Someone called 911 about a man in a ski mask, a mask he wore because a blood condition left him cold. He had bought iced tea.

He was twenty-three.

Here is some of what he said while three officers held him down and two paramedics prepared a syringe:

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There is a particular kind of story football keeps producing, and we keep failing to understand. The story of Valdas Dambrauskas and Sabah FC - a Lithuanian who bankrolled his coaching education with a television quiz-show prize and, a quarter-century later, walked a nine-year-old Azerbaijani club into the Champions League - is being consumed as a *feel-good* item right now: shared, liked, captioned the beautiful game, discarded.

But underneath the confetti is a claim worth making seriously: sport is one of the few arenas where we can actually watch becoming happen; not achievement, but the slower thing that produces it. The two are not the same.

Around 2002, a Lithuanian student in his mid-twenties who had never played professional football went on his local edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He did not win a fortune. He won roughly four thousand litas - a couple thousand dollars - and he lost, tripped up by a question about which country publishes the most daily newspapers. The answer, for the record, was Japan. That modest, imperfect winning, however, was enough. He and his wife moved to England. He enrolled at London Metropolitan University to study sport science and coaching, and picked up academy experience in the orbit of Fulham, Manchester United, and Brentford; youth setups, not first teams, a distinction the viral version blurs.

In 2007 he took over Kingsbury London Tigers in the ninth tier of English football and steered them to the best results in their history, earning a local Westminster award for it. From there: Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary. A dozen jobs, real triumphs, real firings. Then Sabah, the Azerbaijani league and cup double in 2025–26 ahead of the far richer Qarabağ, and finally a wild extra-time comeback against Hapoel Be’er Sheva to reach the Champions League league phase for the first time in the club’s existence.

That is the true story. It is remarkable enough without the embellishments.

We misread stories like this because we are trained to look at the trophy, and the trophy is a photograph: a single frame, a result, a noun. It tells you what happened and nothing about how a person or a group changed shape to make it possible. Becoming is an independent film: it runs in real time, it has no guaranteed ending, and most of it is decidedly unglamorous.

Dambrauskas did not decide to be a Champions League coach and then became one. He answered a trivia question wrong, kept a small pot of money, and made a decision about who he was willing to try to be. Everything after - the coursework, the ninth tier, the twelve jobs, the firings - is the film. The Champions League night is just the last frame; the one someone finally chose to print.

Sabah FK are into the Champions League after being founded in 2017. Getty

Sport is unusually honest about this.

In most of life the process of becoming is hidden: we see the promotion but not the years, the finished book but not the drafts. Sport externalizes the process; it makes you play your qualifying rounds in public. Sabah did not skip to the league phase. They beat The New Saints, then KuPS, then had to overturn a deficit against Hapoel in the 94th minute. You could watch the becoming happen, week by week, in the standings, which is exactly what a scoreboard is for. It is a machine for making change visible.

The specific form of the sport matters here, because different forms reveal different kinds of change. This story isn't possible in MLS: Dambrauskas came up through the ninth tier, the part of the pyramid with no cameras, no money, no safety net, and therefore no illusions. Lower-league football is where becoming is least disguised, because nothing else is there to distract you. You are not managing stars; you are managing a group of people trying to be slightly better than they were last Saturday. It is pure process. The London Tigers taught him something the Champions League never could: how to build an identity out of scarcity. When he later assembled a squad at Sabah with more resources but no history to lean on, he was doing the same job at a different altitude.

Sabah as a group shows the collective version of the same thing. A club founded in 2017 is, in institutional football terms, a child. It has no century of tradition, no inherited sense of itself. Everything about who Sabah is has had to be invented in real time: a squad stitched from Rwandan, Serbian, Nigerian, and local players, a style, a belief that they could finish above Qarabağ. That is collective becoming: not a fixed identity being expressed, but an identity being assembled under pressure. The qualification isn’t the reward for Sabah’s identity. It is Sabah’s identity, crystallizing at the moment it was tested hardest. Individual sport shows you the self, negotiating with its own limits; team sport shows you the self negotiating with other selves, the private business of how a group becomes a we. Elite sport adds the distortion of money and attention, which is why the elite version of a becoming story is the easiest to, too often, misread; the spectacle drowns out the process.

Dambrauskas is legible because his career contains both ends of the pyramid, the ninth tier and the Champions League, and you can see the same man doing the same work in both.

The game show, then, belongs in the story, and not as a novelty…it’s the thesis.

A quiz show is a form of contest too: structured competition, rules, pressure, an audience, a moment of truth. Dambrauskas lost it. He answered wrong. The losing is the point, because the small prize he kept became capital he chose to convert into a wholly different game, one he might be good at over decades rather than minutes. That is the most human mechanic of becoming: it rarely proceeds through victories. It proceeds through conversions, through transformation; taking whatever a losing contest hands you and reinvesting it in a longer one. The litas from a wrong answer became coaching courses. The ninth tier became a résumé. The firings became range. None of it was a straight line and none of it was designed.

He simply kept converting. Transforming.

Becoming.

Most of us are also converting small, imperfect winnings into longer games whose outcomes we can’t see; we just don’t get standings and an anthem to mark the frames. Sport lends us its clock and its scoreboard so that, for once, we can watch a becoming resolve into a moment and name it. When the caption under a socially-mediated version of this tale says football really is the beautiful game, it’s almost right. What’s beautiful isn’t the trophy. It’s that sport, in all its forms, is willing to show us the film and not just a photograph; the process by which a Lithuanian student and a nine-year-old club both, separately and together, became something they had no right to assume they’d be.

Achievement is what we applaud.

Becoming is what we should be watching.

Ten and a half weeks ago, one of the most powerful men in Washington walked into a hospital and, in every way that matters to the public that employs him, has not walked back out. A fall at his Washington home. Then pneumonia. [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/mitch-mcconnell-health-update-senate-gop.html) Then silence, out of the Senate and out of…

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Infantino glad-handing at the CFU Congress this week (his Instagram)

There is a particular kind of political theatre that only works if you show up in person, and Gianni Infantino has always understood that.

This past weekend, the FIFA president boarded a flight to Punta Cana, on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, to appear at a Caribbean Football Union under-14 tournament; a technical youth event, the sort of gathering a man overseeing a global federation of 211 members would normally never trouble himself to attend. What made the trip remarkable was not that he went. It was that he had been asked, in writing, not to.

The request came from Victor Montagliani, the president of CONCACAF and one of FIFA’s own vice presidents. In a letter dated the day before the event, Montagliani urged Infantino to reconsider, arguing that the president’s presence would swamp a children’s tournament with coverage of an entirely different story. “I believe that considering the governance crisis surrounding FIFA as a result of your controversial FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal,” he wrote, “the media will focus on this situation.” It was a polite way of saying something blunt: you are radioactive right now, and you will contaminate a room full of fourteen-year-olds.

Infantino went anyway.

He posted the photographs to Instagram; handshakes with Dominican football officials, smiles alongside local politicians, the president of world football beaming in the Caribbean sun. The message was not subtle, and it was not meant to be.

To read the defiance correctly, you need the backdrop. Over the summer, Infantino floated a proposal known internally as FIFA Forward Enterprise: a plan to spin off FIFA’s multibillion-dollar commercial operations - the broadcasting deals, the sponsorships, the machinery that turns the World Cup into a golden river of cash - into a subsidiary in which outside investors would hold a roughly twenty percent stake. Among the names attached to the investor group was Joshua Kushner, the venture capitalist and brother of Jared Kushner.

The reaction was ferocious. To FIFA’s critics, the plan looked like the partial privatisation of football’s crown jewels, handing private financiers a slice of an institution that is, at least nominally, a non-profit guardian of the global game. Three of Infantino’s own vice presidents (Montagliani at CONCACAF, Aleksander Ceferin at UEFA, and Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa at the AFC) went public with accusations of “deception,” and began openly discussing how to bring an end to Infantino’s eleven-year presidency. Under the pressure, Infantino withdrew the proposal on the first of August. His chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, who had reportedly criticised the plan internally, was fired shortly afterward.

That is the “governance crisis” Montagliani referred to. And it reframes the Punta Cana trip entirely. Infantino did not stumble into a youth tournament during a quiet week. He walked into a Caribbean gathering at the precise moment three of his most senior lieutenants were trying to unseat him, and he did it over the explicit objection of one of them. This was not a scheduling accident. It was a demonstration of where he believes his power actually lives.

Members of the CFU (orange), members of the CONCACAF (orange and camel). From Wikipedia

Here is the detail that turns a puzzling trip into a legible one. In FIFA’s electoral system, the Caribbean is not small.

It is enormous.

FIFA runs on one principle that shapes everything else: one nation, one vote. The football federation of Montserrat, population under five thousand, casts the same single ballot as Germany or Brazil. CONCACAF, the confederation covering North and Central America and the Caribbean, contains a dense cluster of tiny island associations, and the Caribbean Football Union alone accounts for a remarkable share of the global electorate. In a contested FIFA presidential vote, those federations are not spectators. They are the swing bloc. Win the Caribbean and you have banked a double-digit chunk of the votes you need, gathered from places most fans could not find on a map.

Infantino knows this arithmetic intimately, because it is the arithmetic that made him. It is also the arithmetic that has repeatedly made the Caribbean the most compromised electoral terrain in the sport.

You cannot write honestly about a FIFA president courting Caribbean officials without invoking the ghost that hangs over every such visit. In 2011, at a Caribbean Football Union meeting in Trinidad, officials were handed envelopes stuffed with cash (reportedly forty thousand US dollars apiece) in what became one of the most notorious episodes in football’s long history of graft. The money was widely understood as an inducement to support Mohamed bin Hammam’s challenge to Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency, and it was distributed through the machinery built by Jack Warner, the Trinidadian power broker who ran Caribbean football as a personal fiefdom for decades. FIFA banned officials over the affair. Warner was later banned from football for life. The scandal became a case study, taught in ethics seminars and cited in indictments, of exactly how the one-nation-one-vote system turns small federations into a failed and crippling marketplace.

That is the history Infantino flew into. Nobody is alleging that envelopes changed hands in Punta Cana this weekend. But the shape of the visit rhymes uncomfortably with the past. A FIFA president under electoral threat travels to the confederation that holds the swing votes, is photographed embracing its officials, and lets the images do the talking. The currency may have changed (attention, patronage, presence, the implicit promise of continued FIFA Forward development money) but the logic is the one Warner understood perfectly. Power in football is not held at headquarters in Zurich. It is held in the aggregate of small rooms.

Infantino. (Photo by Teresa SUAREZ / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

This is where the concepts of power, influence, and corruption stop being separate ideas and collapse into a single move.

