Fifa president will be under major scrutiny when he goes to Brussels to address the Uefa annual congress on Thursday
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ssuming Gianni Infantino turns up on time, he is expected to make his customary address to Uefa’s annual congress on Thursday. The couple of hours spent in Brussels Expo Hall 3 will be largely procedural but the Fifa president’s messaging will be worth delegates’ attention. Even by the standards of relations between football’s major governing bodies, the past 12 months have been fractious. The fault lines hardly get narrower and there is certainly no reduction in the number of thorny issues simmering away.
At last year’s edition, in Belgrade, Infantino used the gathering of European football’s great and good to make a caveated case for Russia’s return to competitive action. If that was a rolling of the pitch, his comments on the matter in an interview last week amounted to letting the sprinklers loose. Infantino said the ban on Russian sides should be reassessed, at least for age-group teams, but there is little chance of his views gaining weight around Europe even if he elects to revisit the argument.
It is inconceivable that Uefa’s executive committee, which meets the day before congress, tables a vote to let Russia back in. Even if a constituency exists in favour of their return, it has nothing like the clout to push that through. Privately, a number of Football Associations wonder how the subject can seriously be raised given nothing has changed for the better since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A fear in some quarters is that Infantino may attempt to pull levers at Fifa’s congress, in Vancouver on 30 April, to get what appears to be his wish.
