Football: Resistance and Corrupt Governance

Millions watched the World Cup but behind the scenes are governing bodies who engage in shady deals. As opposition grows to the Ireland-Israel match, Andy Storey looks at the corruption of some governing bodies and how fans are resisting.

“This has not just been… the greatest… World Cup of all time. It is the greatest human, social and cultural event that mankind has ever witnessed” – Gianni Infantino, July 2026.

This preposterous statement by the head of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) (world football's governing body) is fully in keeping with his hubristic and delusional management style.

But Infantino's hubris seemed to have gone too far when a plan he had devised, largely in secret, to sell shares in future FIFA tournaments (including the flagship World Cups) to a consortium of private equity investors was greeted with fury. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) led calls for Infantino's dismissal.

That the private equity group being offered a stake in FIFA tournaments was headed up by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared (Donald Trump's son-in-law and ubiquitous special representative), compounded the sense that this was a deeply dodgy deal (which has now been shelved).

Infantino’s misdeeds

A leading UEFA figure was quoted as follows “his [Infantino’s] leadership has been exposed as poor, his character questionable, his interests self-interested and he is absolutely the wrong person to lead FIFA”.

To which the response has to be: you’re only realising this now!? Why did it take this latest scandal to prompt the anonymous UEFA representative to reach a conclusion most other people had drawn years ago?

A list of Infantino’s misdeeds includes:

• Ignoring the plight of migrant workers mercilessly exploited (many to death) during the construction of the infrastructure for the 2022 men’s World Cup held in Qatar;
• The awarding of the 2034 men’s World Cup to Saudi Arabia despite copious evidence that this will be based on further exploitation of migrant workers and will take place against the backdrop of assorted other human rights abuses;
• The farcical award of a newly minted FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump;
• Associating FIFA with Trump’s obscene Board of Peace for Gaza, a vehicle to further dispossess Palestinians and deny them any say in their own governance, with Infantino pledging FIFA to help rehabilitate football facilities (for whose use?) that Israel had destroyed, while raising no objection to that prior destruction nor to the Israeli killing of hundreds of Palestinian footballers;
• Not suspending the Israeli Football Association even though, contrary to FIFA’s own rules, it allows participation by Israeli teams that are based on occupied Palestinian land.
• Trying to force delegates from the Israeli and Palestinian football associations to publicly shake hands at a FIFA event (the Palestinian was having none of it), and proposing that a FIFA youth tournament feature an opening match between Israeli and Palestinian teams, both of these stunts designed to pretend that the conflict was between ‘equal’ combatants requiring mediation when, in fact, it is a one-sided, murderous onslaught.

To this list can be added the shocking conduct of the 2026 tournament (co-hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico) that saw outrageous price gouging (match tickets, transport to and from games, food and drink inside stadiums); the introduction of disruptive ‘hydration breaks’ to facilitate additional TV advertising; US immigration restrictions (unopposed by FIFA) that saw a Somali referee denied entry to the US, alongside fans from many countries, while players and staff from some teams were delayed and harassed, and the Iranian team obliged to base themselves in Mexico and only allowed entry to the US on the days of their games (and forced to leave immediately afterwards); and the overturning of a one-match ban on a US player for a sending-off, a reversal that Trump bragged about having been done at his behest.

When questioned about these travesties, Infantino told people to “chill, relax”, later accusing critics of being “consumed by hate.”

UEFA

Where was the outrage from UEFA when this catalogue of crimes and abuses was being committed? Infantino’s behaviour has, for many years, been shocking and self-serving and this was well known to UEFA and everybody else.

The feigned outrage from UEFA (doubtless based, in reality, on personal ambitions rather than principles) echoes the famous scene in the film Casablanca in which the French Captain Renault obeys his German masters by shutting down the cafe-casino of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick:

Captain Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money.]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.

Like Captain Renault, UEFA was centrally implicated in the shameful and unethical way Infantino has long been running football. UEFA also has its own sins to answer for. For example, their flagship club tournament, the Champions League, is sponsored by, amongst others, bet365 – even though professional footballers suffer disproportionately from gambling addictions.

And UEFA has continued to allow Israeli national teams and clubs compete in European competition despite calls from some of its members (including the Football Association of Ireland, FAI) to ban them. UEFA will claim that they are, in this case, bound by the preferences of the majority of their national member organisations. And if the global (FIFA) and regional (UEFA) governance of football is deeply problematic, things are typically little better at that national level.

FAI

The English Premier League (EPL) is the richest such national association, and a report by the UK charity War on Want documents how that league is complicit in Israeli genocide and other human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. Global corporations active in the Occupied Territories, some of them working directly with the Israeli military, are sponsors of several EPL clubs.

And some clubs display an even more blatant pro-Israeli bias: Arsenal fired a kit man who criticised Israeli atrocities on social media, while Brighton took no action against a coach who posed alongside Israeli soldiers in Gaza and called for the extermination of Palestinians. This comes as no surprise given the extent to which these clubs are increasingly owned by despots or rapacious robber barons (Jeff Bezos of Amazon, a man whose fortune is founded on intense exploitation of labour and industrial-scale tax avoidance, taking a stake in Liverpool is but the latest example).

