What will be the biggest legacy of this World Cup? Besides Lionel Messi’s goals and Spain’s stylish stranglehold of games, it will surely be the moment a US President boasted about exerting political pressure on Fifa.
When Donald Trump revealed he had lobbied Fifa president Gianni Infantino to suspend an automatic one-match ban on Folarin Balogun, breaking precedents to let the US team’s star striker play in a vital game, fans around the globe were united in disgust.
Among them was Miguel Maduro, a former chair of Fifa’s own governance committee. He felt “outraged” by the organisation’s “scandalous” decision, apparently made to please Trump, who Infantino cravenly awarded a Fifa peace prize to last year.
But Maduro was not surprised by what unfolded, because the former Portuguese government minister knows from bitter personal experience how far Infantino will go to gain political favour.
The law professor joined Fifa in 2016, hoping to clean up the association after multiple corruption scandals, only to be sacked just eight months later over decisions that he says threatened the vested interests of Infantino and his supporters.
Maduro is glad the Balogun controversy “took place before the eyes of the entire world”, exposing how Fifa really works behind the scenes. Speaking to The i Paper from Lisbon, he argues it’s just one example of the “serious systemic governance problems that plague Fifa”.
Following the uproar, Trump claimed he did not tell Infantino what to do about Balogun’s ban, insisting he merely asked for it to be reviewed because he “didn’t think it was a foul” – despite also saying he “didn’t know” what a red card was. Infantino insisted he told Trump that only Fifa’s “independent judicial bodies” could lift the ban, not himself.
Yet it has since been revealed the decision was taken by just a single person: Fifa’s disciplinary chairman Mohammad al-Kamali, who didn’t consult any of his 17 fellow committee members, unlike in 100 previous cases.
After European football’s governing body Uefa called the Balogun process and decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”, Infantino’s critics have been hoping it may lead to his downfall in elections next year.
Maduro thinks this is sadly unlikely due to his own experience of Fifa from the inside.
Infantino briefing Donald Trump on how red cards are used while visiting the White House in 2018. The Fifa boss awarded the President a ‘peace prize’ last year (Photo: Al Drago/Getty)Sacked for standing up to Infantino
Having played the game at amateur level and being a season ticket holder at famous Lisbon club Sporting, Maduro has always been passionate about football.
He was eager to help reform Fifa after Sepp Blatter’s humiliating resignation as president in 2016, and having been elected to lead its governance committee, thought he would have an ally in Blatter’s successor. After all, Infantino had taken over promising to “restore and rebuild a new era”.
Infantino was “very eager to be liked and to seduce people”, Maduro says, but “once we took a couple of decisions that he very strongly disliked, he stopped even talking to me at all”.
Maduro and his committee were supposed to make decisions independently, to ensure Fifa was following codes and meeting standards, but he says several attempts to influence him led him to consider resigning. Then, a year before the 2018 World Cup in Russia, a major flashpoint arose.
Russia’s deputy prime minister at the time, Vitaly Mutko, wanted to stand for re-election to Fifa’s main decision-making council. Maduro and his team blocked this because it would breach political neutrality rules, potentially making the organisation vulnerable to direct influence from the Kremlin.
Maduro says Infantino was worried this decision would upset “the political cartel that depends on him”, imperilling his presidency if he failed to overturn it.
He recalls: “Someone speaking on behalf of the president was trying to convince me to change our decision. I said: ‘We’re not going to change. I understand this may be politically complicated for the president and Fifa, but we’ve been appointed to apply the rules equally to everyone. I’m well aware that in a few weeks, you can replace me and my colleagues, but you will face a reputational risk with that.’ This person replied to me: ‘You are right, but it’s one week of bad press, and then it goes away.'”
Sure enough, he was told two months later his position was not being renewed – effectively firing him – and other senior ethics officials were also let go. Maduro says the message Infantino sent out was clear: “If these people don’t do what I want, I replace them.” Although the president doesn’t directly control appointments, he makes it known “who he wants there, who he doesn’t want there”, says the law professor.
