The Man Who Would Be King: Infantino's Book and the Mythology of FIFA Power

In the opening pages of Gianni Infantino's new book, which The Guardian's Barney Ronay reviewed on 30 May 2026, the FIFA president appears to credit something closer to mysticism than meritocracy for his ascent to the summit of global football governance. Ronay's verdict is blunt: the book reads as a sustained exercise in self-mythologisation, its pages populated with name-drops and flattery directed at the very autocrats whose records human rights organisations have repeatedly documented as abysmal.

The recurring motif, according to Ronay, is magic — a word Infantino apparently deploys with startling frequency to describe the circumstances of his own rise. It is a peculiar choice of vocabulary for a man who presides over an organisation that spent the better part of a decade clawing back credibility after the 2015 corruption scandal that brought down his predecessor, Sepp Blatter. But then, the book is not aimed at critics. It is aimed at the world of state actors, broadcasting partners, and commercial sponsors who constitute FIFA's actual power ecosystem.

That ecosystem has always operated on a logic of mutual reinforcement. Football needs stadiums; governments need legitimacy through sport. FIFA needs hosting agreements; host nations need the软 power dividends that come with global attention. Infantino, by most assessments, has become exceptionally adept at managing these interdependencies. He has visited autocrats in Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and elsewhere — nations whose human rights records would give pause to most international executives — and emerged with hosting deals that have transformed FIFA's financial position. The book, Ronay suggests, presents this as a form of wizardry rather than transactional diplomacy.

The critique is useful not because it offers new information about FIFA's internal culture — that culture has been well documented elsewhere — but because it crystallises a tension that has defined the organisation since Blatter's departure. FIFA presents itself as the steward of the world's most popular sport, a role that carries genuine cultural weight in virtually every country on earth. But it also operates as a commercial vehicle, dependent on the goodwill of governments that can deliver stadiums, border exceptions, and broadcast revenues. These two functions are in permanent friction. The book, by all accounts, resolves that tension by simply refusing to acknowledge it exists.

What Ronay's review does not fully explore — perhaps because the book itself does not invite the inquiry — is what this self-mythologisation actually protects. FIFA's governance reforms, enacted under Infantino's presidency, have real substance: improved financial transparency, independent ethics committee rulings, term limits that Blatter never accepted. Critics acknowledge these changes while noting that the organisation's fundamental structure — a president with near-absolute authority, selected by a congress of 211 national federations many of which have their own governance problems — remains essentially unchanged. The book presents a vision of a reformed institution guided by visionary leadership. The tension between reform and continuity is, in this telling, simply dissolved.

The question this raises for the sport's future is not really about Infantino's literary output. It is about whether the normalisation of autocratic partnerships that the book apparently celebrates represents a long-term strategic choice or a short-term financial calculation. Major European leagues are negotiating their own broadcasting rights, their own sponsorship arrangements, their own relationships with states seeking sporting legitimacy. FIFA's model — centralise the quadrennial spectacle, extract maximum value, distribute selectively — has proved durable precisely because no alternative has emerged. But durability and legitimacy are different things.

Ronay's review suggests the book will not trouble Infantino's position within football's power structure. The audience it was written for — the despots, the broadcasters, the commercial partners — has already rendered its verdict by continuing to engage with FIFA as an institution. That engagement is the real measure of influence; the book is merely its literary expression. What remains less clear is whether the sport's broader constituency — the fans, the players, the smaller federations — has any mechanism to impose a different set of values on an organisation that has, by most financial metrics, never been stronger.

The book was published in May 2026. FIFA's next presidential election is scheduled for 2027.