Infantino’s genius - and it is a form of genius, whatever one thinks of him in his infamy - has been to grasp that in a one-nation-one-vote democracy, the most valuable thing a president can distribute is himself. He does not need to hand anyone cash. He needs to make the president of a five-thousand-person federation feel seen, important, courted, photographed beside the most powerful man in the sport. FIFA under Infantino has vastly expanded its development grants to member associations, money that flows most consequentially to exactly the small federations that also happen to hold outsized voting power. When the man who controls that spigot personally appears at your youth tournament, the tournament is not really the point. The relationship is the point.

The debt is the point.

Montagliani’s letter, read this way, was not squeamishness about press coverage. It was an attempt to deny Infantino a stage at the very moment the vice presidents were trying to isolate him. Infantino refused to be isolated. He went to the constituency that has always been most loyal, most electorally decisive, and most susceptible to the warm glow of presidential attention, and he reminded them who shows up.

So yes, there is a reading of this weekend in which Infantino simply attended a children’s football tournament and his “enemies” made too much of it. He would surely offer it himself: he was there for the kids, for the development of the game in a region that loves it, and the cynics see conspiracy in every one of his handshakes.

But institutions reveal themselves in moments of stress, and this was a moment of stress.

A leader accused of deception by his own deputies, forced to withdraw a signature proposal (that would have paid him perpetual millions), with a faction openly plotting his removal, chose to spend a weekend not rebuilding bridges in Zurich but cultivating the smallest and most pliable corner of his electorate…and chose to do so in open defiance of the deputy over the region, one who asked him to stay home.

That is not the behaviour of a man who believes his mandate rests on the merits of his governance. It is the behaviour of a man who knows exactly where the votes are and intends to hold them.

The tragedy, if that is the word, remains structural. As long as football distributes ultimate authority through a system in which the tiniest federations are worth courting far beyond their footballing weight, the incentive to court them - with money, with development grants, with the intoxicating currency of presidential presence - will never disappear. Jack Warner, my former boss, understood it with envelopes. Infantino understands it with Instagram posts from Punta Cana:

The game has grown more sophisticated. The underlying trade has not changed at all.

He was asked not to go. He went. And in going, he told us more about how power in world football actually works than a hundred press releases from Zurich ever could.

Now what are we going to do about it?

The administrator, in their first week on the job, did what seemed obvious. They went up the chain. They knocked on the door of the Vice President of Housing. They asked about the empty dorm rooms, the ones sitting dark, locked, institutionally inert, and whether something could be worked out.

What came back was not a solution. It was a list. A county shelter list. Sent at 4:30 on a Friday.

The subtext was clear, even if it was never spoken aloud: We are not social workers.

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Frodo, small and exhausted and honest to the point of self-endangerment, holds out the One Ring to Galadriel and offers it to her freely. He is not being tempted, or tempting her. He is doing the opposite of tempting. He is trying to give away the thing that is killing him to someone he believes is strong enough to carry it and wise enough to wield it well.

And for a moment she wants it.

Tolkien does not flinch from this. He lets her want it fully, out loud, in language that gets more beautiful the more terrible it becomes. In place of the Dark Lord she will set up a Queen. She will not be dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. All shall love her and despair.

Then the light fades.

She laughs. She shrinks back down into a slender elf-woman in simple white with a voice that is soft and sad, and she says the line that I want to build an entire theory of American politics around:

I have been asking myself a question for months now, and I am going to ask it to you: in the last fifty years of American public life, how many politicians passed the test?

How many, offered the Ring, refused it? How many looked at what they could become if they simply gave the money what it wanted, gave the base what it wanted, gave the algorithm what it wanted, and said no? How many chose to diminish and go “into the West” and remain themselves, rather than distort themselves into whatever shape power required and lose themselves utterly in the bargain?

I wanted a number. I went looking for the number. I want to tell you the truth about what I found.

Theoden King and Grima Wormton-I mean, former California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a staffer, amid concerns at the time that Feinstein was mentally unfit to serve (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The first thing I had to correct in my own thinking was the timeframe.

We tell a comforting story in this country about term limits and peaceful transfers and the graceful exit. We like the image of the statesman riding off into private life, Cincinnatus returning to his plow. We hand out that story like a participation trophy to anyone who leaves office breathing.

But the Ring in Tolkien is not analogous to a two-term limit. The Ring is not mimicking a retirement package.

The Ring is eternal power.

Its power too often ensures that you do not leave in any reasonable timeframe, in any reasonable way, before reasonable people are able to look at you and see that you have been substantially and permanently distorted.

That is the whole horror of it. The distortion arrives first. The recognition arrives late.

By the time the commons can see clearly what the power has made of you, the power has already made it, and you have been wearing that new face so long that you have forgotten you are wearing it. You do not experience your own corruption as corruption. You experience it as maturity. As pragmatism. As “how things actually work.” As “you have to win before you can do any good.”

So retirement is not the test. Losing an election and calling it a choice is not the test. Leaving one office to reach for a larger one is not the test at all, it is the opposite of the test, it is putting the Ring on with both hands. Getting old and tired and going home to be near the grandchildren is not renunciation, it is biology.

The test is only the test if you had the power, if the power was still yours to keep and to grow, if keeping it required only that you agree to become someone else, and you looked at that trade and you refused it while you still had a choice.

Measured that way, the number is not small. The number is almost nothing.

And I do not think that is because almost everyone who enters American politics is a bad person. I think it is because the test, as Tolkien built it, is nearly impossible to pass alone.

Denethor, Steward of Gondo- I mean, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had been making his opening remarks about an annual defense policy bill when he stopped talking. He was silent for 19 seconds. McConnell has served in the Senate since 1985. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Here is the part of the Lothlórien scene we skip when we quote it, and skipping it is the whole mistake.

Galadriel does not pass the test in a vacuum. She passes it because a small, frightened, incorruptibly honest person is standing in front of her holding the thing out and, by the simple fact of his goodness, reminding her of who she is. Frodo is not a bystander to her test. Frodo is the test. His presence, his trust, his refusal to keep the thing for himself, is the mirror in which she sees both what she could become and what she would lose to become it.

She passes because someone was in the room who loved the right things.

We have built a national mythology around the lone incorruptible individual. The person of pure conscience who stands alone against the machine, unmoved, self-sufficient, needing no one. It is a beautiful story and it is a lie, and it is a specifically dangerous lie, because it tells us, the citizenry, the commons, that our job is to find or to be such people, elect them (or get elected), and then leave them alone (or be alone) to be strong on our behalf. That is backwards. That is how we lose every single one of them.

Nobody is strong enough to hold eternal power alone and stay themselves.

Not Galadriel, who needed Frodo in the room. Certainly not a human being with a mortgage, a primary challenger, a donor class, a media ecosystem engineered to reward the worst version of them in real time, and a thousand small daily invitations to become someone slightly more electable and slightly less themselves.

The individual cannot resist the corruption of the Ring by individual virtue. That was never how it worked. The resistance is communal, interdependent, or it does not happen.

Boromir, of Minas Tiri-I mean, former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, seen speaking at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 23, 2024, in Chicago, is a Republican who has been a vocal critic of his party and former President Donald Trump. Jasper Colt/USA TODAY via REUTERS

Adam Kinzinger is the name that comes up when people go looking for an American who passed “the test.” Republican congressman, decorated pilot, voted to impeach a president of his own party, sat on the January 6th committee, was censured by his own party organization, watched his district drawn out from under him, and walked away rather than crawl back on terms that would have required him to unsay what he had said and un-be who he had become.

I admire it. I want to be clear that I admire it. But I do not think it is Galadriel’s test, and pretending it is actually cheapens what it was.

Galadriel had the Ring in front of her, freely offered, hers to take. Kinzinger did not renounce eternal power. He reached for the ordinary kind, the seat, the career, the future in the party, and the party took it from him because he had a conscience it could not use. He is not the elf-queen refusing the crown. He is closer to Boromir, the man who reaches, who is inside the corrupted fellowship, who fails in the ordinary way that ambitious people fail, and who then, at the cost of everything, turns and dies defending the thing he had betrayed.

Boromir’s redemption is not lesser than Galadriel’s test. In some ways it is the more human and the more useful model, because almost none of us are elf-queens and almost all of us are Boromir on a good day. But we should not confuse the two, because the confusion lets us keep believing in the lone hero. Kinzinger did not save himself by being strong alone. He was expelled. The machine spat him out and a handful of us clapped from the sidewalk as it did.

And that brings me to the tension at the very center of what I want to say, the one I will not paper over.

I have been building toward an argument that goes like this: we, the citizenry, must far more occasionally love our people enough to send them home. That the way to keep a good person good is to help them diminish, to receive them back into the commons before the Ring finishes its work, to make “going into the West” an honored destination and not a defeat.

I believe that. I am going to end on it. But I owe you the objection first, because an argument that hides from its own weakest point is just a feeling wearing a suit.

Here is the objection. “Sending them home” is also exactly how a corrupt system disposes of its conscience.

The machine did not lovingly retire Adam Kinzinger. It exiled him. It found the member who would not distort himself and it removed him, efficiently, and it kept everyone who would. If I am not careful, my beautiful language about diminishing and going into the West becomes indistinguishable from the eulogy the system delivers over everyone it purges for the crime of integrity. “We loved you, so we sent you home” can be a blessing. It can also be what the powerful say over the body of the one who would not play along. The sentiment and the disposal can wear the same white robe.

So the loving-kindness I am about to call for cannot be soft. It cannot be the warm feeling we have about the good ones on our way to abandoning them. If “send them home” only means we admire them quietly while the machine removes them, then I have not written an argument, I have written a nicer word for surrender.

The love has to be operational or it is nothing.

Which is why the Tolkein character I actually mean to leave you with is not Galadriel and not Boromir. It is Samwise Gamgee.

We remember Sam as sweetness, as the loyal gardener, as the emotional relief in a grim story. We are wrong about him the same way we are wrong about the Lothlórien scene. Sam is not sentiment. Sam is the single most consequential political actor in the entire book, because Sam is the answer to the problem the Ring poses.

The Ring cannot be resisted alone.

Frodo, the best of them, the one chosen precisely because he is humble and good, fails at the last. He stands at the Crack of Doom and claims the Ring for himself. The lone incorruptible individual, in the end, is corrupted. That is Tolkien telling us the truth we do not want: even the best person, alone, loses.

The quest succeeds anyway. It succeeds because Sam is there. It succeeds because when Frodo can no longer carry the weight, Sam says I cannot carry it for you but I can carry you, and he picks his friend up bodily and hauls him up the side of the mountain. It succeeds because Sam followed when he was told to go home, refused the Ring when it was briefly his, kept Frodo fed and moving and himself across the entire ruined country, and then, crucially, brought him home afterward and would not let him disappear into the damage.