His sacking caused such fury that Maduro was called to testify before a UK parliamentary hearing. He told MPs that Fifa behaved “like a state beyond a state“, operating “without the rule of law”. Its culture was “extremely resistant to accountability, independent scrutiny, transparency and the prevention of conflicts of interest”, he said. Fifa rejected these claims at the time, saying it “always respected” committee decisions.
Folarin Balogun, right, was given an automatic one-match ban for a red card after this tackle but Fifa later suspended it for a year (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty)Consolidating power
Over the last decade, Maduro says it has been “deeply frustrating” to see Infantino consolidate control. “He decides who gets those revenues, how those revenues are distributed between the football associations and between different people in the ecosystem of football, including the presidents of the football associations that vote to elect and re-elect the president,” he says.
It also means Fifa’s supposedly independent committees “ultimately do what the president wants”, acting as Infantino’s “instruments”.
He points out how Infantino avoids media scrutiny by rarely granting interviews – and when he appeared at a press conference in June, it was his first in three years.
Maduro also expects Fifa will bend its rules and allow Infantino to stand a fourth time in 2031, on the basis that his first term – when he replaced Blatter – did not last a full four years.
Fifa did not respond when approached for a response, but a spokesperson said last month: “Fifa underwent deep rooted governance and management reforms over the last decade with a clear focus on transparency and on its mandate to develop football all around the world.” Arguing it has been “transformed”, they said the organisation is now a “role model”.
Infantino has claimed that “every dollar” made from World Cup ticket sales, which have been dogged by allegations of price manipulation forcing fans to pay huge sums, “goes back to the development of football” and is invested in children’s “hopes and dreams”. Responding to the Balogun controversy, he maintained that Fifa committees “operate autonomously” and their independence is “essential to the credibility and integrity of football”.
Why it’s so hard to challenge Fifa
French fans protested against Infantino during their match with Morocco this month (Photo: Chris Brunskill/Getty)The Balogun scandal has refocused attention on Fifa and allegations about corruption.
Seventy-two members of the European Parliament have backed calls for Infantino to face an ethics investigation, with Irish MEP Barry Andrews labelling Fifa a “profoundly corrupt organisation”. In the US, journalists began examining “Fifa’s long history of corruption”, while questioning if this World Cup has been “the most corrupt ever”.
Maduro highlights how Fifa acted in a similar way to ensure Cristiano Ronaldo was not suspended for Portugal’s first two games at the World Cup this summer, despite being banned for violent conduct against the Republic of Ireland.
It also tweaked the qualification criteria for last summer’s Club World Cup so that global superstar Messi would appear with his club, Inter Miami.
What angers Maduro most, however, is that Fifa “manipulated the rules” for Saudi Arabia to host the World Cup in 2034. He explains that encouraging Spain and Portugal to co-host the 2030 tournament together with Morocco, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay meant the following edition could not be hosted again in Europe, Africa or South America, because of rules on alternating host continents – making it “almost certain” the Saudi bid would have no rivals.
Maduro supports the Reboot Fifa campaign launched by sports ethics group FairSquare, which is lodging a “class action” complaint against Infantino after the World Cup. But he worries Fifa is virtually immune to public and political uproar, unless global sponsors “take their money away”.
“I’m deeply skeptical of any likelihood of any reform,” he laments. “There are people in the world of football who know there’s something deeply wrong in how Fifa is governed, but they cannot speak publicly about it. If they do, they are sidelined.” He admires Norway’s football president Lise Klaveness for criticising Infantino but says: “She is a lonely voice. She has to be very careful.”
If the scandals continue, he thinks they will encourage fans to believe conspiracy theories that matches are fixed by biased referees. The biggest tragedy, he says, would be if “people start to distrust the actual outcomes of matches”.
@robhastings.bsky.social
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