How FIFA Tried (and Failed) to Sell the Soul of Football

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Unlocking previously uncaptured commercial value. Right after this. Let's begin with the exhale, because you've been working, I presume, more after the World Cup, Adam Crafton, than you thought you were going to have to. How are you feeling? Yeah, I mean, I was moving apartments this week, so it was really fun. But no, I mean, it's an amazing kind of development in some ways. It's also, it's like the most predictable, amazing development, you know, in the sense of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president's proximity to the Trump family has, you know, ultimately, possibly brought about, his downfall, I may be speaking too soon in that, or may not be speaking soon enough. It is moving at an extraordinary pace. How this all got out into the open, and where it started, how do you sort of tell that story? I suppose if we just go back two or three weekends, it's the World Cup final. Five weeks now into this tournament, 36 days of competition, down to two survivors. Two survivors. Argentina and Spain, Argentina. By the time of that World Cup final, for all of the scandals, I think four or five investigations by attorney generals across America into FIFA's ticketing practices. There is now an investigation into FIFA's ticket practices and those soaring prices. Some fans feeling like they were deceived. The visa scandal with the referee not being allowed into the country. This week, the U.S. found itself at the center of more controversy when a Somali. Referee was barred from entering the United States despite having a valid visa and all valid credentials. He was questioned. The phone call, of course, that happened with Trump, that then kind of subsequently Balogun, the U.S. forward, was then allowed to play the game. Tonight, the stunning reversal reverberating through the soccer world as FIFA reinstates star striker Falarin Balogun, slated to sit out tomorrow's game against Belgium. For all of that. For all of that. For all of that. FIFA ended the tournament celebrating what they deemed to be a huge success. You know, they upscaled their revenue projection from, I think, 11 to 13 billion up to 15 billion. So, for all of the uneasiness and the criticism that people may have of Infantino and his leadership style in all these different federations, that money had a muzzling effect. Until. Infantino has given football associations, until the 19th of September, to back his plan to sell off part of FIFA to private investors. I think that Infantino has overplayed his hand personally. I think we're reaching the point where I think Gianni Infantino is just pushing his luck. I'm hearing of a determined effort at the top of European football to ensure that Gianni Infantino leaves the FIFA presidency. It's now seemingly, perhaps, just a matter of how it ends. I think we've got to the stage with Gianni Infantino's. Gianni Infantino, where the ordinary fan looks at him and says he's motivated by power, money, and then football. Football does not appear to be his main priority. FIFA are not in distress. And FIFA are not short of cash. So, if you've just made $15 billion in cash revenue from a tournament, and you have billions in. Why do you need to give away a stake? Why would you mortgage your future returns and take that risk when you have all of it there already? You don't need to do it. So, that is the question that was on everyone's lips. This is my vantage point as I'm watching all of this, right? You were on the show. We were tracking the before, how America got into business with FIFA, how, at the local level, people were wanting in on all of the windfall that was in excess, it turns out. And it feels like, as everyone was maybe biting their tongue because they knew, wait a minute, this is all going to work out. We're all going to make money off of this. This is the biggest, richest World Cup ever. It takes us. To when the news breaks in public, and it's Tuesday, it's July 28th, and this thing that has been happening in sports broadly seems to now be arriving at the doorstep of, yes, the most popular sport in the world. FIFA 4 Enterprise, or FFE, is actually a proposal, an offer. It's part of a democratic process, a consultation process. And above all, it is an opportunity. His proposal creates a subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise to run commercial operations, everything from broadcast rights to ticket sales. Let's go! Infantino says it would raise $20 billion for FIFA, but 20% of it would be owned by private investors. The main investing firm would be one headed by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. These conversations between Infantino and Thrive Capital, which is owned, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, I think they've been going on for quite some time. I mean, we're talking about like almost a year, really sort of clandestinely. FIFA as a non-profit couldn't just give 20% of its revenues to a private investor. So what's going to happen is that FIFA is going to be a private investor. So what they were proposing was that they spin off the kind of commercial revenues of its competitions, its events, its licensing, all the stuff that makes money would be spun off into this commercial venture. You take in the investment, I think it was around 20-21%, of which Thrive would be the lead investor, and then you have returns. But that being more of a commercial venture enables you to return profits. It would simply, it would simply commercialize and organize all FIFA-owned competitions, along with sponsorship brokers licensing a new venture for the benefit of FIFA's 211 member associations. However, unlocking previously uncaptured commercial value. They claim the idea was, in terms of accelerating the development