That is what loving a good person through power actually looks like, and none of it is soft. Sam does the labor. Sam takes the risk. Sam stays in the room. Sam is the commons doing its actual job, which is not to find a hero and worship him from a distance until he falls, but to accompany the person we have asked to carry the weight, to be near enough to remind them who they are, to carry them when they cannot carry themselves, and to bring them home before the weight finishes them, and to make home a place worth returning to.

Black women in particular have been masters of this across the history of the United States. I do not say this as a decoration on the argument. I say it because if we are going to talk about who has actually done the work of Sam, at scale, for centuries, under conditions that would have broken anyone else, then the honest answer is not the lone white hero of the civic imagination. It is the Black women who have carried this country’s movements up the mountain and refused to let them claim credit for themselves.

Consider what the labor actually was. It was Ella Baker building the infrastructure beneath the men whose names we memorized, insisting on the unglamorous truth that strong people do not need strong leaders, that the movement had to be the many and not the one, and then doing the patient organizing that made the many possible while the cameras pointed elsewhere. It was Fannie Lou Hamer, who had every reason to be broken and was not, standing at Atlantic City and telling the truth on the record so plainly that a president had to call a press conference to keep the country from hearing her. It was the women of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Women’s Political Council, who had the boycott planned and mimeographed before the men had finished deciding whether to hold one. It was Septima Clark’s citizenship schools teaching people to read well enough to register, the slow foundational work that makes everything visible later possible. It was Diane Nash refusing to let the Freedom Rides stop when the leadership wanted them stopped, because she understood that abandoning the road was its own kind of corruption.

None of these women were reaching for the Ring. That is the point. They did the Sam labor precisely because they were not trying to become the hero, and so they could see clearly what the power was doing to the people who were. They carried, they fed, they organized, they stayed in the room, they told the truth that reminded everyone who they were supposed to be, and then, again and again, they watched the credit and the crown and the Ring go to the men they had carried, and they kept doing the work anyway. That is not sweetness. That is not the emotional relief in a grim story. That is the single most consequential political labor in the American record, and we have made the same mistake about it that we make about Sam. We have called it support when it was the actual engine.

If we want to learn how to be the citizenry that accompanies its people up the mountain and brings them home before the weight finishes them, we do not have to invent the practice. It exists. It has a lineage. The people who have done it best and longest and at the greatest cost have been telling us how the whole time, mostly while we credited someone else.

Our problem? We have been trying to run a republic on Frodos. Solitary good people, sent up the mountain alone, whom we then blame when they fail or canonize when they are destroyed. We do not need better Frodos. We have plenty of decent people willing to go up the mountain. We are missing more Sams. We are missing a citizenry that understands its own role is not spectatorship but accompaniment.

Samwise Gamgee-I mean, Ella Baker (1903–1986), the organizer behind SNCC, the SCLC, and the NAACP, who built the movement's foundations while insisting that "strong people don't need strong leaders."

So what does it mean, concretely, to be Sam to the people we send up the mountain?

It means being in “the room.” Galadriel passed because Frodo was standing there. The single greatest protection against the corruption of power is proximity to people who love the right things and are unafraid to be seen loving them. A politician surrounded only by donors, consultants, and the professionally ambitious has no Frodo in the room. We have to be in the room. Town halls that are not theater. Relationships that predate the campaign and outlast the loss. Presence.

It means making “the West” a real place. Right now, in our politics, leaving power is death. There is no honored West to go into. There is only the humiliation of the primary loss, the exile of the purged, the pundit purgatory, the sense that a life in public service ends in erasure. If diminishing means annihilation, no one will choose it, and everyone will cling to the Ring until it finishes them. We, the commons, decide whether there is a dignified home to return to. We decide whether the ones who kept their conscience are received as elders or discarded as losers. That is our choice, not theirs.

It means loving them enough to send them home before the mirror shows the distortion, not after. By the time we can all see what the power has made of someone, it is too late for them and nearly too late for us. Accompaniment means paying close enough attention, early enough, caringly enough, to say to a person we love: come home now, while you are still yourself, and we will make sure home is worth it.

And it means holding the tension I refused to hide. We must distinguish, every single time, between sending someone home in love and letting the machine dispose of them and calling it love. The difference is entirely in what we do next. If we send them home and then abandon them, we were the machine. If we send them home and then keep faith with them, honor them, employ their wisdom, keep them in the commons as elders rather than as cautionary tales, then it was love, and it will teach the next good person that the West is a place they can survive.

Let me continue to make it plain:

We cannot ask singular individuals to be strong enough, alone, to resist a power built specifically to distort them. That is not a moral failing in them. It is a category error in us. The Ring wins against the lone hero every time, even the best one, even Frodo at the last inch of the road.

The only thing that has ever beaten it is company. A fellowship. Neighbors. A friend who says I can’t carry it but I can carry you. A citizenry that understands the good ones are not statues to admire but neighbors to accompany, up the mountain and back down again, and home.

So no, I do not have a number of Galadriels for you. I think the honest count is close to zero, and I think that is not because we lack good people but because we keep sending them up alone and then acting surprised when the mountain takes them.

There are no Galadriels. There were never going to be Galadriels. There was only ever supposed to be us, reaching for one another in loving-kindness, beloved community member for beloved community member, refusing to let the ones we send up the mountain go up alone, and refusing to let the ones who come back down be thrown away.

That is the whole of it. We do not need to find someone strong enough to save us. We need to become the friend who carries the one who is trying.

Kevin Lamour, now former #2 at FIFA (PIOTR KUCZA / FOTOPYK)

There once was a fax machine.

It sat on the seventeenth floor of Trump Tower, and everything wrong with world football passed through it. This was 2001, 2002, 2003; my time as Head of Special Projects for CONCACAF, as North American liaison for the e-FIFA project for FIFA.

Official communications from FIFA as an institution, from FIFA executives and officials, to the men who ran CONCACAF, arrived by fax. They arrived addressed to Chuck Blazer, who was both the general secretary of CONCACAF and a FIFA executive committee member, which meant he was the funnel through which the confederation received the will of Zurich. But the bureaucracy at CONCACAF could never be certain who would see Chuck on any given day, or whether anyone would see him at all. His attendance was, to put it gently, a matter of chance.

So the staff developed a workaround. Every fax that came through for Chuck was copied.

To all of us.

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FIFA President Gianni Infantino talks with President of the Mexican Football Federation Mikel Arriola next to CONCACAF President Victor Montagliani, ahead of the 2026 World Cup round of 32 football match between Mexico and Ecuador at the Mexico City Stadium in Mexico City on June 30, 2026. (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP via Getty Images)

Language.

There is a particular register of language that powerful institutions reach for when they have been caught doing something they cannot defend and cannot quite bring themselves to admit. It is a dialect of English that sounds like accountability while carefully containing none of it. It nods in the direction of contrition without ever setting foot there. It admits that “mistakes were made,” a construction so beautifully bloodless that the mistakes seem to have made themselves, wandering into existence unbidden, orphaned of any parent, any hand, any decision.

Read FIFA’s statement of 8 August closely: the one issued, in the grand tradition of institutions that will not put a name to their words, “attributable to a FIFA spokesperson,” and you are reading a masterclass in this dialect.

So let me propose to what was FIFA a modest rebranding. Drop “Football.” This governing body is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a federation of football. It is a Fédération Internationale de Word-Association. FIWA. A body whose primary competitive discipline is no longer the beautiful game but the endless, artful, exhausting game played with language; the substitution of vocabulary for accountability, of definitions for facts, of the grammar of grievance for the substance of governance.

Let us go to the tape.

The tell in the first sentence

FIFA - I mean FIWA’s - statement opens by telling us it is “echoing the recent statements of CONMEBOL and CAF, as well as discussions with FIFA Member Associations and Confederations from around the world.” Notice the work being done here before we have reached the verb. This is not a defence; it is a headcount. It is a man surrounded on three sides insisting, loudly, that he has friends. The whole rhetorical architecture of the statement is being poured before our eyes, and its foundation is a claim about who is standing where, because the one thing this statement will never do - what it cannot afford to do - is engage with what was actually done.

Then comes the sentence that tells you everything. FIFA “will not support, facilitate or tolerate any process concerning the election of the FIFA President that is inconsistent with FIFA’s Statutes, democratic procedures and established governance framework.”

Word-association in its purest form.

You did not question the man; you questioned the sacred process by which the man was chosen. To criticise him is to be against elections, against the 211, against democracy. It is the oldest move in the authoritarian phrasebook: l’état, c’est moi, rewritten for the age of the compliance memo. The state is me. The democracy is me. Undermine me and you undermine the mandate, the members, the mission, the game.

The confederations who replied (UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC) saw the swap and named it with a precision that must have stung. “Leadership in football,” they wrote, “is not a possession. It is not about holding - or demanding - power to be held. It is a duty of service.” And then the sentence that punctures the entire FIWA edifice: “When an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.” They refused the word-association. They declined to accept that the man and the mandate are the same noun.

Here is the beating heart of the matter, and here is where FIWA’s linguistic engineering is most exquisite.

According to the confederations, FIFA’s own letter to its Vice-Presidents and 211 members “acknowledges that mistakes were made in the process.” Stop and admire that phrasing. Mistakes were made. Passive voice; the passive voice being, as any student of institutional evasion knows, the grammatical equivalent of a getaway car with the plates removed. In the process…locating the fault not in a person, not in a judgement, not in an intention, but in a process, that faceless bureaucratic weather system that apparently, and most absent of intent, rains errors on the innocent from time to time.

And then the second sleight, which the confederations caught cleanly: FIFA “treats this as a failure of communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgement.”

If the problem was communication, then the fix is a better press release, a clearer memo, a warmer tone; a vocabulary problem, solvable by, well, more words. If the problem was judgement, then the fix is a person, and persons can - must - be replaced. FIWA needs it to be a communication problem, because FIWA is a word-association federation and words are the one currency it still prints freely. It cannot afford it to be a judgement problem, because judgement lives in a human being, and that human being has a name he will not sign to a statement.

The confederations went further, and this is the passage FIFA’s drafters will least enjoy: the compressed timeline, the absence of meaningful consultation, the deadline pushed before members could review the terms: these, they wrote, are “not the product of an oversight - it is the product of a design intended to limit scrutiny.” An oversight is a mistake. A design is a decision. You cannot passive-voice a design.

Someone drew it.

Infantino. Carl Recine/Getty Images

Notice what the FIWA statement never says. Read it three times. Nowhere in that lofty prose about mandates and missions and thirty years of professional life does it mention the actual thing that started the fire.

You would not know, from FIFA’s own words, that anything specific had happened at all.

Indeed, to FIWA, there is only “unsubstantiated assertions,” “demonstrably false claims,” “insinuation,” “misinformation”… the fog machine turned to maximum, obscuring the fact that there is a subject being fogged.

The confederations, mercifully, restore the noun to the sentence. “There remains no recognition,” they wrote, “that attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup was a profound failure of judgement - not just a procedural misstep, but a fundamental breach of trust.”

Attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup. There it is. The thing. The event the entire FIWA statement was constructed to avoid naming.

And once you have the noun in your hand, the whole word-association exercise collapses, because you can finally see what all those abstractions were built to hide. The “concerted and ongoing effort by some to undermine FIFA” turns out to be, on inspection, people objecting to the tournament being treated as an asset to be part-privatised. The “misinformation” turns out to be reporting. The “distortion of facts” turns out to be the facts.

This is the essential mechanism of the former FIFA-turned-Fédération Internationale de Word-Association.

You never argue against the specific charge. You argue against a category you have invented to hold the charge: “misinformation,” “distraction,” “manufactured narrative,” and then you dispute the category with great vigour while leaving the actual event untouched, un-named, and therefore, in the institution’s preferred fiction, unreal.

If it has no name, it did not happen.

Repetition, FIFA helpfully lectures us, “does not make an allegation true.” Quite so. But nor does repetitive non-naming make an event false.

Gianni Infantino (L) speaks with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin after addressing the 50th UEFA Ordinary Congress in Brussels on February 12, 2026. (Photo by Pau BARRENA / AFP via Getty Images)

Language is not decoration in a crisis like this. Language is the crisis, or at least the instrument by which an institution attempts to survive one without changing. The whole of FIFA’s 8 August statement is an argument that the problem is how things have been said; the misinformation, the insinuation, the reporting to be challenged “directly and vigorously.” The whole of the confederations’ reply is an argument that the problem is what was done, and that no rearrangement of vocabulary will convert a failure of judgement into a failure of communication.

“There is silence,” the three confederations wrote, “where there should be accountability, distance where there should be openness.” I would add only this: there are also words - a great, swelling tide of them - where there should be a single, simple, signed sentence admitting the one thing FIFA will not admit. Until that sentence arrives, we are entitled to call the organisation by the name its conduct has earned.

Fédération Internationale de Word-Association. FIWA. Where the game within the game is played entirely in the dictionary, and where, so far, only one side has agreed to use the words as they are actually defined.

Instagram - Gianni Infantino

There is a particular species of laughter that arrives only when the joke is being told by the person who broke your leg.

It is not joy.

It is the involuntary bark of a mind confronting an absurdity so total that the ordinary machinery of outrage seizes up and reboots as comedy. That is the laughter I offer FIFA today. Not the courtesy chuckle of a diplomat. The howling, disbelieving laughter of a man who has read a two-page letter and understood that its authors believe he cannot read.

—

The document in question is dated Zurich, 5 August 2026, and it is signed by Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, and Mattias Grafström, FIFA Secretary General. It is styled as an update to the Vice-Presidents and the Members of the FIFA Council following a meeting in Rabat, Morocco. It concerns the collapse of a scheme called FIFA Forward Enterprise, a proposed vehicle whose particulars had leaked to the media, generated an uproar, and forced a retreat. And it is, from its first sentence to its final flourish of "Yours in football," one of the most instructive documents the organization has ever produced. Instructive not because it reveals anything new about FIFA's character, but because it confirms, in FIFA's own hand, that the character is beyond amendment.

The Anatomy of an Apology That Apologizes for Nothing

Read the sequence. First, an acknowledgment that "mistakes were made in the process." Note the grammar. Not "we made mistakes." Mistakes were made. The passive voice is the native tongue of power evading its own reflection. Mistakes, in this telling, are weather. They occur. They condense out of the institutional air and fall upon the innocent like rain, authorless and uncaused. No hand made them. No name attaches to them. They were simply, regrettably, made.

Then comes the substance of the alleged contrition. The Council and the Member Associations should not have been made "to feel excluded." Sit with that construction. The offense is not that they were excluded. The offense is that they were made to feel excluded, as though the exclusion were a subjective misperception, a hurt sensitivity, a failure of the excluded to correctly interpret a process that was, we are assured, entirely proper. The 211 Member Associations are not being told they were wronged. They are being told their feelings got the better of them, and that FIFA regrets the inconvenience of their emotionality.

And then, in the same breath, the acknowledgment that "errors were also made after the proposal was leaked to media." Read this carefully, because it is the tell. The error being confessed here is not the scheme. The error is the leak. The problem, in FIFA's cosmology, was never the establishment of FIFA Forward Enterprise. The problem was that people found out about it. The contrition is not for the deed. The contrition is for the exposure of the deed. FIFA is not sorry it built the thing. FIFA is sorry you ever saw it building.

This is the moral architecture of a burglar apologizing that the homeowner woke up.

The Sentence That Should End the Careers of Everyone Who Signed It

Now we reach the passage that turns this letter from ordinary corporate mendacity into something genuinely radioactive. The second page, having withdrawn the project, states that "with the project withdrawn, FIFA will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity, good governance and due process and will take all necessary measures to protect and safeguard its name and reputation."

Read it again. I will wait, because you will not believe it the first time.

FIFA. Will no longer tolerate. Attacks. On its integrity, good governance, and due process.

I want to hold this sentence up to the light the way a jeweler holds a stone, and turn it slowly, so you can see every fracture.

Begin with the object of the sentence. FIFA proposes to defend its "integrity, good governance and due process" from "attacks." But we have just been told, in the preceding paragraphs and by the very existence of this letter, that FIFA's governance failed. That its process was so defective the Council felt excluded. That mistakes were made, errors were made, and a whole enterprise had to be yanked off the table under public pressure. The letter is a confession of a governance failure of galactic proportions that concludes by threatening anyone who mentions the governance failure. It is the arsonist announcing that he will no longer tolerate attacks on his commitment to fire safety.

The word doing the heaviest lifting is "tolerate." Tolerance is the posture of the strong toward the weak, the permission granted by the powerful to the powerless. A referee does not "tolerate" the players. The rules do. When FIFA says it will no longer tolerate criticism of its integrity, it is telling you precisely how it understands the relationship between itself and every journalist, whistleblower, member association, and ordinary supporter on earth. It regards scrutiny not as its accountability but as its indulgence. It has, until now, generously permitted you to notice its failures. That permission is hereby revoked.

AFP

And then the phrase that should be laminated and hung in every press box on the planet: "attacks on its integrity." Here is the sleight of hand, and it is old, and it is filthy, and it works only on people who agree to be fooled. FIFA has fused two entirely different things into a single defended object. There is the integrity of an institution, meaning its actual honesty and soundness, and there is the reputation of an institution, meaning what people believe about it. These are opposites in a case like this one. When an institution's real integrity has been breached, the thing that protects it is exactly the criticism, the reporting, the exposure. The attack on the reputation is the defense of the integrity.

FIFA has collapsed the two so that it can present the defense of the truth as an assault upon it.

To report FIFA's failures accurately is now, by definition, an "attack on its integrity." The truth-teller and the saboteur have been made into the same person. That is not an accident of drafting.

That is the entire purpose of the sentence.

Consider what "all necessary measures" means from an organization of this scale, this wealth, and this documented willingness to litigate. It means lawyers. It means the chilling letter to the small outlet that cannot afford to fight. It means the threat that hangs over the freelance reporter, the researcher, the member-association official who might otherwise speak. FIFA has more money than most of the nations that belong to it. "All necessary measures to protect its name" is not a statement of principle. It is a budget line. It is a promise to convert a portion of the game's wealth into the machinery of silence.

Not everyone is as bullheaded as I am; many outlets will hear that and beg off FIFA coverage or any actual investigations, out of fear. I decided to walk around with the Willingness to do Five Things years ago; how many outlets have made that decisive a commitment to justice and truth over privilege and power? Not many.

There is one more sentence I cannot let pass, because it is the keystone of the whole grotesque arch. The first page insists that "although mistakes were made, everything that was done, was done in full compliance with the FIFA regulatory framework."

Here is the confession dressed as an exoneration.

Everything was done in full compliance with the FIFA regulatory framework. I believe them.

That is the horror.

If FIFA can attempt to establish a commercial enterprise of this magnitude, exclude its own Council and its 211 members from meaningful oversight, proceed until the press stopped it, and then truthfully claim the entire process was *compliant with its own rules*, then the indictment is not of a rogue actor inside FIFA. The indictment is of FIFA's rules. The framework is not a guardrail that was breached. The framework is the getaway car. When the referee, the rulebook, and the accused are the same body, "full compliance" is not a defense.

It is the crime scene photograph.

You cannot police yourself and then cite your own permission as proof of your innocence. A body that writes the rules, breaks the spirit of them, complies with the letter of them, and then presents that compliance as vindication has told you, with perfect clarity, that its rules exist to launder its conduct rather than to constrain it.

Now to the consequence.

Because a letter like this is only as powerful as the willingness of its recipients to pretend it is serious.

If the Vice-Presidents and the Council accept this document, they accept their own irrelevance in writing. They accept a governance model in which they are informed of decisions after the press forces a reversal, thanked for their patience, reassured that everything was compliant, and warned that further "attacks" will not be tolerated. To accept it is to sign your own demotion from governor to spectator. Any Council member who reads "FIFA will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity" and does not understand that he is among the people being told to be quiet has not been reading carefully.

If the media accepts it, the media accepts the terms of its own muzzling. The reporting that surfaced FIFA Forward Enterprise is, under the plain language of this letter, exactly the kind of "attack on integrity" that FIFA now promises to meet with "all necessary measures." To treat this letter as a normal piece of corporate communication, to summarize it neutrally, to move on, is to accept the redefinition of accountability journalism as aggression. The correct response of the press to a sentence threatening the press is not stenography. It is contempt, and more reporting.

If the sponsors, the confederations, the governments, and the supporters accept it, they accept the whole architecture: the passive voice, the feelings-not-facts apology, the leak-as-crime, the compliance-as-innocence, and the criticism-as-attack. Acceptance is not neutral. Acceptance is participation. The letter works only if we agree to be its audience rather than its jury.

And here is where the comedy turns exquisite, because one confederation has already refused, and it is mine. My former employer, CONCACAF, and its 41 member associations issued their own statement welcoming the withdrawal, and they did something the Rabat letter would classify as a hostile act. They thanked the press. They commended the media, in writing, for bringing the FFE scheme "out of the shadows and into the light."

So on one side, FIFA, promising to take all necessary measures against attacks on its integrity. On the other, forty-one of FIFA's own member associations, publicly praising the exact journalism FIFA has just sought to quasi-criminalize. The confederation I served from the inside, the one whose governance I know in my bones, went on the record celebrating the light while the parent body drafted a letter in the dark threatening anyone who switches it on.

That is not a difference of opinion.

That is two irreconcilable theories of what football is. In one, scrutiny is the immune system. In the other, scrutiny is the disease. FIFA has told you which theory it holds, and CONCACAF, God help me, told you the opposite (intentionally or unintentionally) in the same news cycle. You cannot reform an institution into agreeing with its own members about whether the truth is an attack. You can only decide which of the two documents you are going to live by.

