Gianni Infantino was elected yesterday to serve another four years as the Secretary General of FIFA.
As the only candidate for the role, his election was by acclamation as opposed to the ballot box. This will be his first full term having stepped up to the role when Sepp Blatter was removed under a cloud of charges of corruption throughout the organisation in 2016.
In his acceptance speech, he referenced that “the organisation has gone from being toxic, almost criminal, to being what it should be, an organisation that develops football and is synonymous with transparency and integrity.”
That was not a view expressed by Colm McCarthy at last Friday’s FAI Stakeholder Forum in Dublin but FIFA’s attention will be on the Women’s World Cup for the next month and hopefully the ‘little local difficulty’ being experienced in Ireland will have gone some way to being resolved by the time that comes to a conclusion in July.
As part of Congress, the issue was also raised of potential bids to stage the 2030 FIFA Men’s World Cup.
The FAI is part of a putative bid involving England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, though did not take part in a meeting held by those four countries in Paris this week.
Infantino raised the possibility that China could be a bidder for the same tournament, which would present stiff competition, alongside another bid from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile.
The statutes of FIFA dictate that back to back World Cups cannot be held on the same continent though the practice has been recently that this extends to two tournaments.
Recent World Cups have been held in:
France 1998
Korea and Japan 2002
Germany 2006
South Africa 2010
Brazil 2014
Russia 2018
and will be held in
Qatar 2022
USA, Canada and Mexico 2026
The prospect of Ireland staging part of a World Cup is mouthwatering though understandably it will not be top of the agenda at the FAI for a while yet.
In business terms, Infantino has overseen a strong recovery for FIFA with reserves rising from €886 Million at the time of his becoming Secretary-General, to €2.4 Billion in the latest accounts.