of soccer globally, so we've just had a World Cup, where you expand the number of teams from 32 to 48, which has enabled you to bring in more nations that wouldn't ordinarily have a chance to compete at that top table. It means they gain more revenues. It means that soccer can develop more in those countries. Now, what they also want to do is make sure that the amount of money that goes to each federation gets higher. And they wanted to bring that to, I think there was going to be one-off payments of 20 million, and then they would also increase to, I think, four or five million a year, year in, year out. And the idea there is that means more grassroots fields, it means better opportunities in school soccer, women's soccer, all those things that you'd want FIFA to be worried about, that you'd want the global game to be working towards. But the question again is, you can do that anyway. Right, right. You have the money. If you want to spend the money on that, you go to the FIFA council, you talk to, everyone who has a vote, you say, we've got this money that we've made by exploiting fans in the United States. We can spend it on this if we want to. But what they've instead done is do a secret deal in a very clandestine way without consulting most of FIFA's management or executive team or any of the confederations, presented it almost as a fait accompli just to be signed off, not done an open process, so they've just decided it would be a Kushner company and not done an open process as well on valuation. Now, the other bit of this is, at 4.2, I think around 4.2 billion, does that actually undervalue FIFA? If you're going to do it, at least get the best price for it, at least do an open process, at least do an auction. Well, this brings us to the question of what's in it for Gianni Infantino as this is the deal as described, right? So the name, by the way, that they come up with, the funding scheme that we can all participate in, it's the FIFA Fast Forward Program, the FFFP, just rolls off the tongue. And it's just funny that as we had seen in the World Cup, like Freddie LA7, like discover the cultural cross-coastal exchange of Buc-ee's and Scotland is sort of falling in love with New England, maybe the actual cross-cultural exchange that we should have been focusing on was Gianni Infantino. Gianni Infantino realizing, wait a minute, why can't we get some of that Americanness with us and it's interesting we'll get we'll maybe get on to the kind of the JP Morgan deck that was prepared that talks about relative to the eyeballs that it drives globally FIFA or the World Cup has been in their eyes under monetized you know if you compare it to the NFL the NBA the Premier League to a certain extent that there were these gaps in terms of what could be made revenue wise but what you're saying is right that people investors realized even more that this thing is super popular it's global that even at highly exploitative prices ticket prices the stadiums were still full that this is so important to so many people that you can really maximize value and returns and I don't think it's a secret that Gianni Infantino has probably been looking at some of these US sports leagues and looking at some of these commissioners and looking at people like Roger Goodell and thinking hang on a minute I'm the king of soccer right and the king of soccer should have a bigger salary than this little I'm teasing this little parochial American sport NFL right and he may not be wrong in that right but when you're already earning sort of six million dollars a year from a non-profit it's hard to make the argument that that should go to 12 you know for 20 to 40 60. Now FIFA have denied that there was ever an intention to have a commissioner or anything like that or that it was about Infantino's salary they say it was all about accelerating the growth of global soccer but I think there's another possibility which is you know if you create this spin co if Gianni maybe only has another four years as FIFA president if he was to win next year because his term is up you know end of this year maybe he spins off to be a commissioner or whatever you give the job title of this commercial venture which he's helped set up and he's got the relationship with the investors and all of that kind of stuff so I think those are sort of some of the theories behind it and it might just be because he really wants to develop soccer in Montserrat that could be all it is. Well hold on though because UEFA right and I get that everybody is sort of fighting on some financial terrain perpetually when it comes to world football but there is this philosophical argument that I have seen in Europe. And of course when you refer to the idea that look institutional investing foreign ownership American ownership coming to world football we've seen that before and most memorably I mean we saw it with what happened to the Super League. A Super League in the planning for years crumbled in less than two days as every corner of football united against it. This ugly episode in the beautiful game has exposed deep rifts between some of the biggest clubs their smaller rivals and the sports governing body in Europe. And that was for me as an American very eye opening the idea that wait a minute there's a philosophical argument that people will go to the barricades for and revolt over. It's what I thought of when I saw that UEFA said in their statement quote that the soul and governance of football are not assets to trade. Could you just give us sort of the context for how popular a sentiment that is? How apart are they? I think there are a lot of people who feel that way. For sure. But there's also a lot of people who feel that you know Manchester United for example should never have been the subjects of a highly leveraged takeover by the Glazer family who