For years the honest reformers, and I have been among them, have operated on a hopeful premise: that FIFA could be improved from within, that better rules and braver officials and sharper oversight could bend the institution toward decency.

I no longer believe it, and this letter is why.

Reform assumes the existence of a mechanism that can hold the institution to account. This letter is FIFA announcing, in writing, over its two most important signatures, that it recognizes no such mechanism and will attack anyone who tries to be one. It confesses a governance failure and criminalizes the reporting of it in the same breath. It defines its own rulebook as the ceiling of its accountability and its own reputation as a thing to be defended against the truth. There is no internal lever left to pull, because the letter is a public notice that the levers have been welded shut and the people reaching for them will be sued.

Reform is not merely difficult here. It is a less than zero proposition.

Every hour, every dollar, every ounce of moral energy poured into reforming FIFA is not neutral, it is negative, because it lends the institution the legitimacy of a body that might yet be fixed, or one that works, and that borrowed legitimacy is precisely what the letter is trying to reclaim. To fight for reform is to concede that FIFA is the only possible custodian of the game.

It is not.

It is merely the current one, and it has just told us, laughing, that it intends to remain so by force of "all necessary measures."

So the task is not reform. The task is construction; to build the organization, correctly, for the very first time.

The game does not belong to FIFA. It belongs to the players and the coaches and the parents and the small clubs and the leagues and the hundreds of millions who love it, and every one of those constituencies existed before FIFA and would survive its collapse. The question that should occupy us is not how to make FIFA better. FIFA has answered that question for us, in Zurich, on the fifth of August, in the year 2026. The question is what we build instead, and how fast, and who we invite to help.

A body that threatens the people who tell the truth about it has forfeited the right to be reformed.

It has only earned the right to be replaced.

Laugh, then. Don't cry; laugh…out loud. Laugh at the galactic comedy of FIFA policing FIFA, of the burglar issuing the alarm codes, of the arsonist promising he will not tolerate any further attacks on his integrity. Laugh loud enough that they hear it in Zurich.

And then get to work on the thing that comes after them.

---

## Notes on the Record

The 5 August letter analyzed above is authentic to the wider episode, and every characterization in this piece is anchored to the public record of what happened between late July and early August 2026.

What FFE actually was. FIFA Forward Enterprise was a proposed commercial subsidiary that would have consolidated the sale of FIFA's commercial rights and the operational delivery of its tournaments, including the men's and women's World Cups and the Club World Cup. FIFA planned to raise up to roughly 4.2 billion dollars by selling a minority stake of around 20 percent in the entity, which valued the business at approximately 20 billion dollars. Reporting linked a New York investment firm connected to Joshua Kushner, younger brother of Jared Kushner, as the anchor investor. The Statesman (4 Aug 2026): https://www.thestatesman.com/sports/gianni-infantino-drops-controversial-fifa-forward-enterprise-project-after-backlash-from-football-bodies-1503623167.html · IBTimes: https://www.ibtimes.com/fifa-forward-enterprise-abandoned-infantino-withdraws-20-billion-proposal-after-widespread-3805971 · Al Jazeera (31 Jul 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/7/31/infantinos-senior-adviser-cordeiro-resigns-over-fifa-world-cup-plan

The anchor investor. Al Jazeera identified the intended anchor investor as Thrive Eternal, the firm launched by Joshua Kushner, and noted the structural absurdity at the heart of the deal: FIFA's 211 member federations are already, effectively, the owners of the governing body as a nonprofit association under Swiss law, and were being offered 20 million dollars each to accept a scheme that would sell a stake in what they collectively own. Al Jazeera (1 Aug 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/1/why-has-infantino-scrapped-fifas-world-cup-investment-plan-what-to-know

The timeline. The proposal surfaced through media reporting on Tuesday of that week. FIFA responded with a clarification statement insisting "nobody is selling football" and blaming "incorrect media reports" for disrupting its consultation, which is the leak-as-crime framing that recurs in the later apology. By Thursday, UEFA and its 55 national associations had met and agreed to boycott all FIFA events and competitions while the proposal remained active. By early Saturday, Infantino had withdrawn it. CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/sport/uefa-warns-fifa-legal-action-world-cup · Sky Sports: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/12098/13568656/fifa-insists-nobody-is-selling-football-after-uefa-threatens-to-boycott-tournaments-if-plans-to-sell-off-stake-in-world-cup-go-ahead

Internal fracture. Carlos Cordeiro, senior adviser to Infantino, former US Soccer president, former Goldman Sachs banker, and FIFA's representative on the White House World Cup Task Force, resigned in protest, calling FFE "a bad deal for football" and stating he had no involvement in the proposal and opposed it "unequivocally." FIFA COO Kevin Lamour went further, describing the scheme as "the project of one person," saying staff had been "deceived," and telling the Associated Press that staff "deserve better than contempt and intimidation." NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/soccer/fifa-president-gianni-infantino-faces-boycott-20b-world-cup-private-eq-rcna590207 · Variety: https://variety.com/2026/biz/global/fifa-gianni-infantino-ditches-private-investment-plan-1236825512/ · Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/7/31/infantinos-senior-adviser-cordeiro-resigns-over-fifa-world-cup-plan

UEFA's verdict, and the legal threat. UEFA did not treat the withdrawal as a resolution. It declared that Infantino had lost its confidence and that of "many other members of the football family," condemning "secret schemes on fast-track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals." Its lawyers at Dechert then informed FIFA it was actively considering legal action, arbitration, and regulatory complaints arising out of the FFE plan, and named 18 FIFA executives who should preserve documents and messages as potential evidence. This is the context in which FIFA's threat to punish "attacks on its integrity" should be read: an institution facing a live evidence-preservation demand, announcing it will defend its reputation by all necessary measures. ESPN: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49503505/gianni-infantino-lost-uefa-confidence-world-cup-investment-plan-fails · CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/sport/uefa-warns-fifa-legal-action-world-cup

The confederation response, and a central irony. CONCACAF and its 41 member associations welcomed the withdrawal, cited concerns over "the lack of due process," and, in the passage that anchors this essay, explicitly commended the media "for bringing this issue out of the shadows and into the light." That statement, from forty-one of FIFA's own members, praises exactly the journalism FIFA's Rabat letter reframes as an intolerable attack. CONCACAF: https://www.concacaf.com/news/concacaf-and-its-41-member-associations-welcome-the-withdrawal-of-the-proposed-fifa-forward-enterprise

The Rabat letter itself. The 5 August update from Rabat, Morocco, acknowledged "mistakes were made," that it was not the intention for the Council and Member Associations "to feel excluded," and that "errors were also made after the proposal was leaked to media." It confirmed a separate apology letter to the Council and all 211 Member Associations, a review to be reported to the next FIFA Council meeting, reaffirmed support for Infantino, and contained the pledge that FIFA "will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity, good governance and due process." The Tribune (ANI wire, 6 Aug 2026), which reproduces that language: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/ffe-proposal/fifa-apologises-to-its-member-association

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Larry Berg, co-managing owner of Los Angeles Football Club and a man who spent three decades at the private equity firm Apollo Global Management before moving to 26North, will become the third commissioner in the history of Major League Soccer. He takes over on the first of January, 2027. Don Garber, who has held the post since 1999, will move to the chairmanship and stay through the end of his contract. Berg beat one other finalist, the former Fox executive David Nathanson. He will have to sell his stake in LAFC to take the chair.

I want to be fair to the man before I am hard on the institution. By the accounts of people who have worked with him, Berg is capable, disciplined, and serious. Garber himself, who is not obligated to say anything, called him a leader of integrity and judgment. LAFC under Berg and his partners became one of the most valuable franchises in the league, a club with a real supporters culture and a real trophy case. None of that is nothing. And Garber's own tenure deserves the appreciation people are already extending to it. He took a league that had folded two teams by 2001 and left it with thirty clubs, twenty-six soccer-specific stadiums, and a collective valuation north of twenty billion dollars. In an industry not known for accessible or personable leadership, he was a rare exception. That is true, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But I have spent my professional life on both sides of a particular line. I was Head of Special Projects at CONCACAF. I was one of five North American delegates to the 2002 World Cup. I sat in the rooms where the World Game's future gets decided, and I wrote a book, Saving Soccer, about what happens in those rooms when nobody outside them is looking. And I have spent the other half of my life on the ground in Baltimore, running food banks and family centers and youth programs, watching who gets access to what and who does not. So when I read that a private equity partner has been chosen to lead American soccer into its next era, I do not feel scandal.

I feel recognition.

This is the machine doing exactly what the machine is built to do.

Let me be precise about the challenge Berg inherits, because the industry framing of it is honest as far as it goes. Major League Soccer is now firmly established across thirty markets. Revenues are climbing, albeit unsteadily. Local attendances are strong, although that varies market to market. The task, as the league's own boosters describe it, is to move MLS from a stable domestic competition into a top-tier league that commands genuine national and global attention. That means letting clubs spend more, attracting better talent, and doing it without completely destroying the parity mechanisms that keep smaller markets competitive nad this form of MLS alive. And it means doing all of this before the current Apple broadcast deal concludes in 2029, because broadcasters pay for stars, and stars require spending. That is the puzzle. It is a real puzzle. Berg, who co-chaired the league's Sporting and Competition Committee and helped steer the coming flip to the European calendar, is as well positioned to solve it as anyone the owners could have chosen from among themselves.

But notice the terms of the puzzle. Every variable in it is a business variable. Revenue. Rights fees. Talent acquisition. Franchise valuation. Parity is treated not as a value but as a constraint, a thing to be preserved only insofar as it protects the investment of owners in smaller markets. Nowhere in the official framing does the question appear that I think should sit at the center of any serious conversation about American soccer:

Who is this league actually for?

It's the kind of question the documentary I appeared in, Can We Kick It?, was built to ask. It is a cultural soccer film, made by Concrete2Green over three years, and its subject is not tactics or transfers. Its subject is access. It examines the cultural, structural, and economic barriers that have kept the world's game from reaching urban America, and it does so at precisely this moment, as the United States prepares to host the 2026 World Cup, when the question of who gets to be seen and remembered and included in American soccer has never been more urgent. The talent exists. The passion exists. What does not exist, in too many communities, are the pathways, the visibility, and the investment. That is the film's thesis, and it is correct.

Creators and cast members of the documentary Can We Kick It?

Hold those two things next to each other. On one side, a league whose defining challenge is described entirely in the language of capital, now to be led by a man who spent thirty years in the business of capital. On the other, a documentary arguing that the game's deepest failure in this country is a failure of access, a structural exclusion of the very communities that have historically driven American culture and American athletic excellence. These are not two conversations. They are one conversation, and the tragedy is that the people running the league are only having half of it.

