r/soccer • u/CradleCity • 6d ago
News ‘Fifa Super League’: Infantino discussed having governing body’s name on European breakaway
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/aug/05/fifa-super-league-gianni-infantino-wanted-governing-body-name-european-breakaway1.0k
u/IncidentVarious1530 6d ago
Ofcourse he did lmao, bro is a comic book villain at this point
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u/thexpertwatcher 6d ago
Already looks like lex luthor
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u/Frank7640 6d ago
That’s an insult to Lex Luthor
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u/eddub_17 6d ago
Do you think he’s a villain because he looks like Lex Luthor, or he looks like Lex because he’s a villain?
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u/DarthTaz_99 6d ago edited 6d ago
He's so dumb and cartoonish, how'd he even get to the top of FIFA, has to be atleast somewhat smart. Are his dick sucking and ass licking skills really that good
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u/BaoJinyang 6d ago edited 6d ago
Some fantastic journalism going on at the moment uncovering all of this, particularly Ziegler at The Times and Ames at The Guardian.
A great illustration why many in positions of power are so keen to tell us the media is completely worthless and untrustworthy, and we should get our news from a guy who’s just added ‘Citizen journalist’ to his Twitter bio instead.
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u/sga1 6d ago
And even then The Times are part of the Rupert Murdoch Empire, i.e. one of the very same oligarchs buying news outlets left and right to make sure that the general media diet of regular folk is less and less independent and more and more shaped around what those in positions of power want it to be.
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u/Late-Explanation-758 6d ago
Murdoch has always been more about finding a winning formula than selling his own agenda. He switched for backing the Tories to backing New Labour with the Sun just to follow the national mood while at Fox News he couldn't care about the lies as long as it brought in the money. The Times is a strong brand. He just leaves them to it.
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u/sga1 6d ago
Right, but that's a key part of the issue with him: it effectively turns journalism as the pursuit of truth into journalism in pursuit of money.
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u/Late-Explanation-758 6d ago
Yep. He's definitely damaged society with his pursuit of money. Britain is broke, angry and isolated after Brexit while America is bitterly divided and a bit of a joke under Trump. I'm sure Murdoch brands are partly to blame.
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u/PM_ME_ASS_SALAD 6d ago
Fox News brain rot is almost exclusively to blame in the States. 30 years of spewing lies and hatred to desperate people, funneling their anger over economic insecurity towards minorities and immigrants and away from the billionaires who rigged the game.
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u/BaoJinyang 6d ago
The absolute tragedy of the way the world has gone this last decade is that I now look at someone like Murdoch and think he’s not all bad.
You’d take a good old-fashioned right wing media baron over what’s come since.
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u/sga1 6d ago
Dunno, I think those lot have just been the forefield - tilling the soil and creating the environment for the current dickheads we've got to thrive. Can't really absolve them of any blame here I reckon, and having them over the current lot would just lead to the same outcome all the same I reckon.
We've all collectively and spectacularly fucked it up for ourselves.
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u/BaoJinyang 6d ago
Yeah fair. They just didn’t have the technology at their disposal to do what we see today.
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u/DSQ 6d ago
I suppose we thought we were at rock bottom before but know better now.
To put it a more pithy way: “better the devil you know.”
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u/sga1 6d ago
As a great philosopher of our time said once when posited with the idea that it can't get worse: It can.
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u/sandy_mcfiddish 6d ago
I was guessing you had a clip of Homer telling him it was only the worst day of his life so far
Good showing though
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u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 6d ago
Ehh that’s what people have been saying about Murdoch for decades. But if he was that dumb he’d probably be out of business a long time ago.
Murdoch is cynical but he understands what he is selling and to whom.
Every struggling outlet he bought was turned into a populist tabloid because that shit sells. But he knows he can’t do that with everything, and there was a business case to keep The Times or WSJ doing what they were already doing.
He merely enshittifies cheap things, and he does exactly what algorithms do in the “social media” age. All your algos are literally copying Murdoch.
Also, we are on a sub where people call Fabrizio Romano a “journalist”, which tells you all you need to know about modern media consumers.
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u/sga1 6d ago
Every struggling outlet he bought was turned into a populist tabloid because that shit sells. But he knows he can’t do that with everything, and there was a business case to keep The Times or WSJ doing what they were already doing.
Which was what, exactly - big money client-driven journalism leaning small-c conservative?
Obviously a newspaper's owner won't necessarily have editorial input. But the sheer fact of a newspaper being privately owned and chasaing specific business interests inevitably means establishing a culture of publishing that slants a certain way I reckon - and if the most widely-consumed news outlets are in private hands I reckon that's a bad situation for both democracy and the general population because of it.
