football,” said Infantino. “But I want to re-iterate once again – and I have said it a ton of times – nobody was removed. Terms came to an end. We now have personalities with absolute integrity, such as FIFA has never seen before, chairing our independent organs.”
Such comments seem bound to raise eyebrows among some of those who, for whatever reason, have lost their senior positions under Infantino. Their replacements are viewed in some circles as mere yes men (and women) and while Infantino rejected this, he hinted that those previously at the top of the ethics apparatus were too eager to court the media.
Those now in charge, he said, “take their jobs very seriously and do not want to make publicity for themselves. I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in these two years.”
Asked why he had decided to go for a second term as FIFA president in 2019, Infantino said there was a lot more work to be done in terms of aiding developing nations. “Do I ever regret being FIFA president? Yes, at least 100 times a day. But at least one million times every day I think how fantastic this job is.”
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