⚽ The Helvetic Underground

Ramon Vega played centre-back for Tottenham and Switzerland, then went into finance in London. Last week he announced he would challenge Gianni Infantino for the FIFA presidency in Rabat next March. He first needs 5 of FIFA’s 211 federations to nominate him by 18 November, a bar he missed in 2019. If he clears it, the next boss of world football will be Swiss either way. Infantino was born in Brig, in the Upper Valais. Sepp Blatter, who ran FIFA before him, comes from Visp, a few miles down the valley. (Blatter, banned from football until 2028, wished Vega luck. Lovely gesture. Not the endorsement I would put on my CV.) Even the Swiss Football Association has dropped Infantino, over transparency. Two Swiss men are fighting over a chair their own country would never build.

The chair pays about CHF4.8M a year. In 2016 FIFA capped its president at three terms. In 2022 it ruled that Infantino’s first three years did not count, which is how a three-term limit produces a fourth term. In July he tried to fold FIFA’s commercial business into a $20B subsidiary and sell up to 20% to investors led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital. (Joshua’s brother Jared is Donald Trump’s son-in-law, in case the deal looked short of conflicts.) Each federation, which also happens to elect the president, was offered up to $20M. The plan lasted less than a week. FIFA’s chief operating officer said staff had been deceived by a one-man project. By the end of August he was gone. Vega’s 11-page manifesto promises to restore trust and modernise governance, and leaves the chair exactly as it is. Swapping the man who tried to sell a fifth of the World Cup business for a fund manager is what bankers call a change of counterparty.

At home, the Swiss hand power to seven ministers who decide as a college, each on a tenth of Infantino’s pay. The presidency rotates every January and comes with a CHF12K top-up. This year it is Guy Parmelin, a winegrower from the vineyards above Lake Geneva, who has taken nearly 600 photos of the flowers on the cabinet table. (Infantino, meanwhile, created a FIFA peace prize and gave it to Trump.) On 2 October Parmelin announced he would leave government in December, after 11 years, to make room for others. Infantino is running for a fourth term.

And no law requires a throne. FIFA is legally a Swiss association, like a village choir, and Swiss law makes the general meeting, here the 211 federations, its supreme body. Bern did its part in 2014 and 2015, classing Swiss-based sports bosses as politically exposed persons and letting prosecutors pursue private bribery without a complaint. Since Blatter took over FIFA in 1998, Switzerland has changed presidents 28 times. FIFA has managed it once, and that took Swiss police raiding a Zurich hotel at dawn.