Given the way it’s carried on, why does FIFA continue to exist?

Open this photo in gallery:

FIFA is one of those outfits that makes you wish you were born with a con-artist streak. If you were, maybe you’d be the one bellying up to the trough instead of some gurning Swiss lawyer.

Founded on nothing but a desire to run a thing that didn’t require running, FIFA has no actual sports business. It doesn’t own its most valuable asset, the World Cup, in any real sense. Yes, it holds the trademark. But if Germany, Argentina and Japan decide tomorrow they would like to start an Earth Cup, the only thing FIFA could do to prevent them would be to throw them out of FIFA.

So it is a mystery to me why anyone is discussing what FIFA wants, plans or thinks is best for the game of football. The question should not be, ‘How can FIFA be stopped?’ It’s, ‘Given the way it’s carried on, why does FIFA continue to exist?’

Over the last few days, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has gone from trying to sell off the World Cup, to delaying the sale, to rescinding the sale, to trying to scramble out of his own professional grave.

European football administrators say they want him gone. Okay, let’s say that happens and they elect someone new. What’s the history there?

The FIFA World Cup boycott and Gianni Infantino controversy, explained

The FIFA president before Infantino, Issa Hayatou, was multiply accused of taking bribes. The one before that, Sepp Blatter, has been banned from coming anywhere near the game of football. João Havelange, the one before that – many more bribes. That gets us back to the 1970s. A new person in the same suit is unlikely to be the answer here.

One gets why the world’s football leaders value FIFA. It does the tedious work of administration. Occasionally, they cut you a big cheque. Like a bad accountant, FIFA handles the money and spares you the details.

However, now that the accountant has suggested that instead of billing you, they sell off your estate and disburse those monies as they see fit, why would you continue to employ them?

The shame of this isn’t the ask. What’s cringeworthy is the reaction, and the reaction to the reaction.

Open this photo in gallery:

Europe took FIFA’s attempt to tranche their national teams like junk bonds poorly enough that they refused to show up at any future FIFA productions.

Was this supposed to demonstrate strength? You try to rob me to my face, so I won’t be coming to your house again until you promise to stop making plans to rob me?

How will I know you’ve done that? Because you’ve replaced the huckster at the top with one of the assistant hucksters, all of whom are drawn from an unbroken procession of hucksters going back to the sporting Stone Age?

The world’s reaction to this insipid response was hosannahs to European strength. They’re in the process of being quiet-invaded by Russia, but at least they’ve shown the sports knobs who’s not in charge.

You invented the game. Your leagues are the reason it’s so popular. A bunch of rubes who have no claim on your work have tried to snatch it away so that they can use it as a buy-in at Donald Trump’s casino. What other evidence of institutional bad faith do you require?

My over/under on the number of major European football powers it would take to capsize FIFA is two.

If two European powerhouses – France and England, for instance – said, ‘You know what? We don’t want to be in business with these people any more. We’re happy playing in the European championships. It’s a better tournament than the World Cup anyway. If the rest of you figure out some other way to do a world championship, minus FIFA, let us know. But that’s on you, and we’re out.’

No negotiations. Just go. That would sink FIFA. But no. They cannot remove their lips from FIFA’s money spigot. This is the crux of it.

Infantino may be dodging fire, but FIFA hasn’t been cowed. One FIFA executive called the idea to sell the World Cup’s commercial rights “the project of one person.” Okay. Sure.

Open this photo in gallery:

In the midst of this mess, FIFA announced an intention to expand the next World Cup to 64 teams. That would have seemed like a major deal, but now seems like a minor concession. Could that have been the real goal?

Via Infantino, FIFA has taken a lesson from its American benefactors: losers make plans; winners bulldoze. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter what the plan is. You don’t even need a plan. What matters is relentless forward pressure.

You need only hold one idea in your mind – that your opponents are weak. Made too fat by recent history, too complacent, too easily bought, they lack the steel to make a hard choice. So you push until they collapse. There may be some setbacks along the way. But in the end, you’ll get most of what you want.

That’s how this will turn out. The ground is already being laid. Over the weekend, the Financial Times proclaimed that the problem with Infantino’s plan to sell the World Cup wasn’t the sale itself. It was the valuation. He’d proposed asking for too little. Don’t think that won’t put some antennae up around the football world.

Whether it’s Infantino in charge or not, FIFA will get some part of what it wanted a week ago. There will still be a World Cup. Europe and the rest will be there. They’ll make a great show of being for the right thing, but they’ll go.

That’s how all these stories – and I assume you’re getting that I’m no longer taking about sports – will continue to end.

They will do so until someone who has something to lose decides to stand on principle, and accept the material consequences of whatever that entails. Not because it’s the smart business decision, but because it’s right.