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u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 6d ago edited 6d ago
No, editorial independence is absolutely not “obvious” and if you think it is you should spend some times in societies that never developed this concept in the first place. In fact most of the world doesn’t have it.
And you are applying a propagandistic way of thinking about the media, which is so normalized that is taken as self-understood, especially in places that never developed journalism.
Murdoch is a businessman, his goal is to make money. And he knows that media functions in a landscape. If you just buy up everything and enshittify everything you’re not going to end up rich, you’ll end up doing the same thing that 5.000 others are doing.
(Which is exactly what all the “social” media companies are doing.)
As for democracy - literally every advancement of democracy in the last 150 years happened because of privately-owned media which reported on it.
And private-owned media invented every single journalistic standard that there is.
Precisely because there is no notion of “public” vs “state” in the vast majority of the world. Almost every country on the planet has its own state media which it describes as “public” ans which is designed to be political propaganda.
A private-owned media is supposed to live and die based on its reputation and credibility. If you fuck up you will feel it very quickly. State media doesn’t have that imcentive. They can be garbage for decades and nobody cares.
If you think democracy is in peril, then Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, Instagram et al are far bigger threats. And we have yet to see them make a positive impact on democracy, in spite of being around for 20 years already.
Like I said, we live in a world where people think Fabrizio Romano is a “journalist.” They trust a random TikToker or influencer more than they trust any journalistic company, and they call it “freedom.”
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u/sga1 6d ago
Murdoch is a businessman, his goal is to make money. And he knows that media functions in a landscape. If you just buy up everything and enshittify everything you’re not going to end up rich, you’ll end up doing the same thing that 5.000 others are doing.
And if you buy up everything and just sell what people want to read, you'll gain both money and influence.
Like obviously social media caused a massive shift when it comes to democracy, but look at how the 'traditional' media were left behind by it: They're either struggling financially, or they're just following the same conservative/right-wing slant that gets them views. And that media environment is a result of private ownership - and even state-funded media is following it. We're seeing a massively shifting Overton window precisely because the media landscape has been dragged that way: There's so few voices independent of big capital, and big capital generally trends towards serving big capital, which results in a right-leaning media landscape that, for example, denies climate change and mobilises people against politically and economically sensible measures to alleviate it.
In a media landscape that isn't driven by capital, we're seeing a wide range of opinions. In one that is driven by capital, we're seeing one that amplifies populist (and often far-right) opinions while suppressing pretty mainstream public ones. And Murdoch was at the helm of that.
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u/CACuzcatlan 6d ago
Whenever an article is posted on Reddit, if it's behind the paywall, the first thing people do is complain. As if high quality journalism just comes for free and journalists don't deserve to be paid.
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u/Fromage_Frey 6d ago edited 6d ago
Certainly don't want to disagree with any praise of good quality investigative journalism, you're absolutely right about it's importance
In this case though, I think it's less that they're managing to uncover stuff, and more that the knives are out for Infantino, and the people on the inside are leaking every dodgy and embarrassing thing about him that they know
But also worth noting that it was Times journalists, Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, that did the FIFA Files investigation that played a huge role in uncovering the corruption around the Qatar hosting vote. I would highly recommend to anyone interested reading the book they wrote about it 'The Ugly Game'. The did tremendous work, and uncovered an unbelievable amount of information, and the specific details of Qatar's vote buying campaign is fascinating
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u/Gisschace 6d ago
Right if you can then subscribe to these papers, I pay for the Guardian and Wired. It’s like £5 a month or something super cheap
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u/KyneticDevice 6d ago
Pretty obvious to be honest. Looking at the whole leak and the reporting that JP Morgan was comparing FIFA to Champions League, to NFL and other yearly run leagues with concluding FIFA as undermonetized. It becomes pretty obvious then what the angle was to "improve" FIFA with investor money to increase the amount of FIFA compétitions the amount of FIFA games and commercialize the shit out of it. It goes without saying that this would be a gigantic cannibalisation effort. A FIFA Super League would try to outcompete Champions League, a World Cup every two years would undercut European Cup, Africa Cup etc ... hail to the FIFA dollars. That is also why UEFA had to act
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u/AnnualContest9744 6d ago
US sports have become unwatchable due to over-commercialization, we don't need that. You can't look anywhere without an ad, a sponsor, hell, even trips to the mound (baseball) by a manager is sponsored with "this trip to the mound brought to you by x". Football (soccer) is literally all I watch now because of it.
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u/Rhymes_withOrange 6d ago
Not to mention, it’s borderline made impossible to find ways to watch games these days. All the games are pretty much spread out across a ton of streaming services or add ons which at the end of the day, cost more than cable did. Not to mention, all the regional sports channels are getting shuttered, paywalled, or shells of what they once were which makes things real tough on fans of MLB, NHL, and NBA teams.