own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL. There's a lot of people who feel that Paris Saint-Germain shouldn't essentially be owned by Qatar. That Newcastle shouldn't be owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. So we shouldn't pretend here that Europe hasn't sold out. In many ways at certain points whether it's to U.S. private equity whether it's to as we say leverage takeovers whether it's to sovereign wealth funds. This isn't a question and I think it's very I think this is something that media sometimes allows it to become. It becomes good for evil and actually I think in this case it is almost very bad against quite bad right and you know or highly flawed against very flawed. Those are the grades that we're looking at here. But what FIFA have done is they've kind of they've just taken it that step further. You know they've taken it in the same way as the Super League took it one step further. And I think when it comes to kind of FIFA and the World Cup and it's just the idea like it's almost just the tackiness really. Oh but this is this is what's so funny to me is that like there is no purity left in sports and certainly not in in in world football at the highest levels. You just tacked off a bunch of the sovereign wealth funds and the petro states that are certainly staining everything. But it's so interesting that there is a threshold beyond which this seems gross. Yeah. UEFA would they decide in their own again not not not with a halo over their head but with just sort of a sense of like this is too much. They threaten a total European boycott of the World Cup and all FIFA competitions. The Union of European. The Union Football Associations has told Infantino to go UEFA yourself. No UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership. UEFA has used this kind of threat of boycott. Before when Infantino tried to make the World Cup an every two year competition rather than every four year competition. And it's a very powerful threat because many of the past of the most recent past winners if you go back nine ten competitions have been from Europe and they have most of the best players. A lot of the value of the competition is derived from the European nations, European fans, players. Not all, not to be entitled, but that's just reality, right? You've got Mbappe, Bellingham, all those great players. The kind of secondary layer to this is I don't think you can underestimate is not just the content of the plan. It's the how. It's the fact Infantino didn't tell anyone, right? And they all found out, they only found out because it was reported brilliantly by the Times of London and also the Financial Times. And because they found out in that way and you're caught on the hop and you're not consulted, it calls into questions, you know, all sorts of questions about governance, transparency, opacity. You know, if you were a CEO of a major company and you'd done something like that without the permission of your board or anybody that you report to, you know, Infantino is, he reports to an electorate. He is elected. He is not a kink, you know. So he has to be transparent about what he's up to. And he failed in all those respects. So I think when you tack that on to the previous opacity, even something like the FIFA Peace Prize, where they didn't consult with any of the vice presidents or the FIFA Council, it's just the latest example. And I don't think you can underestimate the accumulation of things. And also, you know, on top of it, you then look at who the investor is, the surname's Kushner, and it's like, for God's sake, Gio. Right? Like, I mean, help yourself here, right? But now you're echoing what lots of us here in America say about this presidential administration. Every day. Every f***ing day. It's like, what was the endgame? Was there a plan? Is this malice or incompetence? It is the question of our time. And it's also perhaps a useless exercise because at a certain point, if you're in charge of something, the difference is vanishing because your responsibility is to make sure that you don't crash the car. What's interesting is that Donald Trump, at some point in the last several days, gets asked himself about the plan. And they didn't know about it. proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup. And is that something you support? About who? Did FIFA or Mr. Infantino speak to you about their proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup? No, I never spoke to him. Mr. President, on the. And in the world of Donald Trump, when he gives very short answers, the person who's the protagonist of that question, yeah, you should probably be a bit worried. He just said no. One word. I think some viewers will kind of roll their eyes at this. And I think even I'm about to roll my eyes at what I'm saying. But I kind of asked a few people about Joshua Kushner because I haven't heard much about him. Yeah. You know, price this investment. Obviously, everyone knows a lot about Jared. And Jared's got a very long-standing relationship with Infantino. Goes back to the World Cup bid in 2018. He was very key to getting some of the votes for the U.S. at the time during Trump's first presidency. He's very key, actually, to getting the World Cup final to MetLife Stadium, convening a dinner of business leaders and local politicians. And it was ultimately Infantino who made that call. So that relationship is very long-standing. According to the people who kind of represent him isn't much of a Trump guy, right? This is where it's funny. I mean, so he's the good one, Adam. It's a bit like that. Is it the good Kushner? Well, I should say, like, I have known about him because we went to college together. Oh, okay. And look, he graduated the year after me, but we're about the same age. But just to add to the reputation, he's married to Karlie Kloss, the