Binface, Keysey, Howe and other possible Infantino replacements as FIFA president | OneFootball

It does now look like there is, remarkably, a non-zero chance that Gianni Infantino has got so very high on the smell of his own farts that his previously unshakeable iron-fist control of FIFA could all come crumbling down.

Turns out ‘what if we sold the World Cup to the much-loved Trump family and I pocket a bunch of the cash?’ might really be the point at which the wax melts and the wings with which he has soared ever closer to the sun finally fail him.

It’s a remarkable and hubristic f*ck-up for a man who only needed to carry on being as bent and self-serving as he was before to be sure of another four years of having his snout in the trough. Now he faces, for the first time, the prospect of a challenge even from those corners of the footballing world he has previously kept in line by promising ever more cash and ever more World Cup spots.

But it won’t be enough, will it, to just remove Infantino. Somebody will have to replace him. But who? Turns out, that’s not an easy question.

Arsene Wenger

When we pitched the idea for 10 possible FIFA presidents to replace Infantino, the only note we received from on high was very simple, very clear and ran to a mere two words: No Wenger.

We’re going to go against that advice purely to note just how striking that is. Just how complete Le Professeur’s fall from grace. It really isn’t that long ago that if you were trying to come up with a fantasy (and fantastical) dream candidate who obviously would never want or take the job but would be the absolutely ideal man for the task, then Wenger’s name would likely be the one you’d settle on.

A football man. An intelligent man. A great thinker about the game. But above all a decent man. He’d be ideal, you’d think.

But then he got an actual FIFA job (one that – terrifyingly, really – actually makes it very slightly less unlikely that he actually ends up with the presidency) and almost instantly went completely mad.

It’s a sobering warning about what even a tiny sniff of power can do. He’d barely got his foot in the door before The Cleverest Man In Football started talking absolutely insane sh*t about having World Cups every two years and forcing through his indescribably stupid offside plans.

None of us liked Infantino’s Hydration Breaks, but give Wenger the presidency and he would actually break the game completely.

We are at least pretty sure Wenger isn’t corrupt, but even that just makes things worse in a way. He’d destroy the game out of sheer stubborn refusal to understand why he’s so obviously, measurably wrong about these things. At least Infantino had an ulterior motive.

Richard Keys

The smooth-bollocked hero football deserves, but not the one it needs right now.

You can snort derisively if you like, but any man who can interrupt his own tribute to Kevin Keegan to issue another takedown of Infantino so that the final words of a video supposedly paying tribute to one of the most universally beloved footballers of all time are “dreadful individual” is a voice to be taken very seriously indeed.

Sepp Blatter

Infantino’s artless, starf*cking, open corruption makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it, for the good old days of FIFA. Cause they understood that you’re supposed to at least performatively try and hide the corruption didn’t they?

They were gentlemen grifters, the finest scammers this sport’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for Sepp Blatter, who couldn’t help but embody some fundamentally decent grifting values.

Count Binface

If (as ultimately remains likely) it becomes clear that Infantino is still going to win the election because when sh*t gets real at voting time enough of the smaller confederations reluctantly come to accept where their bread is buttering and who’s wielding the biggest butter knife, then lets at least make sure the whole thing descends into farce.

Don’t let Infantino off the hook with an unopposed coronation. Make him campaign against a tw*t dressed as a bin who brings to the table such hilariously unworkable joke policies as ‘maybe not sell off the game to Donald Trump’s family and mates’.

It won’t actually change anything, but look around you. The world is completely f*cked anyway. We can’t change anything anyway. Not really. Not meaningfully. The best we can often hope for is to just make the bastards slightly uncomfortable for a brief period of time.

That’s where the annoying faux-intergalactic bin-headed tit comes in. There are other names on this list that we actually wouldn’t mind having the job. Binface is not one of them. But if the choice comes down to ‘Infantino unopposed’ or ‘Infantino has to go through a small ritual humiliation before comfortably beating a bin’ then we choose the latter as the undeniably w*nkier but still lesser of two evils and thus we win, in the most minor way possible.

Mattias Grafstrom

FIFA’s current general secretary and surely too bald, too European and just too close to Infantino to represent the real candidate of change needed to stir the confederations up to go against the incumbent.

None of that may be particularly fair on a man who has become an increasingly significant voice at FIFA over the last two years, but the optics are what they are. He looks and sounds just too much like Infantino Lite and thus the valid question becomes: What’s the point? Might as well just have the full-fat, full-bastard version.

Being the less overtly, less over-the-top comic-book villain face of the current regime just isn’t going to cut it. But he would probably be better than Binface. And, importantly, Infantino.

Eddie Howe

He’s at a loose end now and would, almost uniquely among the available candidates, have the unwavering and unstinting support of a loud and influential British press pack who already believe he can do anything.