Here is where the tenets of Saving Soccer become useful, because the book is not really just, or even mostly, about FIFA. It is about a pattern. The pattern is this: football's institutions consistently organize themselves around the interests of the people already inside them, and they consistently describe that self-interest in the neutral language of growth.

Growth for whom?

The World Game was captured not by villains twirling mustaches but by men who genuinely believed that what was good for the institution was good for the game, and who never had to test that belief because no one outside the institution had standing to make them. The Chuck Blazers and Jack Warners of the world were extreme cases, but the deeper problem was structural. Accountability flowed upward, to sponsors and to boards, and never downward, to the communities the game claimed to serve. There was no mechanism by which a kid in a neighborhood without a pitch could register a claim on the institution's attention.

There still isn't.

Now apply that lens to MLS. A commissioner chosen by owners, accountable to owners, tasked by owners with maximizing the value of their franchises ahead of a broadcast negotiation. I do not question the legality or even the ordinariness of this. Every major American sports league works this way. But we should be honest that a governance structure designed to serve thirty ownership groups is not a governance structure designed to serve the fifty million people who live within reach of those thirty clubs. The parity debate makes this vivid. When the league frames parity as a business problem, a question of keeping small-market franchises viable, it has already decided that the relevant stakeholders are the franchises. The alternative framing, that parity and access are about whether the game belongs to a country or only to the people who can afford a season ticket and a pay-to-play club fee for their child, is simply not on the table.

But it should be. And this is the constructive part, because I do not write only to indict. Berg has a genuine opportunity, precisely because he is arriving with a mandate to reshape the economics of the league, to build access into the reshaping rather than treating it as charity bolted on afterward. The pay-to-play system that governs American youth soccer is the single greatest structural barrier to talent in this country, and it is a barrier that falls hardest on exactly the urban and Black and immigrant communities that Can We Kick It? documents. A commissioner who wanted to could tie the league's expansion of spending to real investment in free and low-cost pathways, could make academy access a condition of the economic liberalization owners are demanding, could treat the communities surrounding each club as stakeholders with standing rather than as a marketing demographic. None of that is utopian. It is a governance choice, and governance choices are exactly what a new commissioner gets to make.

Whether he will is a different question, and I am not optimistic in the way that costs nothing. The incentives indeed point the other way. The broadcast deal is the near-term prize, and stars sell broadcast deals, and stars come from spending, and spending flows to the top of the pyramid. Access develops stars too, perhaps more consistently, but it is a long game, measured in generations, and the men who voted Berg in are not, as a class, patient about generational returns. So the likeliest outcome is the one the industry is already describing. More spending, bigger names, a more lucrative rights deal, and a league that is richer and more visible and no more just than it was before. The kid without a pitch remains without a pitch. The talent remains untapped.

In other words, what's most likely is that the pattern holds.

But it does not have to.

That is the whole argument of the book, and the whole argument of the film, and the whole reason I am building Free Play America instead of writing this from a comfortable distance (more on that some other time).

Institutions are made by people, and what people made, people can remake. The World Game was captured because no one with power inside it chose to hold it accountable to the people outside it. American soccer is being handed to a new commissioner at a moment when he could choose differently, when the leverage of a broadcast negotiation and a calendar flip and a post-World-Cup surge of attention gives him room to write access into the foundation. He probably will not. The structure did not select for it. But he could, and the fact that he could is the thing worth writing about, because a possibility unnamed is a possibility surrendered.

So let us name it plainly…

Congratulations to Larry Berg, and my sincere respect to Don Garber for a tenure of real achievement. And to the league they are handing off between them, one question, the only question that finally matters:

You have built something valuable. Now tell me who it is for.

Tell me whether the boy in West Baltimore who has never touched a proper ball is a future of this league or merely a distant, potential audience for it. Everything else is arithmetic. This is the thing.

So Infantino blinked.

Ninety-six hours after floating a scheme to spin off the World Cup's assets into a company part-owned by whoever showed up with a checkbook, he pulled it. UEFA's fifty-five threatened to walk. CONCACAF and the AFC followed, in the muted, lawyerly cadence of men who want credit for resistance without the risk of it. His own COO turned on him in public. And now the football press is doing what the football press always does: counting the days until the coronation in Morocco, handicapping the succession, asking whether the king is toast.

Wrong question. It has always been the wrong question.

Bonita Mersiades - who knows the inside of this machine better than almost anyone alive - put it plainly this week: if the only outcome is that Infantino is replaced, football will have missed the opportunity of a generation. Havelange, Blatter, Infantino. Three men, one office, one set of tools. Every so-called reformer who inherits that chair inherits an instrument built for a strongman, and then we act surprised when the next occupant plays it like one. This is not a personnel problem. It has never been a personnel problem.

You do not fix a rotten throne by changing who sits on it.

I have watched this cycle from inside the building. I was one of five North American delegates to the 2002 World Cup. I sat in CONCACAF as Head of Special Projects while the men later indicted were still shaking hands and posing for photographs. I went on record in FIFA Uncovered and on NPR because I got tired of watching people who witnessed the same things I did decide that silence paid better, then I wrote my own book with the details. So let me say the thing the reform conversation keeps swallowing:

The scandal was never that bad men captured a good structure. The scandal is that the structure works exactly as designed, and the design is the crime.

FFE was not an aberration. FFE was the system telling on itself. A president could even propose selling equity in the sport's crown jewel because the office he holds was engineered - deliberately, over seventy years - to concentrate that much power in that few hands with that little accountability. Remove the man and you have removed the symptom.

The pathology sits in the bylaws.

So here is what actual institutional reform looks like; not "he must go," but "this must change." From the club up to the confederation, from the confederation up to Zürich:

1. Separate the money from the whistle. FIFA is simultaneously the game's regulator, its commercial owner, and its judge. No serious institution on earth lets the same body write the rules, sell the rights, and adjudicate the disputes. Split it. A regulatory FIFA that governs the laws of the game and integrity, structurally walled off from a commercial arm that sells the tournaments — with the commercial arm accountable to the regulator, not the reverse.

2. Term and power limits with teeth. Two terms for the president, hard stop, no "development" sinecures afterward. But more important than limiting the term is limiting the office. Strip the presidency of unilateral spending authority, unilateral appointment authority, and the power to reorganize governance by decree. A president should convene and represent…not rule.

3. An independent integrity body FIFA cannot fire. The current "ethics" apparatus serves at the pleasure of the people it is supposed to investigate. That is not oversight; it is theater. Integrity, audit, and adjudication must be appointed by, funded by, and removable only by a body entirely outside the football pyramid, with subpoena power, published findings, and no ability for the president to disband it the moment it looks in his direction. Ask Garcia how the current version ends.

4. Financial transparency as a condition of membership. Every confederation and every national association that takes FIFA development money publishes audited, itemized accounts: where it went, who signed for it, what it built. The FIFA Forward money has flowed for a decade with a fraction of this scrutiny. Sunlight or no subsidy. That is the deal.

5. Break the confederation vote-buying machine. One nation, one vote sounds democratic yet functions as a marketplace. Two hundred-plus federations, many entirely dependent on central funding, voting on the future of the people who fund them…that is not a democracy, it is a patronage network with a flag ceremony. Decouple development funding from the electoral process entirely. Money for football must never be a lever on a ballot.

6. Stakeholder seats that are not decoration. Players, referees, leagues, supporters, and women's football need voting representation in governance, not advisory councils that get thanked and ignored. The people who make the game and the people who love it should have structural power over it, because the men who currently hold that power keep confusing custody with ownership.

7. Transparent, criteria-bound hosting decisions. No more World Cups awarded by a show of hands in a room after a decade of quiet cultivation. Published, weighted, human-rights-inclusive criteria; independent evaluation; a public record of who voted how and why. 2018, 2022, 2034 happened because the process was designed to be captured and corrupted. Design it to resist capture.

8. Whistleblower protection written into statute. I can name the price people pay for telling the truth about this game, because I have watched them pay it and paid some of it myself. Until the person who reports wrongdoing is structurally safer than the person who conceals it, the incentives run one direction, and it isn't toward the light.

9. Subsidiarity that actually devolves power. Reform cannot only happen at the top. The rot the average family feels is at the bottom: pay-to-play pricing children out, national federations run as fiefdoms, local clubs with no recourse against the governing bodies above them. A reformed FIFA has to push transparency, accountability, and appeal rights down the pyramid, all the way to the parent writing a check they can't afford so their kid can play. Governance that stops at the confederation level is governance for administrators, not for the game.

Mersiades is right that this is not a victory, it is an opportunity. But I'd describe the trap more sharply. Every reform cycle since 2011 has ended the same way: a scandal, a spasm of outrage, a reshuffled board, a new "governance framework" with the word transparency stamped on the cover, and business as usual by the next World Cup. The palace has learned that it can survive any storm by sacrificing a minister. Blatter for Infantino. Infantino for whoever comes next. The face changes. The architecture is immortal.

The confederations just proved they can say no. UEFA drew a line and the others eventually shuffled up to stand near it. Fine. Now comes the only question that matters: what are they prepared to say yes to? Because saying no to FFE while leaving the office that produced FFE fully intact is not reform. It is maintenance. It keeps the machine running smoothly enough to produce the next FFE, and the one after that.

I have spent a career watching good people wait for the right man to fix a structure built to defeat good men. He is not coming. There is no honest president who can save a dishonest office, and no amount of resignation letters that adds up to a constitution.

Change the palace, or stop pretending you're surprised by the kings.

Imagine the amount of propaganda it took.

Not the loud kind. Not the Proud-Boys-goose-stepping, Moms-for-Liberty-book-burning kind you were trained in school to recognize and congratulate yourself for being immune to.

The other kind.

The kind that arrives dressed as common sense. The kind that speaks in the reasonable, weary voice of a man explaining to a child why the toy in the window will not be coming home. The kind that says we can't afford it while standing in the richest nation in the history of the species, in a room whose furniture costs more than a schoolteacher earns in a year, with a straight face and a firm handshake and a check already written to the people who paid for the room.

Imagine the amount of propaganda it took to convince over a hundred and fifty million working people that healthcare, food assistance, clean water, clean air, good wages, housing, equal rights, diversity, and a livable planet - the plainest catalog of human decency ever assembled, the things every parent wants for every child without being taught to want them - were not their birthright but a threat. A threat to America. A threat to God. Imagine the sheer industrial tonnage of lies required to take the most obvious good and file its serial numbers off and sell it back to the very people it was stolen from as a danger.

This is the story of that theft.

And it is not a small story, so I am not going to tell it small.