supermodel, and they both have threaded this needle this entire time. They've been dancing between the raindrops of that stain. And they have emerged as like, look, he has a healthcare company, Oscar Health, which is this wildly successful thing. Thrive Capital is a winner. People consider him very smart. It's just interesting that this thing has now connected him to Trump world. And it's sort of operating prime directives in a way that is new in his story, just to add to what you were getting at. Yeah, exactly. And it was a bit like you say, that was kind of the description given to me that he is kind of pretty smart guy, a little bit more liberal, et cetera. I mean, ultimately, it doesn't really matter because the opposition to the plan is far more than whether it's to a connection to the Trump family or not. It's just the optics of it. Yes. Even if he is this great guy. I mean, I would also question his senses as well because. Yeah. Unfortunately, we've seen this time and time again from US investors where there is this naivety to how the world of soccer and soccer fans will react to ideas that they have for the sport. And what's amazing about this is it is once again JP Morgan who are involved as they were in the Super League. They apologized after the Super League and they've done it again. And there is this kind of. incredible naivety that just keeps repeating itself. And I'm sure there would have been advice from some people involved saying, hey, this is dangerous territory. There was a level of political naivety actually from Infantino as well. Because actually, I think if he'd have workshopped this idea with some of his allies and certain confederations, possibly Africa, South America, Asia to a certain extent, I don't know if they'd have gone for it, but they may have been more predisposed to it. UEFA were never going to go for it. Some of CONCACAF might have gone for it. You know, we've seen Mexico come out with a slightly different statement to what the overall CONCACAF statement was. And for some of these federations, it's a lot of money. And of course, you know, they wouldn't be doing their job to their members actually to not think about it and to have a conversation about it. But by keeping it as secret as he did and then losing control of the messaging, I mean, he was actually meant to announce it the day before the World Cup final. That was when it was meant to be announced. But for some reason, either he or the Kushner side wanted to do a bit more work on it and it got pushed back. And the way I'm told, Gianni kept sort of slightly gossiping about it with his rich friends. And that widened the web of people who knew about it. And that then led, you know, obviously to it leaking. So it was kind of his own hubris that has kind of caused this possible downfall. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. I think what it gives you a sense of is I think he does view himself as a king, to be blunt. You know, you look at the way that he travels via private jet, which I think was secured via sort of Qatar Airways FIFA sponsorship for the president to use, the security escorts that he got throughout police motorcades. And the fact he doesn't really do press conferences. You know, he did one at the start of the tournament. He does about one every four years these days. He doesn't take questions. He doesn't take questions from us. He doesn't take questions from his own confederation president. It all gives the sense of someone who thought they were invincible, impregnable. I mean, this week started with the most extraordinary rant on Instagram. Yes, it's amazing. This is him on Instagram going at his critics, the people who had now emerged in full-throatedness in public. And he's telling them to, quote, meditate, pray, or watch a football match instead of spending their time and energy hating us. There are 15 slides. And he's talking about, you know, we just had the best show in the world. And he's saying those behind their screens, spreading hate and false rumors. You know, he's defending football itself against the haters, Adam. Yeah, and it was the most ridiculous statement. It was just like the kind of ramblings of insanity, to be honest. And that was the day before all of this then came. And I think that he knew something was coming and he was gearing up for a fight. And it's a shame because it was a great show. You know, it's always a great show. It's the World Cup. And there'll be a lot of people at FIFA who have put in an incredible amount of work only to basically see it all go up in flames, you know, within two, two, three weeks of the tournament ending. And it's very, very hard to see how they would ever again want to work for this man. This now just brings me to the FIFA side of things, their historical pattern of corruption. Like, how do you just explain how it is that Set Bladder, the predecessor to Gianni Infantino, as the head of FIFA, is now getting to say, actually, this too is beyond the pale for me. Quote, FIFA is not a private equity fund. It is an association with statutes, regulations, and a fiduciary responsibility to protect the global game. If you sell football's crown jewels to private investors, you also sell part of the game, especially its soul. Money matters, but it must never become everything. End quote. And look, the hypocrisy embedded in, this tweet, of course, is something to marvel at, given Set Bladder's role in previous FIFA corruption. But it underscores the depths of the Infantino administration. Well, because it's been a pattern under Infantino of a pretty appalling governance of, I would say, elasticity of rules and policies and consultation that has alienated, pretty much everyone, including now, even his own closest allies. I mean, his advisor, Carlos Cordero, quit on Friday morning. We, of course, start with that breaking