What will be the biggest legacy of this World Cup? Besides Lionel Messi’s goals and Spain’s stylish stranglehold of games, it will surely be the moment a US President boasted about exerting political pressure on Fifa.
When Donald Trump revealed he had lobbied Fifa president Gianni Infantino to suspend an automatic one-match ban on Folarin Balogun, breaking precedents to let the US team’s star striker play in a vital game, fans around the globe were united in disgust.
Among them was Miguel Maduro, a former chair of Fifa’s own governance committee. He felt “outraged” by the organisation’s “scandalous” decision, apparently made to please Trump, who Infantino cravenly awarded a Fifa peace prize to last year.
But Maduro was not surprised by what unfolded, because the former Portuguese government minister knows from bitter personal experience how far Infantino will go to gain political favour.
The law professor joined Fifa in 2016, hoping to clean up the association after multiple corruption scandals, only to be sacked just eight months later over decisions that he says threatened the vested interests of Infantino and his supporters.
