I read Infantino’s name-dropping, despot-fluffing book so you don’t have to

One chapter promises to dig into how he rid Fifa of corruption

30 May 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

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.

It was in this spirit 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, in less than two weeks.

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.

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 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.

After which, nothing happens for 60 pages. There's one good detail about his childhood, which has him travelling on a train collecting scrap metal in a sack to sell to a dealer. The rest is name-dropping, despot-fluffing and yet more mentions of genies and lamp-rubbing.

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. A little later, the book seems to say Infantino saved the world from Covid-19 and also, obviously, racism. He loves hanging out with legends, such as Diego Maradona, who really like him and not just because he’s a president.

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, 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. It’s just too strange to look directly in the eye. An unremarkable 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. 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 die because of choices made in the staging of World Cups.

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 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, 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.