Fifa cannot be cleaned up, as the Panama Papers scandal reminds us. Rip it up and start again

The leaked documents raise new questions about Gianni Infantino as incoming head of Fifa. It's not enough to claim that world football has turned over a new leaf

Gianni Infantino was director of legal services at Uefa when the contracts exposed in the Panama Papers were agreed. (Getty Images)

For evidence of how the Fifa corporate engine is the same as it ever was, you need not have waited for the Panama Papers – which claimed the new Fifa head in charge of cleaning up the organisation, Gianni Infantino, had in a previous job signed off on a Uefa deal with involving individuals later accused of bribery, setting in train a process of raids on offices, denials and clarifications.

What Amnesty International uncovered last week about the treatment of immigrant workers in Qatar on a stadium complex for Fifa’s 2022 World Cup, shocked any who look for a spirit of humanity and human rights in the people’s game. Every single construction and landscape worker of 231 interviewed by Amnesty in a 12-month period to February this year reported abuse of one kind or another as they worked under the grotesque, feudal kafala labour system.

The response of Fifa's “head of sustainability”, Federio Addiechi, was an embarrassment: abject, insulting, nothing less than a disgrace. Addiechi claimed the charity had not produced its report quickly enough. He made no offer to investigate any of the findings further and claimed that Fifa “cannot and indeed does not have the responsibility to solve the social problems” of any host country of a Fifa World Cup. Yet the organisation says it does its utmost to ensure human rights are respected on all World Cup sites.

Before Infantino was elected, journalists were treated to a series of briefings from Fifa in central London. We were invited, individually, to meet them on comfortable sofas in the very desirable Covent Garden Hotel in Monmouth Street. Tea was served in china cups, and we were told how Fifa would be different now: humans rights enshrined in its statues; women at the core; an executive structure to prevent the elected members running the place like a fiefdom. But Covent Garden seemed a very long way away when Addiechi was insulting Amnesty last week.

And now, the Panama Papers revelations. These claim that the incoming Infantino previously signed off on a $111,170 Uefa deal to sell rights to Champions League games in South American countries to a private shell company, Cross Trading, registered in the tiny Pacific island of Niue. It subsequently sold the rights on for three times the price to a broadcaster. They tell us that the individual behind Cross Trading is Hugo Jinkis, who would later be named on an FBI Fifa indictment as allegedly involved in bribery over FIFA media and marketing rights.

Infantino denies personal involvement with Cross Trading because the tender process was dealt with by Team Marketing, an intermediary. He says he is dismayed that his integrity has been cast into doubt, and claims he has had no dealings with any of the officials now under investigation. Uefa, meanwhile, insists the TV rights deal was above board and it could have no way of knowing that Jinkis would be involved in a scandal a decade later. They say there is “absolutely nothing in this story which could in any possible way serve to undermine the integrity of either Uefa or Gianni Infantino” and that any bilateral deals between Teleamazonas and Cross Trading were “their business, not ours”.

Nowhere are these weasel words better deconstructed than on theoffshoregame.net website, where the investigative journalist Andrew Jennings asks why on earth Uefa was in the game of selling broadcast rights to companies based on an island populated by 1,500 people in the Pacific.

It raises a whole series of questions that Infantino apparently did not think to ask.The repackaging of those rights for huge profits also suggests that they were vastly under-priced in the first place by the man now being entrusted to run the international game of football. And so to Fifa.

It appears the ‘new’ Fifa is nothing of the sort. It’s still an organisation run by grey men who are up to their elbows in back-room deals, cronyism and obfuscation. They have taken our game and turned its administration into something grotesque. They are incapable of reform. The solution is the same now as ever. Banish these people. Rip the structure up and start again.