Fifa's Infantino Faces Legal Pressure Amid Scandal

“Tell Mike it was just business. I always liked him.”

The line from The Godfather lands differently this week. Because for the first time since the Fifa Forward scandal broke, it feels as though someone, somewhere, has decided that Gianni Infantino is no longer family – just business.

For almost six weeks, the Fifa president has lived under a cloud. The story is now well worn: an undercover scheme to flog off football’s greatest shared asset – the World Cup – on the cheap, with Infantino positioned to benefit personally from the deal. A grotesque plan, critics say, from a man hired to safeguard the game’s crown jewel and hand it on intact.

He has ridden out storms before. Toxic reputation, angry columns, the odd ex‑pro popping up to denounce him – this time Mikaël Silvestre, of all people, weighing in. Noise, mostly. Power, especially the kind Infantino has cultivated, tends not to buckle under noise.

But this week feels different. This week, hard power entered the room.

A lawsuit that changes the temperature

Uefa’s lawsuit in the US was never really about a clean courtroom victory. The smarter reading is that it was always about position – a chess move designed to force Fifa and its president into a corner where every escape route carries danger.

That move now has a name: discovery.

If the court allows it, Uefa will gain access to documents, emails, internal memos – the paper and digital trail that runs through Fifa, Thrive Capital and the office of Greg Maffei, a Trump donor and deal adviser. All roads from that period lead back to one thing: the sale of the World Cup and the access Infantino enjoyed to the Trump-era corridors of power.

No one on Infantino’s side wants that box opened. Not in Florida. Not anywhere.

Fifa’s legal response this week made that plain, even as it tried to bat everything away as a “smear campaign”. Buried in the bluster was the real message: they will resist discovery with everything they have. Because discovery is where the masks come off.

Kushner steps back

The first crack appeared with Josh Kushner’s statement.

Kushner, whose Thrive Capital sat at the financial heart of the Fifa Forward project, has now been named as a party to discovery. This is the money man, the person Fifa turned to for finance and favours, who also happens to be the brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son‑in‑law.

This week, Josh Kushner said he “would not have gotten involved” had he known the full picture. He called the whole saga “regrettable”.

On the surface, it sounded mild. Polite. But the subtext was louder: distance. Separation. The quiet snip of a protective cord.

Then came the real tell. Kushner hired Alex Spiro, the high-profile lawyer who has defended Elon Musk over the “pedo guy” tweet and Alec Baldwin after the fatal shooting on a film set. That is not a casual choice. That is a nuclear option.

The message from Kushner’s camp is clear: he is not going to be the one left holding the bag.

Fifa on the back foot

Fifa’s counter-filing felt more rattled.

The organisation denounced the whole thing as a smear, yet still circled nervously around the word that matters: discovery. The urgency with which it tried to slam that door shut told its own story.

Because discovery is not theory. It is the moment when emails sent from a golf course after lunch, WhatsApp messages from late-night strategy chats, and internal memos with red-ink scribbles become exhibits.

For people in power, that is the nightmare. For people anywhere near Trump-world, it can be lethal.

Infantino knows this. So does anyone who has watched the Trump orbit over the last decade.

Trump’s embrace – and the shrug that followed

Early in August, Trump posted his support for Infantino on Truth Social. The headlines framed it as a full-throated backing. Read the words, though, and it felt more qualified.

“If for any reason” Fifa removed Infantino, Trump said, it would be “really bad”. Conditional. Not exactly an oath of eternal loyalty. And since then? Silence.

The bromance between the two always looked strangely glossy. The Fifa president and the former US president grinning together like catalogue models in an overlit Brooks Brothers knitwear shoot: the bald dealmaker to power and the man who so often resembles a walking slab of deep‑fried, honey‑glazed American excess, wrapped in a baggy suit and scripted to say things like “a very tall, very handsome man”.

It made for good pictures. It never guaranteed protection.

Trump’s world runs on a simple matrix: winners and losers. There is no ideology, no deep belief system, just the calculation of who is useful and who is not. Once you stop being useful, you stop existing.

The list of former insiders now on the wrong side of that equation is long. Michael Cohen, once the self‑declared loyalist who would “take a bullet” for Trump, ended up imprisoned, disbarred and cast out. Jeff Sessions, the attorney general who called Trumpism “a movement”, has since been dismissed by Trump as weak, dumb, confused, “a disgrace”, even “mentally retarded”.

There is always a pattern. When you fall, you fall alone.

Infantino, for now, has only felt the shrug – that sense of Trump ambling away from the stage, remembering the good times, but not stopping to help you off it.

What’s really at stake

Uefa’s legal case accuses Fifa and Infantino of “criminal mismanagement”. The heart of it is the alleged undervaluing of the World Cup in the proposed sale. Alongside that, sitting in a grey area labelled “industry practice” by some, is the fact that Infantino was in line for a huge personal salary from the structure around the deal.

This is why discovery matters. Uefa wants to see inside the machine, to find out what conversations were had, who signed off what, and on whose advice. It is less a fishing expedition than a decision to prise open a locked drawer and stare straight at whatever is inside.

The image that comes to mind is the Club World Cup trophy: a jagged, unsettling thing, all sharp edges and hidden corners, like it might contain some secret compartment full of something you really don’t want to find. Toenails. Or worse.

Do you really want to look? Uefa clearly does.

Infantino on the road, votes in the air

While the legal fight simmers, Infantino has gone back to what he knows: travel, handshakes, and the careful cultivation of loyalty in football’s outer provinces.

He has been on the road, visiting member associations, pressing the flesh, banking goodwill. Saudi Arabia has offered support, but even that comes with a telling caveat: backing “at this time …”. Not exactly a blank cheque.

There is a Fifa congress in November. On paper, that is where votes will be counted, allegiances tested, futures decided. But anyone who watched how it ended for Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini knows that the decisive blow in football politics often comes from somewhere else entirely.

Blatter and Platini both fell to a single, sudden allegation over an illegal payment. One shot. Out of the blue. One day in power, the next day gone.

Infantino has seen that film. He knows how quickly the room can empty.

Waiting on the judge

Everything now hangs on the court’s decision over discovery.

If the judge allows it, the process will not be quick, and Uefa’s case might still fail in the end. Legal challenges often do. But Uefa does not need a neat victory. It just needs to keep the coals hot, to make clear that it will keep raking until something – or someone – gives way.

That pressure alone can be enough. It can peel away allies. It can make once‑loyal partners decide that they, too, “would not have gotten involved” if they had known.

And up in the Fifa tower, the president who once sold the world – twice – may find that there are fewer people left outside his door than he imagined.

“Mr president, you can have my answer now. Our offer is this: Nothing.”