news and a major blow for Gianni Infantino. His senior advisor, Carlos Cordero, has resigned with immediate effect today in protest at proposals to sell a stake in the World Cup, calling the plan a bad deal for football. I messaged Carlos on Thursday night about 7pm to say, I heard you knew nothing, nothing about this. Do you want to comment? And then I woke up the next morning and he quit. Well, this is the former US soccer president who was Gianni Infantino's right-hand man. Is that a fair description? Yeah, yeah. And he had been essentially running around after Infantino like a little puppy since 2021. Very involved with sort of all the planning for the North American World Cup and White House meetings on the White House task force, all of that sort of stuff. And he basically said, he wants to distance himself from it. And then there was the most extraordinary statement from the COO of FIFA, Kevin Lamour. This is FIFA's chief operating officer. His name is Kevin Lamour. And he said that the governing body staff were deceived by Infantino's lack of openness over his plans for the World Cup private investor scheme. So this is a statement from Kevin Lamour in which he said that staff, quote, deserve better than contempt and intimidation. This was really an extraordinary statement. Extraordinary one. Because Kevin is a previously UEFA executive, moved over to FIFA maybe a year and a half ago. He's one of the few people, I would say, from FIFA land that almost universally people outside of FIFA speak well of. He's the Josh Kushner of FIFA. Right, right. And so I don't say that lightly, but he basically came out and said, look, we've all been completely deceived by Gianni. This was a one-man show. I don't care if I lose my job. I don't care if I lose my job over this. He's not yet lost his job over this, but it's hard to imagine how he could possibly continue if Infantino is president. But that just gives you a sense of, you know, the level of alienation. You know, when your own advisor and your COO are coming out publicly to stab you in the front. You know, this isn't behind the scenes or anything like that. That is, you know, stabbing you right in the front. All of this leads us to Friday because we're going to be talking about what does Gianni Infantino finally decide to do? He pulls back. We start. with breaking news and an embarrassing U-turn from Gianni Infantino, who has scrapped his controversial plan to sell off stakes in FIFA competitions, including the World Cup. It comes after global criticism aimed at the FIFA president, who in a lengthy statement in the early hours of this morning admitted the project had created divisions and was no longer in the interest of its original objective. It was basically how do we extricate ourselves from this while keeping Gianni in a job? That was the level it had got to. You sort of, what had happened, you had UEFA threaten a boycott, you'd have CONCACAF reject it. And FIFA had doubled down on it in the early hours of Friday morning, only for the Asian Confederation to immediately come out and reject it. And, you know, he was hoping that that would be the end of it. And it's not, because Saturday morning UEFA came out, basically said he's not fit for purpose. UEFA welcomes FIFA's decision to sell off stakes in its competitions, including the World Cup, into private hands. We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game. The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA's confidence, but also that of many other members of the football family. CONCACAF then come out, call for a reckoning for the presidency. There have been some celebrations who have come out and backed Gianni, who have basically said, you know, look, you've made a mistake. Thank you for correcting the mistake. Now, you know, we still believe in you. I mean, the ones who have come out for him, Qatar, who obviously he's got a very close relationship with Qatar, going back to the 22 World Cup, even lived there for a little bit and was very defensive of Qatar, you know, in and amongst all of his, all the workers abuses that took place there. And also Morocco. Who are a co-host of 2030 and desperate to get the final for 2030. So maybe that loyalty could be rewarded. I think that's going to be really interesting to see which confederations are a unified bloc, which splinter. FIFA politics is really simple. It's a numbers game. It's 211 nations. You need the numbers. And Gianni, I think, will only resign if he feels he's lost the numbers. If he feels he's in with a fighting chance, I can imagine he will. Attempt to fight on. And then it's a case of who has the guts to fight it. Well, now we get to the political question on the back end of this scandal and this turn, this twist in the in the plot here, because something that you've been alluding to, of course, is that, yes, this is a federation. There are 211 voters. For those who are not familiar, it is one country, one vote. The smallest state in the union has the same number of votes as the largest state in the world. And so it's a case of who has the guts to fight it. And so the other thing that everyone's anticipating that had been previously established, Adam, is yet another expansion of the World Cup. So biggest ever was what we just saw, 48. And now 64 is looming. There was just a memo released about this amid all of this. And what does that signal to you? And what does it mean? I think it makes it really hard if he stays in power for it to go to 64 teams. I think the last thing that's going to happen is that we're going to see the likelihood of 64 teams is now greatly diminished due to the events of the past week, because UEFA and CONCACAF are already opposed to that. If he then tries to push that through, do you want to go and start another war? Or do you have a little mini war with CONMEBOL, the South