Closer to home, the FAI has its own history of unaccountable leadership and financial chicanery, forensically documented in the book Champagne Football, which shows how former (2004-2019) Chief Executive John Delaney (a kind of Celtic Infantino) organised a salary of hundreds of thousands of Euros per annum for himself (with generous expenses on top) even as he ran the association into the ground and left it with massive debts.

Some reforms have been put in place since Delaney’s reign but a propensity for deception is still on display: the FAI claimed that its decision to move its forthcoming ‘home’ game against Israel (discussed further below) to a neutral venue had the backing of the Palestinian Football Association, a claim the Palestinian authority quickly exposed as false.

Fans Support Palestine

In summary, the governance of football is profoundly rotten from top to bottom. But there are signs of hope amidst all the reactionary politics and corruption.

One such sign is the widespread opposition to Ireland playing Israel in those UEFA Nations League games (scheduled for 27 September and 4 October), with both ‘home’ and ‘away’ games now to be played at third country venues – as if that resolved the matter, when the real issue is that nobody should be playing Israel anywhere.

A grassroots movement, backed by numerous former players and coaches, has raised invaluable awareness of the issues, which could not have been achieved were it not for the fact that ordinary people care about football and do not want to see it used to whitewash Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. Corporate and political elites can use the game to advance their ego- and greed-driven agendas, but people’s love of the game can equally be tapped into as a resource to fuel resistance.

The same love of the game, and in this case of a particular club, caused dozens of Glasgow Celtic supporters’ clubs to campaign against the mooted appointment of former Ireland international Robbie Keane as Celtic manager in June of this year. Their opposition was rooted in Keane’s decision to manage an Israeli club – Maccabi Tel Aviv – while the genocide in Gaza was ongoing.

And this was not just any club – Maccabi’s fans routinely chant slogans like “Let the IDF [Israeli military] win, f*** the Arabs”; these same fans have engaged in thuggery against Arabs and others on their travels abroad. The club showed, during Keane’s tenure as manager, a video to its players of some of its staff serving with the Israeli army in Gaza as a motivational tool – the team applauded.

The Celtic fans’ statement opposing Keane’s appointment noted that their club “was founded by a community shaped by the legacy of genocide, displacement and famine [the club having been founded by Irish emigrants]. Our club’s roots lie in solidarity with those who suffered injustice and oppression. We cannot forget where we came from, nor turn our backs on those facing genocide today.”

Whether this protest influenced the decision to ultimately not appoint Keane to the job, it was still a stirring expression of solidarity rooted in a football community who see themselves as upholding values beyond the pursuit of titles and trophies.

Another sporting community that expresses those values is Ireland’s Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) players, coaches and supporters, many of whom have been appalled by the decision of the GAA authorities to maintain its sponsorship relationship with the Allianz insurance group. A UN Special Rapporteur’s report found that Allianz has helped sustain the Israeli military presence in Palestinian territories. Pimco, Allianz’s bond management subsidiary, has lent billions of dollars to the Israeli government.

Former Dublin footballer David Hickey has stated that “The history and the morality of the GAA is directly opposed to having Allianz and its genocide enabling fraternity involved in anything to do with our national games.” Again, what we see here is a sporting community seeking to reclaim what they see as the essence and values of the game from those who can see no further than the bottom line.

Of course it would be wrong to romanticise sport. For every Lamine Yamal, the Spanish superstar who waved a Palestinian flag on the open-top bus parade to celebrate Barcelona winning the Spanish league title, there is an Enzo Fernández – the Argentinian player whose transfer from Chelsea to Manchester City has just broken the English transfer record and whose racism and homophobia are a matter of public record.

Staying with Argentina, the Left can claim the legendary Diego Maradona, a stalwart anti-imperialist, but the current President of that country, the extreme right-winger Javier Milei, is himself a former footballer.

For every pro-Palestinian Glasgow Celtic fan there is an IDF-supporting Glasgow Rangers fan, a club steeped in a culture of toxic Loyalism, some of whose followers gleefully sing lines like “we’re up to our knees in Fenian blood”.

George Orwell claimed that all competitive sport is “bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness” though, as usual with Orwell, he was transmuting his own pessimistic and disgruntled outlook into a supposedly universal law. In reality, sport can be a force for good or ill. Which makes it much like nationalism.

Sections of the Left have tended to treat nationalism with suspicion, seeing it as a diversion from the ‘real’ politics of class. This left the field open for the Far Right to seize the banner of nationalism in the building of xenophobic movements across the world. In Ireland we have seen the Far Right seek to hijack the tricolour as a symbol of an exclusionary politics of hate.

As with nationalism, it would be a mistake for the Left not to engage with sport – it is far too important and powerful a force to be left to the likes of Gianni Infantino.

The ideas in this article were first teased out in an episode of The Ditch’s Party Line podcast: Ep 23: Cleaning Up Football, w Andy Storey