Because here is the number that should end every argument before it begins, the number that is the keel of this entire vessel: since the year 2000, the government of the United States has collected well over one hundred trillion dollars in federal revenue. One hundred trillion. Say it slowly. A hundred thousand billion dollars, extracted from the paychecks and the purchases and the labor of ordinary Americans, handed up to the project of a democratic republic, for the stated and constitutional purpose of establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

A hundred trillion dollars just this millennium. And you are being told, right now, today, in the year 2026, that there isn't enough.

That is the propaganda. Everything else is just the elaboration.

They named the ship Titanic because it was supposed to be unsinkable.

The word was the whole point.

It was a boast made physical, a thousand feet of riveted steel that existed to prove a thesis about the invincibility of a certain kind of confidence, a certain kind of money, a certain kind of man. First class dined under a glass dome. The third-class passengers, the ones who had sold everything they owned for a bunk below the waterline and the promise of a new country, they were locked behind gates when the water came, because the manifest had to be kept separate, because the classes could not be allowed to mix…even in death.

There were not enough lifeboats. Everyone knows this part. But almost no one remembers why there were not enough lifeboats, and the why is the entire moral of the story, the reason I have named this essay after a shipwreck disaster.

There were not enough lifeboats because a full complement of lifeboats would have cluttered the deck. The boats that could have saved every soul aboard were left off the design because they interfered with the promenade. The first-class passengers had paid for a view, and a rack of lifeboats spoils a view. So the calculation was made - quietly, in an office, by reasonable men in good suits - that a certain number of human beings would be allowed to drown rather than inconvenience the aesthetic expectations of the people who could afford the upper decks.

That is not a metaphor I am reaching for, that is the actual policy that killed fifteen hundred people in the North Atlantic in 1912. The lifeboats existed. The engineering existed. The money existed. What did not exist was the will to prioritize the survival of ordinary people over the comfort of the comfortable, and so the ship went down with the band playing and the gates locked and the deck uncluttered.

America is the ship. The lifeboats exist. We built the shipyard that could build any lifeboat ever conceived. And we have spent the better part of a century being persuaded, at enormous expense, that the lifeboats would spoil the view.

Let me show you the lifeboats we were talked out of. One by one. Because I want you to see, in each case, that the boat was already in the water somewhere in the world, or was already tied up at our own dock, before somebody with a budget for lies convinced us to leave it behind.

HEALTHCARE

Start with the one that kills the most of us, because it is the cleanest example of the whole con.

Every other wealthy nation on earth guarantees healthcare to its people. Not most of them. All of them. Every single developed country except the United States treats the setting of a broken arm and the treatment of a child's leukemia as a function of belonging to the society, the way we treat the fire department and the road in front of your house. This is not a controversial claim. It is a fact so settled that in the rest of the developed world it is not even a political question anymore; it is simply the floor beneath politics, the thing every party of the left and the right agrees is not up for debate.

The propaganda you were fed - that we all ate - is that this is impossible. That it is un-American. That it is a European luxury we cannot afford and would not want, a road to rationing and death panels and waiting lists and the smothering hand of the state between you and your doctor.

Here is what they did not tell you. We had it. Or we very nearly did, more than once, and each time the boat was pushed away from the ship by hands that were paid to push.

In 1945, Harry Truman - a plain Missouri Democrat, no radical by any means - proposed national health insurance for all Americans. The American Medical Association hired a public relations firm and ran what was, at the time, the most expensive lobbying campaign in the history of the country. They called it socialized medicine. They mailed pamphlets to every doctor's office in America. They put up posters in waiting rooms. They invoked the specter of Soviet Russia in the examination room where your grandmother sat in a paper gown. And it worked. The boat was pushed away.

In 1993, we tried again, and the insurance industry ran a series of television advertisements featuring a fictional middle-class couple named Harry and Louise, sitting at a kitchen table, worrying in soft and reasonable tones that the government was going to take away their choices. Harry and Louise were not real. They were actors, paid by an industry that pockets your premiums, hired to sit at a fake kitchen table and perform your anxieties back at you so that you would fight to keep the very system that was bleeding you. The boat was pushed away.

And so today an American can do everything right…work hard, pay in, follow every rule… and be destroyed anyway by a diagnosis. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Not gambling. Not frivolity. Getting sick. We are the only rich country on earth where a cancer diagnosis is simultaneously a death sentence and a foreclosure notice, where people ration insulin that costs pennies to manufacture, where a mother reads the price of the ambulance before she lets them call the ambulance for her own child.

We could have had the boat. Britain built the National Health Service in 1948, out of the literal rubble of a country that had just been bombed for six years, that was flat broke, that was rationing bread. They looked at that devastation and decided that a nation that could not guarantee the health of its people was not worth rebuilding. They were poorer than we have ever been in our worst year, and they built the lifeboat anyway. We, in the richest years any nation has ever known, with a hundred trillion dollars flowing through the treasury, were persuaded that the same boat would sink us.

That is not economics. That is propaganda. And it has a body count.

FOOD

I have spent a portion of my working life inside this one, so let me speak plainly and from the ground.

The United States produces a staggering, almost obscene surplus of food. We pay farmers not to grow, some years, because we grow too much. We plow crops under. We let produce rot in fields for want of a buyer. We are not a nation that lacks food; we are a nation drowning in it. And yet in this ocean of calories, more than thirteen million American children live in households that do not know where the next meal is coming from. In the richest country in the history of the world. In the middle of the harvest.

How do you convince people to accept childhood hunger in a land of surplus? You need a story, and the story is one of the oldest and ugliest in the American canon. You tell them the hungry deserve it. You conjure a figure - she has been called the welfare queen, she has been given a Cadillac and a fur coat and a fistful of stolen names - and you make her the face of assistance so that the actual face, which is a five-year-old with an empty lunch tray, never gets seen at all. You call food stamps a "handout" and a "dependency" and a "lifestyle," and you attach that language so thoroughly to the program that people who are themselves one bad month from needing it will vote to gut it out of contempt for a person who does not exist.

The genius of it (and it is genius…evil horrific genius, but genius) is that the actual cost of feeding every hungry child in America is a rounding error against that hundred-trillion-dollar tide. Feeding the hungry is one of the cheapest things a government can do and one of the highest-returning; a child who eats learns, and a child who learns earns, and a child who earns pays it all back with interest for fifty years. It is not charity. It is the single best investment a nation can make in its own future revenue. The propaganda had to work overtime to convince us to refuse a deal this good - to leave money on the table and children hungry - and it did work, because it aimed itself not at our wallets but at our resentments, and resentment is the cheapest fuel there is. It worked because we in fact have 20% of children in the United States living in food-insecure households. We did that. We are doing that.

Other nations simply feed their children. It is not remarked upon. It is not debated on the Sunday shows. It is the boat, already in the water, oars already moving. We were told the boat was a goddamned moral hazard.

WATER AND AIR

You cannot see this propaganda, which is exactly why it was so effective. You cannot taste lead in the water. The children of Flint could not taste it. It was invisible and it was odorless and it was in every glass, every bottle for a baby's formula, every pot of pasta, and the officials who knew told the people who did not know that everything was fine, drink up, the water is safe, and it was a lie, and children were poisoned in their own kitchens by the substance that is supposed to be the very definition of purity.

Clean water is not a technological mystery we have failed to solve. Rome had aqueducts. We put men on the moon on a slide rule. The engineering of clean water is a solved, ancient, boring problem. What we have is a political failure disguised as a fiscal one; pipes we knew were poisoning people and chose not to replace because replacing them would cost money that had been earmarked, in the deep quiet grammar of American budgeting, for other things, for tax abatements and stadium deals and the thousand small transfers of public wealth into private hands.

And the air. There was a stretch of the twentieth century when American cities disappeared into their own exhaust, when Los Angeles was a rumor behind a brown curtain, when a river in Ohio caught fire - the water caught fire - and we passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and for one shining bipartisan moment did the obvious thing, and the sky came back. It worked. The lifeboat was launched and it saved millions of lungs.

And then…

And then the propaganda arrived to tell us that the very laws that gave us back the sky were "job-killing regulations," "government overreach," "red tape strangling business." A machine was built - funded by precisely the industries doing the polluting - to manufacture doubt, the same firms and often the same individual men who had told us cigarettes were healthy now told us the planet was fine, that the science was uncertain, that the scientists were on the take, that clean air was a luxury we suddenly, after having had it, could no longer afford. They did not have to win the argument. They only had to make it seem like there was an argument, to fog the glass, to buy time, and every year of fog was another year of profit and another year of the boat rotting on its davits.

WAGES

Here is the chart that should be tattooed on the inside of every American's eyelids, and I will describe it because you have to see it in your mind to feel the theft.

From the end of the Second World War until about 1973, two lines on a graph rose together, side by side, like two friends walking up a hill. One line was worker productivity; how much stuff American workers made per hour. The other was worker pay. They climbed together, in lockstep, for nearly thirty years, because that was the deal, the plainest and fairest deal in the world: you produce more, you earn more, the pie grows and everyone gets a bigger slice. That was the America of the most authentic middle-class the nation ever spawned…the single-income household, the union card, the pension, the house on one salary, the vacation, the sense that the ground beneath a working family was rising.

And then...

And then, right around 1973, the lines split. Productivity kept climbing: Americans kept getting more efficient, more skilled, more productive, decade after decade after decade, right up to this morning.

But pay flattened.

It lay down and it stayed down. The two friends who had walked up the hill together parted ways, and one kept climbing to the summit while the other sat down in the road, and the enormous, ever-widening gap between those two lines is not an abstraction. That gap is money. Trillions of dollars of it. It is the difference between the wealth that working people created and the wealth they got to keep, and it did not vanish; it went somewhere, it went up, it pooled at the top of the ship in quantities the world had never before seen.

The propaganda that accomplished this - the Great Uncoupling of work from reward - is maybe the most sophisticated of all, because it convinced the people being robbed to identify with the robber.

It taught a man breaking his body on a warehouse floor to sneer at the "entitled" and admire the billionaire, to see the union that might raise his wage as the enemy and the corporation suppressing it as the natural order. It rebranded a demand for a living wage as laziness. It called the fight for fifteen dollars an hour (fifteen dollars, in an economy where a studio apartment can, typically, cost two thousand a month) economically illiterate, a job-killer, a fantasy, while the very same commentators drew salaries that would take a minimum-wage worker a century to earn.

U.S. union membership peaked at nearly 35% density in 1954 (and 21 million total members in 1979), whereas today, union membership stands at 10.0% of wage and salary workers. From 1 in 3 to 1 in 10: the power of propaganda.

Union membership in Norway today? It stands at approximately 52% to 57% of the workforce.

Other developed nations did not let the lines split, or did not let them split so far. They kept the deal. Their workers kept climbing the hill. Ours were told that the hill was closed, that the summit was a myth, that the friend who kept rising had simply worked harder, and that to want the old deal back was to be a child crying for the moon.

