Gianni Infantino's FIFA Presidency: Expansion and Controversy
When Gianni Infantino walked into the Fifa presidency in 2016, the mood was oddly hopeful. Sepp Blatter had gone, the walls still echoed with corruption scandals, and here came the clean-cut lawyer promising to “restore the image of Fifa”. He talked about accountability, transparency, good governance. He also promised something else that landed even more sweetly with his electorate: a “very significant increase” in funding.
The applause he predicted from “everyone in the world” never quite arrived. The money did.
Even then, the clues were there. The whispers about his fondness for private jets. The sense that this supposedly grey Swiss bureaucrat had ambitions that stretched far beyond Zurich. Eight years on, nobody calls him a technocrat. Inside the game, a different description does the rounds: “He thinks he’s running a nation state.”
This week, that line felt less like a quip and more like a diagnosis. Fifa unveiled plans – without meaningful consultation – to sell a slice of the World Cup’s commercial rights to outside investors. It was framed as another step in football’s global growth. To many inside the sport, it looked like something else: the latest move in a long, relentless project to expand Fifa’s reach, revenue and political leverage.
Expansion as a way of life
Infantino’s presidency has been defined by one instinct: make everything bigger.
Barely settled into the job, he floated expanding the World Cup and revamping the Club World Cup. In 2017, the first of those ideas landed. The 2026 World Cup would jump from 32 to 48 teams, a structural change to the sport’s showpiece tournament pushed through with minimal resistance.
He didn’t stop there. In 2018 came the pitch for a global Nations League and a new corporate vehicle to run it, funded by outside money. The plan died under pressure, but the direction of travel was unmistakable. The game’s crown jewels were now seen as assets to be packaged, sold and leveraged.
By 2021, Infantino was openly advocating a biennial World Cup. Around the same time, it emerged that the 12 Super League clubs had expected Fifa to quietly back their breakaway before that project imploded under public fury. The official line was distance; the suspicion of alignment lingered.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, the pace only quickened. Football’s finances were shredded, and Fifa stepped in with its Forward Programme to plug some of the gaps. At the same time, the governing body rolled out a 32‑team Club World Cup and immediately began talking about how that, too, might grow.
The World Cup itself became a travelling circus of unprecedented scale. The 2030 edition was stretched across three continents and six host nations. The 2034 tournament went, almost by acclamation and with no real contest, to Saudi Arabia. There is already talk of taking the World Cup to 64 teams. Even the matchday experience has not been spared: mandatory hydration breaks were floated and adopted as another tweak to the product.
Nothing, it seems, is ever big enough.
What is driving Infantino?
Inside boardrooms and back corridors, a question keeps surfacing: what is eating Gianni Infantino? What fuels this constant appetite for expansion?
The most common answer is cold political arithmetic. More tournaments, more games, more teams mean more money. More money means more cash to redistribute to Fifa’s 211 member associations. And a well-fed electorate tends to be a loyal one when the time comes to vote.
On that score, Infantino’s record is startling. Since he took office, Fifa’s revenues have effectively trebled. That would usually be enough to secure power. Yet the reforms to presidential term limits – pushed through on his watch – have created room for a third full mandate, now all but assured. Officially, that will be his last.
So why the need to keep pushing? Why another commercial carve‑up, another structural overhaul?
One theory has gained traction in light of the latest proposal. By creating a new vehicle to hold World Cup commercial rights, Infantino could be building his own landing spot for life after the presidency. Reports in the Times suggested he could become CEO of the new entity once he steps down, earning a salary more in line with a corporate chief than the head of an NGO. Fifa has flatly denied any such discussions, and there is no hard evidence that a post‑presidency role has been promised.
Even if such a job materialised, though, it does not quite explain the scale and speed of the transformation underway. The deals, the tournaments, the structural rewrites – they go far beyond one man’s retirement plan.
That leads to a third, more human explanation: status.
From bullied outsider to global power broker
Infantino’s backstory is well known in football circles. The son of Italian immigrants, raised in working‑class circumstances in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, he has spoken of being bullied for his ginger hair. It is an origin story that sits in sharp contrast to the life he now leads.
As an adult, he has never hidden his taste for the high life. The private jets. The entourages. The carefully curated circle of celebrity. During his 2016 campaign he assembled a cast of ex‑players, rebranded as Fifa Legends, to tour the world and burnish his image.
Once elected, the focus shifted upwards. Away from retired footballers and towards heads of state. Infantino made a point of being seen alongside Vladimir Putin, the emir of Qatar, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, crucially, the then US president, Donald Trump. Each appearance placed him not as an administrator of a sport, but as a peer at the geopolitical top table.
With that status came a new perception of power. Inside Fifa, he has been able to push through sweeping changes with minimal internal resistance. Outside it, national associations and confederations have often fallen into line, wary of losing access to the money and tournaments that now flow from Zurich.
But political alliances built on mutual utility are rarely stable. They are transactional by nature. They come with a price.
One senior football figure, speaking about the latest commercial plan, cast it in stark terms. In their view, this was not Infantino’s grand design at all. “Gianni has got in way over his head with Trump,” they said. “He [Trump] is now extracting his share of the World Cup rewards.”
Fifa denies any improper influence, just as it denies any conversation about a future corporate role for its president. Yet the direction of travel is impossible to ignore. The World Cup, once a quadrennial festival of football, is being sliced, expanded and repackaged as a financial instrument.
Infantino promised to restore Fifa’s image. He has certainly reshaped it. The question for the game now is simple and uncomfortable: when the biggest tournament in sport starts to look like just another asset on a balance sheet, who is really in control of football’s future – and how much of it is already gone?