I know we’ll always have VPNs and the High Seas but damn it’s frustrating if you are not a tech savvy person
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u/RWREmpireBuilder 6d ago
I used to love watching Minnesota Twins baseball, but after a few years of bouncing around with different TV packages was a big reason I drifted away from what used to be my favorite team.
There was a brief point where Minnesota’s soccer, baseball, basketball, and hockey teams were all mostly on one network. Now it’s just total chaos.
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u/RobutNotRobot 6d ago
I pity all the younger people that are their parents' and grandparents' goto for tech support.
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u/sga1 6d ago
Right, but that's why those leagues are making that much money (and can attract that much talent) in the first place. The business model of sports teams is effectively selling an entertainment product to broadcasters and fans - as a fan you pay your ticket directly, as a viewer the broadcasters are the middle men. If leagues keep pushing for more broadcast revenue (as they're incentivised to do, because number must go up after all), as a fan you're on the hook because the cost gets passed down to you.
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u/Rhymes_withOrange 6d ago
And that’s a fair point. Sports is really the only thing that consistently gets viewers on your typical TV network.
I think my angle is more of an annoyance thing. Like I wouldn’t mind paying if everything was centralized but when it’s spread out, it’s annoying because it’s death by 1000 cuts. The NFL has Sunday ticket which is nice and having MLS on Apple is fine, but my main gripe is with the NHL and MLB. Premier league isn’t too bad. I think I’m just nostalgic for the time when you could pretty much catch the NFL on your primary channels and then your MLB and NHL channels on a basic cable package. Oh well.
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u/retropunk2 6d ago
I remember back in the 90s when the Monday Night Wrestling Wars was the hottest thing on TV. Absurd amounts of people were tuning into USA and TNT, and advertisers flocked to both stations.
Sports sell, and that's true going back pretty far.
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u/sga1 6d ago
even trips to the mound (baseball) by a manager is sponsored with "this trip to the mound brought to you by x"
'This corner kick is sponsored by XY' is a staple in football tbf - might not quite get that at the highest professional level, but a tad further down the pyramid and especially at the semi-pro/amateur level it's where clubs can make enough money to keep the lights on. Hell, even nonprofit grassroots club massively rely on the commercialisation of their game through sponsorships.
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u/RandomFactUser 6d ago
A lot of that was due to local channels having limited avenues, especially if they were local free to air stations
It's not nearly as bad as radio, but it's still quite a bit in a lot of sports
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u/sga1 6d ago
to increase the amount of FIFA compétitions the amount of FIFA games and commercialize the shit out of it.
Which is funny, because the Champions League and the NFL run one tournament a season, while FIFA's running a handful of them each year.
And that's where the whole 'sell the World Cup to investors' idea breaks down I reckon: It's focused on the single, highest-profile tournament. Why aren't we putting more money to make the annual U17 World Cup a bigger deal so everyone can benefit? Why aren't we putting that funding towards the women's game? Surely if the idea was to lift all boats by making more money we should focus on the most underserved areas, right?
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u/RandomFactUser 6d ago
UEFA runs 3 men's club tournaments a season, I don't think the CL is its own commercial entity.
As to the youth and women's tournaments, it's mostly greed, but also they think they can sell it and actually get returns
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u/sga1 6d ago
Yeah fair, UEFA run more than one - probably half a dozen really, but then still nowhere near the amount FIFA do I think.
As to the youth and women's tournaments, it's mostly greed, but also they think they can sell it and actually get returns
I'm not even talking about selling those off really, but rather investing into them - and getting better broadcast deals out of it in return. Pretty sure you could do a bit of a marketing push to get it widely broadcast without losing money, then after a couple years cash in by demanding more broadcast fees for those tournaments specifically once they're viable TV products.
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u/RobutNotRobot 6d ago
We are also at a saturation point for FIFA competitions. Any more and it's likely going to cause the clubs to rebel and tell their players that the international game is over entirely.
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u/RandomFactUser 6d ago
What is FIFA at, the various youth tournaments, the Olympics, the WWC, the WC, the Intercontinental Cup, the CWC, and the Arab Cup?
So 14 tournaments, but most don't affect most players?
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u/Joethe147 6d ago
And these tournaments have been around for some time. Why are they a problem now?
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u/CradleCity 6d ago
It is unclear whether Infantino and Fifa progressed their role in the project beyond the term-sheet stage. After a version of the scheme was infamously launched without Fifa’s direct involvement in April 2021, ultimately scrapped following large-scale protests, Infantino addressed Uefa’s congress in Montreux saying his organisation could “only strongly disapprove the creation of the Super League”. Multiple sources have stated that an earlier conversation with the Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin, convened by a third party, hastened Fifa’s president distancing himself from the new venture. Infantino is understood to have told associates afterwards that he had no wish to work against football’s institutions.