For a man who can lead Newcastle to Carabao Cup glory, sorting out all FIFA’s messes should be a walk in the park.

Additional bonus of taking him out of the running to be next England manager, albeit with the setback of taking him out of the running to be the next Tottenham manager.

And what an episode of Jake Humphrey’s High Performance Podcast it would all make, by the way.

Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa

President of the increasingly influential Asian Football Confederation and now an increasingly audible voice of opposition to the Infantino regime.

That he has carried with him the 47-nation AFC in that opposition is no small feat given many of the AFC’s members are among those with most to gain from Infantino’s assorted schemes designed to keep them in line and backing him because they know that he might be lining his own pockets but he’s also still lining theirs.

Al Khalifa can also point to significant growth and expansion of AFC tournaments – at both club and international level – under his stewardship which might help convince some of the other confederations who very much like Infantino’s expansionist tendencies but have grown queasy about the sheer naked, disdainful, personal greed behind them that there might yet be a way out in which they can still have their cake and eat it.

Lise Klaveness

Not going to happen for all manner of reasons, many of which are unsavoury reminders of the fact that the very, very best we can possibly hope for is that a new FIFA regime is a slightly less evil, slightly less mendacious, slightly less obviously out for themselves version of the boys’ club it always has been and always will be.

World football is not about to fall in behind a candidate who is, gasp, a woman. But there is also arguably no figure in a prominent leadership role within the modern game who has been as consistently correct about Infantino for as long as Klaveness.

The president of the Norwegian Football Federation is one of the few potential challengers to Infantino whose criticism of his egregious f*cking nonsense doesn’t boil down to “In light of these new facts of which I now realise I was largely aware, I must take action” and hers was a key voice in UEFA’s withering collective takedown of Infantino’s latest wheeze.

Klaveness hasn’t only just started to doubt Infantino over his latest plan to sell the World Cup for profit, having previously spoken out publicly against other such Infantino bullsh*t as the Peace Prize and the whole handling of the Qatar World Cup in general.

It might not seem much, but there aren’t many out there in her kind of position who have been actively speaking out for this long, as well as championing even more controversial ideas for FIFA reform such as increasing transparency and the wild idea that the custodians of the world’s most popular sport might be held to some basic standards of accountability and possibly – possibly – even face and suffer consequences for their actions.

It’ll never work. Which is a real shame, because Klaveness, a lawyer and former Norway international, appears to occupy an almost unique position within football governance right now of expertly understanding how to play both the game and The Game.

Nasser Al-Khelaifi

Lots of reasons to like this one. First, it is just undeniably very funny that football has reached a point where there is a genuine strong case to be made that the man best placed to save the sport from itself and the money-driven depths to which Gianni Infantino has sunk it is a bloke from Qatar.

Al-Khelaifi is not just a man who has played a huge part in transforming PSG into Europe’s pre-eminent football team, but has also done significant work as chairman of European Football Clubs – formerly the European Clubs’ Association, taking over that role in deeply challenging times after the whole Super League caper and its 48-hour collapse.

He has expanded the organisation significantly, with Real Madrid now the only conspicuous absence among big clubs. That is, admittedly, a very conspicuous absence, but it does point to the level of power Al-Khelaifi wields within the European club game, where so much of football’s true heft exists.

Drawbacks include the fact he doesn’t want it, apparently. “He genuinely, genuinely doesn’t want the job” was the response of ‘a source close to Al-Khelaifi’ last week when the idea was mooted. But we’re choosing to believe that second ‘genuinely’ places this whole dismissal of the idea firmly in the ‘protest too much’ camp.

Victor Montagliani

The CONCACAF president might be the most plausible unity candidate to ruffle Infantino’s feathers. We have to be at least slightly realistic here. We can have silly options that won’t happen. We can have pie-in-the-sky fantasy options that won’t happen. We can have ‘probably won’t be quite as bad or at least as cartoonishly obvious about being bad as Infantino’ options that might happen. But we can’t have perfect options. There are no perfect options.

Being president of FIFA probably does come under the umbrella of being a job that anybody who actually wants to do it or is in a position to get the chance to do it becomes almost by definition somebody who shouldn’t do it.

But if we have to be a tiny bit sensible for one brief moment in time and try and identify the least bad semi-realistic candidate, then Montagliani is probably it.

Lord knows the 2026 World Cup wasn’t perfect, but we have a strong suspicion it would have been far, far worse with a weaker, less politically astute, man heading up CONCACAF’s involvement in the whole sordid business. He opposes both the 64-team World Cup and Arsene Wenger’s half-baked plan to make FIFA’s golden goose sh*t out a heavily monetised egg every two years instead of every four.

Montagliani sits in the sweet spot of understanding the world in which he operates while remaining optimistic better things are possible.

“That is the beauty of our game, it is bigger than any individual and country.”

Whether he’s the next FIFA president or not, we must all at least hope and pray he’s right about that.