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3 hours ago
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Gliding through time as if surfing a rainbow, you can transform uncertainty into something beautiful.
People sometimes like to talk in general terms about the idea, the abstract concept of the worst book ever written. Probably this title should belong to a book that is supposed to be good in the first place, like a really terrible Norman Mailer about a super-tough, hard-drinking American fiction genius who has a fist-fight with a zebra on an oil rig.
In The Information, Martin Amis has one of his characters write a modernist novel so complex and tortured it keeps inducing strokes, allergic reactions and minor brain aneurysms in the publishers he sends it to, which is a good joke, possibly even the best joke in The Information. I wouldn’t know because I kept choking on my own vomit and bleeding out of my eyes every time I tried to get past page 20.
Sport has made its own bid for this crown at various points. Alex Ferguson wrote a book about leadership so boring it was actually quite dangerous when mixed with any kind of alcohol or medication. More recently there’s a new kind of sports book, the AI-generated Arne Slot biography you buy online and which unspools in a strangely cold and meandering tone, as though the author has been bitten by a venomous snake and is being encouraged to talk in a quietly droning voice about Arne Slot’s childhood in order to try to stay awake until the ambulance arrives.
It was in this spirit of realism that I read the new Gianni Infantino book so you don’t have to. I read it out of hope too. Forward – The Revolution of Football was published at the end of April. It arrives just before a morally and geographically labyrinthine World Cup, which starts, believe it or not, less than two weeks from now.
As things stand, Forward is the closest thing to a guide, a press conference, a human face, or at least some way of understanding a little better what is about to happen to us and why. Oddly enough, it delivers on that promise too. Although obviously not as a mea culpa or a straight-talking confession, but with its own strange energy, the sound, just below the gloss, of a voice shouting between the notes.
First up, the book was quite hard to get hold of. Something about Forward seemed quite angry that I was trying to read it. It’s there on the internet if you’re willing to pay quite a lot. But this is not really a book at all. It’s a mission statement, the kind of document that is fanned out across a padded conference table, or left in hotel suites for the perusal of executive delegates. At times it feels like an alibi, an internal directive, somebody getting their story straight.
Disappointingly, it isn’t written by the president’s own hand, despite being published in-house, and despite reading like a series of voice notes intoned into the bathroom mirror via a piece of software called dictatorblather.app. This is what Infantino calls “an anecdote-based biography”, pulled together by a man called Alessandro Alciato. “This is how he sees it”, Infantino writes in his foreword to Forward, although given Alciato kicks off by comparing his subject to both Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, the level of unblinking journalistic detachment is pretty clear.
The format is odd, the lines ranged in random gobbets, like biblical verses. And in his intro, Infantino talks about magic a lot, as he often does. He talks about the ball. The magic ball. The magic of that magic ball. “Every single day in this office, at least once, I have looked at a ball, touched it, played with it.” Yeah, well, me too Gianni. Just make sure you wash your hands afterwards.
“The ball is the most magical object there is, a crystal ball that helps to imagine the future,” he suggests. No it isn’t. Nobody thinks this. It’s not even a good metaphor. Crystal balls are the preserve of cranks and fraudsters, used to … hang on he’s back again. “Whenever I meet people on a football pitch, especially children, I remind them that the world and the ball share the same shape.” The only response to which is just to try really, really hard not to meet Gianni Infantino on a football pitch.
After which, nothing happens for 60 pages. There’s one good detail about Infantino’s childhood, which has him travelling on a train collecting scrap metal in a sack to sell to dealers. The rest is basically name-dropping, despot-fluffing and yet more mentions of genies and lamp-rubbing. There are incredibly boring anecdotes about Infantino’s travels. He plays a game of football against 40 North Korean children. He goes to Iran and fights single-handed for the rights of women, including running across the pitch to a group of female spectators in order to take lots of selfies with them, although not, the book warns sternly, “out of vanity”.
A chapter headed “A Clean Slate” promises to dig into how Infantino rid Fifa of corruption, but this is over in four hastily padded-pages, mainly about how he didn’t rip out Sepp Blatter’s old wall safe, plus a good bit where Infantino gets angry about the millions spent on the Fifa museum.
A little later, the book seems to be saying Infantino saved the world from the Covid-19 pandemic and also, obviously, racism. He loves hanging out with legends, who actually really like him and not just because he’s a president. Hilariously, Diego Maradona used to criticise Blatter but changed his tune when Gianni arrived, also, as it happens, a period that coincided with Maradona being demonstrably out of his mind, ferried about the 2018 World Cup like a gurning, sweating captive bear, before eventually collapsing in a stairwell and being airlifted out of the country. So, that period then.
At this point you find yourself staring again at the many, many photos, almost all of them of Gianni Infantino, looking for some kind of insight. The cover is iconic Gianni, there in dark suit, white shirt, clip mic, arms spread in gesture of healing, benevolence, love, the look of a man addressing from the bridge of his personal asteroid of hope.
There’s a massive one with Cristiano Ronaldo in full, square-jawed, plasticised future sex-robot phase, Gianni beaming beside him, still hypnotic, looking more than ever like the distilled essence of human mendacity stuffed inside a swimming cap, with a pair of strangely flat and haunted eyes painted on. And the look is the only part that really stays with you, the look of a man who literally cannot believe what is happening to him. And correctly so. This is why Infantino talks in this strange way. Why this is not a coherent book. Why the words just slide over each other. It is cognitive dissonance.
There is no way for him to write an honest book about what has happened to him, no way to rationalise this, no way to explain his utterly ludicrous reach, his proximity to power, without talking endlessly about magic. It’s just too strange to look directly in the eye. An unremarkable Swiss lawyer, embedded pretty much by chance in a ridiculously stratified sports body, at the precise moment when the world took a lurch into despotism, when the ability to put on a show suddenly puts you in the room with the ruling despots, the universe bosses. No wonder he talks about magic a lot. This makes no sense. Magic enters the room when reason departs. And on some level Infantino must realise this is grotesque, that people have died and will die because of choices made in the staging of World Cups.
We’ve all been boiled so slowly in this frog water that you need to look up to take it in. From 2016 onwards football has been pushing at an open door. The best line in Forward is “money used to change hands under the table. Since 2016, however, it has moved in the open for all to see”. And this is basically how the world works too. There is no longer any need to be corrupt. Do it right out front. Allow nation-state funding to pay for your Club World Cup. Cosy up to Donald Trump and you have access to the biggest market in the world. Avoid scrutiny. Stage no press conferences. Communicate only in a gush of football-Jesus talk.
This is what the pictures capture, a man who appears to have been entirely consumed by proximity to power, eyes wide, unable to divert the course, to do anything but crank the throttle into the heart of the sun. We can rage against Gianni himself, the court magician, but what we have here is essentially an avatar, out there riding the currents, surfing his rainbow, searching for some kind of speech that can make it make sense, but pretty much giving up before the end of his own foreword.