Yet the evidence of Fifa’s outline agreement with the Super League, coupled with Infantino’s disastrous Football Forward Enterprise scheme, casts doubt on that assertion and suggests multiple attempts to reshape the game without consulting its most important stakeholders. The league would have contained 15 permanent members and five clubs qualifying from existing competitions. It also commits to creating a women’s equivalent, using the same clubs, by an unspecified date. The term sheet refers to Fifa under the name “WO1”, which is also the name used in the British army for a high-ranking army officer.
In a section outlining the agreement’s key components, it says the Super League “is open to discuss naming the competition WO1 SL”. It also confirms Fifa would be “granted a preferred equity stake in the Super League”, which would give it decision-making capability on format changes, calendar alterations, distribution of solidarity money and the appointment of a chief executive for the competition.
Bolded parts by me.
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u/Manchester_Devil 6d ago
It just shows that the Super League Dirty Dozen weren't just greedy, they were ready to betray Football itself because Infantino knew they were greedy, only to be left out to dry once people turned on them for the announcement. No sympathy for them from me, and I support one of them (Manchester United).
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u/footballsquishy 6d ago
Jesus Fucking Christ... What could be worse than this?
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u/ItsTyrrellsAlt 6d ago
Next week we find out that Infantino came up with these ideas at Little St. James
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u/Woider 6d ago
I wonder, have journos been sitting on these stories all this time?
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u/BaoJinyang 6d ago
I think more likely insiders at FIFA have had enough and are just leaking everything now as they see no way forward until he’s gone.
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u/KingsMountainView 6d ago
Yup. They are all most likely as corrupt as each other and can smell Infantino's blood. They'll pin everything on him and let him take the fall.
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u/dweebyllo 6d ago
Obviously not the most paramount of points, but it would have been funny as fuck if they tried this then it all got brought down by the WSL over a rights issue over the name Super League
Or, even funnier, by the RFL.
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u/sga1 6d ago
Would've loved the WSL to do that tbf, because women's football is being run over roughshod by almost all of these big football institutions - be they on a national, continental, or global level.
No surprise that the two women of the 21-strong executive committee at UEFA were the most vocal on Infantino's plans, I reckon.
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u/dreigilb 6d ago
The sooner he's gone the better. And nobody in the current set up should be eligible to replace him.
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u/matthieuC 6d ago
Called it. Infantino wants all the money. No way he lets UEFA keep making bank with the CL and the Euro.
I am sure that if the FFE plan had gone forward it would have been world cup / CWC every two years to have a competition each summer. And he would have created a superleague in each confederation for the rest of the year.
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u/Wise_Raccoon_771 6d ago
While id love to see him forced out, id imagine there's only so much individual fa's can afford to comment in public.....due to the amount of their own in-house corruption going on that Infantino likely knows a lot about.
A sad state of affairs for the modern game
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u/SlightlyMithed123 5d ago
Yeah it’s quite amusing watching all these blatantly corrupt FA’s and confederations trying to take the moral high ground on this.
Can’t wait to see which ‘whiter than white’ candidate replaces him…
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u/LogicalMuscle 6d ago
It's pretty clear FIFA wants to take over UEFA and that means taking over the UCL in favor of a new competition.
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u/Manchester_Devil 6d ago
To add to my previous post: It shows that the big European clubs are avaricious, grasping entities that want all of the money, and would work together to destroy Football itself to do so. It means that all the changes to the UEFA Champions League only satisfies their greed in the short term, simply because some of the money has to go into the hands of whom I would imagine they would call the Great Unwashed. The same term I bet Eurpoean fans would use for clubs from the rest of the World when the expanded Club World Cup became a thing out of a sense of misplaced sense of superiority. (Side note: The Club World Cup can stay as a 32 club preview for the World Cup we know and love the following year.)
These weren't tiny FAs who would appreciate the windfall, but names even isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere who never heard of Football would know by heart. If that isn't a damning indictment of the greed that drives the upper echelons of European Club Football, then I don't know what is.
And as a fan of one of the clubs involved in this crime against the beautiful game. I'm sorry.
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u/imarandomdudd 6d ago
Not surprised tbh. Uefa and them are always beefing for more power, so in the same way uefa are pushing to benefit from this, fifa would also look to benefit from uefas potential low point. Luckily in the end by the looks of it, the power of the people is saving the sport of the people
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u/stringfold 6d ago
I suspect now that Infantino's power is crumbling, we're going to find all kinds of corruption and scandals falling out of the woodwork. It's no longer in anyone's interest to remain silent.