Infantino's Seat: The Man Who Owns Every Room
Gianni Infantino has become the defining off-pitch image of this World Cup, and not because FIFA wants it that way.
There is a particular kind of person who cannot watch from a distance. They must be *in* it — not performing the sport, not reporting it, not even supporting a side, just present, visibly, unmistakably, at the centre of things. I have met a few in forty years on the circuit. They are rarely the most interesting people in the building. But they are always, somehow, in every photograph.
Gianni Infantino has become the defining off-pitch image of this World Cup, and not because FIFA wants it that way. He has simply appeared — in stadium after stadium, match after match, the same face in the crowd at forty-eight nations' most important days. Supporters started noticing. Then cameras started finding him. Now it has become a kind of dark sport of its own: spot the president, somewhere between the dignitaries and the dugout, watching another nation's heart either break or soar.
I understand the compulsion, actually. When you have built something this large — 48 teams, three countries, the biggest World Cup in the tournament's history — you want to witness what it produces. The architect wanting to walk through every room. That impulse I can forgive.
What sits less easily is the optics of it, the symbolism of the man at the top of football's governing body being not a steward in the background but a presence in the foreground, as if the tournament is happening *for* him rather than through him. Football has always had this problem: the administrators who mistake custody for ownership.
Meanwhile, away from Infantino's wandering eye, the knockout bracket is arranging itself into something worth watching properly. England carry the weight of a suspended player into their tie with Norway — Erling Haaland's side arriving with problems of their own, which tells you this tournament has been generous with its chaos. Reece James, the Chelsea defender co-owning a racehorse named Scomessa Sicura that has just won at the Newmarket July Festival, is perhaps having the better week of any man connected to the England camp. There is a metaphor available there about fortunes running on different tracks simultaneously, but I will leave it for the horse racing correspondents.
The half-time show for the final is still being discussed — how long, who performs, what the occasion demands. I think about Freddie Mercury at Wembley in 1985, the way he played twenty thousand strangers like a single instrument. That is the standard. Whether anyone performing in a stadium in 2026 can meet it is a separate, sadder question.
What I keep coming back to, though, is this: the football, eventually, overwhelms everything else. The presidency, the scheduling disputes, the suspended players, the racehorse results. At some point a ball goes in, or doesn't, and the tournament writes its own sentence. It always does. That is why we are all still here.
