Spare a prayer for the suffering of a poor little FIFA president

When Greg Norman was asked in May about the bloodthirsty deeds of the Saudi Arabian government for whom he was working as a frontman, he said: “Everyone makes mistakes.” It gave him what appeared to be an unassailable clubhouse lead in the contest for insensitive inanity of the century.

But his reign lasted just six months. On Saturday, he was overtaken by FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

In what was supposed to be a preface to a press conference in Doha ahead of the World Cup, but became a pained and peeved 50-minute monologue, Infantino somehow turned inside out Qatar’s dubious human rights record and FIFA’s acquiescence in it and made himself the victim.

“Today, I have very strong feelings,” he began. “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”

Lest you might think he was speaking figuratively, he went on: “I am (the) son of migrant workers. My parents worked very, very hard in very, very difficult conditions, not in Qatar, in Switzerland. I remember how migrant workers were treated when they tried to enter the country.

“When I came to Doha [he lives there now], I went to see the workers here and was brought back to my childhood. I said to the people here in Qatar, ‘This is not good, this is not right, we have to do something about this’.”

You see what he did there? He was no longer the president of the rich, powerful and infamously greedy organisation that was complicit in what was enslavement of the migrant workers, he was their saviour, a whistleblower, noble righter of their wrongs.

First, though, he had to finish off his rhetorical flourish. “I’m not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled, and I’m not really a migrant worker,” he said, “but I feel like them because I know what it means to be discriminated (against) … to be bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country.

“As a child, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles, plus I was Italian, so imagine.”

Oh, we’re imagining away as hard as we can here.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.Credit: AP

We don’t doubt that schoolyard mockery of young Infantino was unpleasant. But we can’t get our heads around the idea that it made him as one with gays who stand to go to jail here for being themselves or Indian and Pakistani construction workers who died building the stadiums and infrastructure for this World Cup. Not even Norman tried to identify with the dead.

Infantino was far from done in his shape-shifting, Still speaking as the bully’s victim, he said: “What do you do then? You try to engage, make friends. Don’t start accusing, fighting, insulting. You start engaging. And this is what we should be doing.”

Gianni Infantino: ‘As a child I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles.’Credit: AP

We? But who is we? Gianni Infantino and his fellow oppressed, the downtrodden, disenfranchised and dead of Doha? Unless something was lost in translation, he was placing the onus on the victims. Unless, he was again Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA.

In truth, he was blaming human rights and labour activists for drawing attention to abuses and the media for drawing attention to their attention. This was a media conference, remember. “This moral-giving: it’s just hypocrisy,” said the man who in recent consecutive breaths urged Ukraine and Russia to strike a ceasefire in the name of the World Cup and demanded that players stay out of politics.

It wasn’t a media conference. It was a breathtaking and fantastical two-hour apologia for FIFA, exposing Infantino in his overweening self-regard and FIFA, again, for the born-to-rule cult it has become.

Switzerland’s attitude towards gays when it hosted the World Cup in 1954 was not so different to Qatar’s now, he said, and women there did not gain voting rights until the 1990s. Countries change, he said. But on these matters of human dignity, Qatar hasn’t.

FIFA was working with the International Labour Organisation to frame better conditions, he said, as if this was some sort of ground-breaking initiative by football’s governing body and not belated and necessary redress. It was also out of the bigness of its heart offering reparation.

Infantino asked that the players be left out of criticism, which should instead be directed at him, then protested criticisms directed at him. Having felt for Qataris, Arabs, Africans, gays, the disabled and migrant workers, he also felt most keenly for himself, answering now for decisions taken 12 years ago.

The German soccer team stage a protest at the start of their World Cup qualifier against Iceland in March.Credit: AP

He promised that this would be the best World Cup ever, of course. “We must bring the world together,” he said. “No one else is bringing the world together. No one is doing that.”

At which point even Norman must have put down his beer, packed away his clubs and called for his helicopter. “Too good,” he would have said. “Too good.”

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