Americans, which have about 11 members? That's one of the downsides of South America for Gianni is there's not that many countries. There's a lot of landmass, but not that many votes. And so I think it's going to be a very, very difficult time. I think it's going to be a very, very difficult time. And they're the ones who are really keen on it. So they get more of a hosting rights in 2030. So I think that does make it harder. There's a lot of things that it would make harder for him. And I think it would make his even if he was reelected, I think it would make him a real lame duck. To be honest, as a president, I'm not really sure what he'd be able to get through. Because anything that he attempts to get through that's his own idea, I think would really struggle now. This is a bit surprising. In a way that makes me now need to calibrate, like, am I feeling optimism? Is that sinking sensation? Optimism? Well, never be too optimistic until you know who the next one is. That's what I say, right? You know, there's a lot of people who, you know, until this week, have quietly enabled this, right? Yes. You know, for the past, well, 10 years, pretty much, you know, think of all the things that have gone on at FIFA over the last 10 years, you know, the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, the Balogun affair, the Peace Prize, the kind of slightly ridiculous Club World Cup expansion, the Saudi Arabia, the way that it was kind of rigged so that the Saudis would be the sole bidder for 2034. So are we going to now have, you know, one of these vice presidents from one of these confederations who have largely sat there taking, you know, $300,000 a year as a salary, occasionally had a bit of a whinge publicly to make themselves look good, or because they genuinely believe it in some cases. Are we saying that they're not, they've not enabled this at all for the last few years? You know, it's taken this, this thing where it's literally got to the point of Infantino has sold out so much that he's literally selling a piece of the World Cup that was the red line when there probably should have been a red line four or five years ago to be honest, over kind of, yes, arguably even more kind of ethically important issues. Yeah, I mean, admittedly, I had, and this is quite sad to verbalize near the end here, but I had given up on the idea that human rights violations were the threshold beyond which we would not cross. You know, the Saudis were given the what we're given a kind of World Cup 2034. They had to do because one of the one of the consequences of the Qatar World Cup, was that they would do a human rights assessment for future World Cups. And FIFA got a global law, a global kind of law firm consultancy, Clifford Chance, in their Saudi practice to do an assessment of Saudi human rights. It came back, medium assessment, a medium assessment of human rights, which begs the question of where on earth would be high, right? And, you know, but that, just kind of, you know, a couple of news stories, a few people talk about it for a week, breeze on. The Confederation Vice President has nothing to say. And no, that's not kind of a British, European, American resident, whatever you want to call me, sort of talking down to the Gulf States or anything like that. That is simply an observation of the way that these people who work within FIFA, what they have been prepared to tolerate over the last few years, the elasticity that they've been able to first tolerate. So don't be surprised at some point if you give someone so many inches that they then try and take a mile away from you as well. I mean, there is this larger conversation in which everyone, I think, is feeling tempted to say, oh my God, there is a limit on greed. There is the ability to organize an even vaguely populist revolt to put your foot down on the march of capital. And the thing I am left thinking here at the end with you is this is actually the story of what it is to f**k up your political strategy so badly that you lose your allies. Yeah, I think that feels like kind of the easiest way to describe what's happened because never has someone been in a position so strongly to say, oh my God, there is a limit on greed. There is a limit on and squandered so much political capital so quickly. But to Gianni Infantino, reportedly, there was another familiar play worth trying here. The news of this Hail Mary breaking just yesterday in the New York Post and elsewhere. There is going to be a meeting, we think via telephone today, with the under-pressure FIFA president and members of the Donald Trump administration. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State for America, is expected to be on the call. I mean, get yourself a bigger shovel, Gianni. This is going to have the opposite effect, isn't it? What on earth has he got to do with Donald Trump? And this is what I can't get over now. I think it's now becoming sort of farcical. It's almost comical. Laughable and, yeah, that's the way I was looking for, farcical. Now, the spokesman for U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has denied reports of this call. And FIFA, privately, has done the same, we are told. But as one lame duck appears to plead for help with another, testing the reciprocality of the favor trading that brought us here in the first place, I think you can begin to hear what is now a quite familiar sound to both Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino. Laughter. From the rest of the world. And, um. it may only get worse, really, from here. But let's see. It is a fitting postscript to the biggest and most American World Cup that we've ever seen, Adam Crafton. A fellow resident, a fellow new American, who I'm glad to talk to as all of this is swirling. Thanks, as always. Godspeed. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.