HOUSING

I have run transitional housing. I have stood in the family life center at the end of the day and watched a mother with two children in tow sign in for a bed, a woman who did everything a person is supposed to do and still ended up with nowhere for her babies to sleep, a woman too often on the run from a broken father and his predations, and I am here to tell you that homelessness in America is not a natural disaster.

It is a policy. It is a choice. We choose, directly and indirectly.

It is manufactured, as surely as the food surplus and the medical debt are manufactured, and the machine that manufactures it runs on a specific and cultivated belief: that a house is not a home but an asset, a chip in a casino, a vehicle for the endless extraction of wealth from the basic human need for shelter.

We had, once, a genuine national commitment to housing. We built it before and after the war. And then, decade by decade, we let the propaganda convince us that public housing was a failure by design (we starved it of funds and then pointed at its decay as proof it could not work).

Indeed, when federal public housing was first created in the United States during the New Deal era of the 1930s, it was designed primarily for white, working-class families. Over the mid-20th century, a combination of government subsidized suburban home loans for white families and rising urban migration by people of color triggered a massive transition.

And then…

Across that transition, we let the market off its leash to treat the roof over a family's head as a speculative instrument, to be bought and flipped and rented and securitized and gambled upon until, in 2008, the whole rotten scheme collapsed and threw millions of families out of homes they had been suckered into as the price of a mortgage. And when the ship went down that time, the lifeboats were lowered…but they were lowered for the banks.

The institutions that built the fraud were rescued at public expense, from that same hundred-trillion-dollar sea, and the families who were defrauded got the foreclosure notice.

First class got the boats. Third class got the gates.

Other nations treat housing as infrastructure; as a thing a society simply has, like sewers and streetlights, and their people are not sleeping in tents beneath the overpasses of the richest cities on earth. We were told that housing everyone was impossible, utopian, unaffordable. We spend more warehousing the homeless in emergency rooms and jail cells and shelters than it would cost to simply house them, and this is not a secret, it is studied and known and published, and still the propaganda holds, because the propaganda was never about the math. It was about the belief that some people deserve a roof and some people do not, and that the deserving can be known by whether they already have one.

RIGHTS AND RACE

Now we come to the deepest and the darkest of the propagandas, the one that is a mother to all the others, the one without which none of the rest would have been possible.

Every single one of the lifeboats I have described - healthcare, food, wages, housing - was sunk, again and again, by the same glacier that, upon hitting the hull of the nation, results in the same cracks: race.

This is where American delusion and illusion also collide; the propaganda master-tool that has been used to pick the lock on the treasury and hand its contents upward for four hundred years. You want to know how you convince poor white Americans to vote against their own healthcare, their own food assistance, their own wages? You tell them that the boat is really for someone else. You tell them that the program meant to save them will mostly save people they have been carefully taught to resent. You make the safety net look Black, or brown, or foreign, and you watch people set fire to their own rescue rowboat, rather than share it.

This is the trick any historian understands and the everyday citizen is not supposed to. When the New Deal built the great American middle class, it built it with the doors locked against Black families; the housing programs redlined, the labor protections carved out to exclude the jobs Black workers held, the whole magnificent apparatus of upward mobility engineered to lift some and not others. And then, a generation later, when the movement for rights, for equal rights, for authentic rights finally pried those doors open, the response was not to widen the boat but to sink it: to defund the schools the moment they were integrated, to close the public pools rather than share them, to discover a sudden passion for "small government" precisely at the moment government might have to serve everyone.

“Diversity” is a threat, the propaganda says. But look at what the word is doing. It is doing the work of the crowbar. It is teaching a laid-off factory worker in a dying town that his enemy is the immigrant, the woman, the man of another color who wants the same dignity he wants, rather than the executive who moved his factory overseas and pocketed the difference and funded the very media that taught him whom to blame. Diversity is not the threat. Diversity is the coalition - the only coalition large enough to demand every one of these lifeboats at once and actually win them - and the men at the top of the ship know it, which is precisely why they have spent so many billions to keep that coalition from ever recognizing itself in the mirror. Divide the third-class passengers by every line you can draw among them, and they will never combine to break the gates.

Let them combine, and no gate on earth will hold.

The equal rights the propagandist names as a “threat” is the threat of a united deck. It is the threat of the many recognizing that they are the many. That is the oldest fear of the few, and every dollar spent on the propaganda of division is a dollar spent to keep that recognition from dawning.

THE EARTH

And finally the ship itself: the vessel we are all standing on, taking on water at the waterline while the propaganda insists the reports of flooding are exaggerated, politically motivated, a hoax cooked up by scientists who want your gas stove.

This is the propaganda that will be studied, if there is anyone left to study it, as the most expensive and most murderous lie ever told, because its victims are not yet born to suffer this intergenerational tyranny. The technology to power a civilization without cooking it exists…it is here. It is a new boat and it is cheaper by the month.

That boat is not only in the water, it is faster and cleaner than the ship. And we are being talked out of getting into it by the exact same people, using the exact same playbook, that talked us out of every other boat: manufacture doubt, buy the science, fund the confusion, brand the survival option as the radical threat and the suicidal course as good sound business. The fossil fuel industry knew, in its own laboratories, decades ago, precisely what was coming, and it chose, as a matter of corporate strategy, to spend its money not on lifeboats but on lies. That is on the record now. That is not conspiracy. It ought to be criminally evidentiary. It is certainly documented history.

A healthy planet is named as a threat to America and to Christianity, and there is no more perfect illustration of how thoroughly the propaganda has inverted reality. The stewardship of creation, the care of the earth given into human keeping…this is the most basic religious instruction imaginable, and it has been so completely propagandized that a faith founded on caring for “the least of these” has been turned, in millions of minds, against the very future of the planet the least of these will have to live on. That is not an accident. That is a triumph of manipulative marketing over meaning, and it is the same triumph, everywhere in this essay; the taking of a plain good and the selling of it back to us as a plain evil.

A RECKONING

So let us do the accounting, because this whole piece has been building to the ledger.

Over one hundred trillion dollars in federal revenue, this millennium alone. That is the money the American people have handed up to the project of self-government since the year 2000. Where a nation’s money goes is where a nation’s heart is; the budget is the truest theology any people ever writes. And for that hundred trillion dollars we were told, again and again, on every issue that would have lifted the many, the same sentence: we can’t afford it.

We could not afford to insure the sick. We could not afford to feed the children. We could not afford to fix the water pipes or clean the sky or pay the workers or house the families or educate the poor or cool the planet. There was never enough. The treasury was always empty, precisely and only at the moment the money might have flowed downward and outward to everyday people, and it was always, somehow, miraculously full at the moment it might flow upward and inward, to the wars, to the bailouts, to the tax cuts that fell like the warmest, gentlest rain on the upper decks, to the contracts and the carried interest and the hundred quiet channels by which the wealth that working people made was returned to the people who did not make it.

This is the propaganda in its final and purest form. It is the word afford. It is the single most powerful piece of propaganda in the American language, because it disguises a choice as a fact. “We can’t afford it” is never a statement about money.

Every “we can’t afford healthcare” is a lie that means “we have chosen to spend that money on something else, and we have decided you must not notice the choosing.” Every lifeboat left off the deck was a decision made in an office by reasonable men, and the propaganda’s entire job - its whole trillion-dollar job - was to make that decision look like the weather. Like gravity. Like something that simply is, rather than something that someone did.

The Titanic did not sink because the ocean was too strong. It sank because it was built with a fatal confidence and steered too fast through known danger by men who were sure the water could not touch them, and when the water came, the design of the ship itself decided who lived and who drowned. The boats were too few and the gates were locked, and the people in third class - the people who had bet everything on the promise of a new country - went down with the ship while the band, God bless them, played on.

America was sold to its people as unsinkable. The most powerful, the most prosperous, the most free; a titan among nations, riding high, its confidence stamped into the very name. And the possibility of that America, the real one, the one where the promise on the manifest is the promise every passenger actually receives, has been kept away from Americans not by any force of nature, not by any true scarcity, not by the impossibility of the thing, but by the most sustained and expensive campaign of persuasion in human history.

A campaign to convince the many that the lifeboats would spoil the view.

That healthcare is tyranny and hunger is character and low wages are freedom and clean air is red tape and a shared roof is dependency and equal dignity is a threat and a living planet is a hoax. A campaign, in the end, to keep the gates locked and the third-class passengers convinced that the locks were for their own protection.

But here is the thing about the manifest, the thing the men on the upper decks have always feared: everyone whose name is on it paid for passage. Every one. The hundred trillion dollars is not their money that they generously share; it is our money that they have been spending against us. The boat was built in our shipyard, with our hands, out of our labor and our taxes and our lives, and the only thing that has ever kept us off it is a story; a very expensive, very sophisticated, very well-funded story about what we can and cannot afford, about who deserves and who does not, about which of us is the threat.

The story is of course not true. It was never true.

It cost a fortune precisely because it was never true, because a lie that enormous, sold against evidence that plain, to people whose own lives contradict it every single day, requires an unimaginable and unending expenditure of propaganda to keep aloft.

And a lie that expensive to maintain is a lie that is, by its very cost, admitting how fragile it is. How near to sinking it is. How much it fears the moment the passengers on the lower decks stop listening to the loudspeaker and start, at last, talking to one another.

Imagine the amount of propaganda it took.

Now imagine what happens the day it stops working.

Years ago, on Sky Sports News, I made a prediction. I said that if we tried to fix FIFA by changing the criminals at the top while leaving the machine untouched, we would not fix anything. We would simply install a new set of hands on the same levers. The scandal of 2015 - the dawn arrests in Zurich, the racketeering indictments, the spectacle of grey men in suits led out of the Baur au Lac - felt to a lot of people like a reckoning. I said it was a substitution. Swap the driver, keep the car, keep the road, keep the destination.

I want no credit for being right. Being right about this has cost the game a decade.

Because here we are in the summer of 2026, days after a World Cup that generated something close to twelve billion dollars, and the institution is not chastened. It is emboldened. On July 26, Gianni Infantino published a message telling his critics they had been “consumed by hate,” that those of us “behind our pens” had spread false rumours while FIFA did the real work of uniting the world. “While you divide, we unite,” he wrote. Forty-eight hours later, FIFA asked the football world to swallow the most audacious enclosure of the commons the sport has ever seen.

They call it FIFA Forward Enterprise. I call it the moment the mask came off entirely.

Strip away the language of “democratisation” and here is what is on the table. FIFA intends to spin its broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing rights, plus the operational delivery of the World Cup, the Club World Cup, the women’s and youth tournaments into a new commercial company. It intends to sell up to roughly a fifth of that company to private investors, raising about $4.2 billion against a $20 billion valuation. JPMorgan Chase has reportedly been retained to run the process. The lead investor being lined up is Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, who is married to the daughter of the sitting President of the United States (through his Thrive fund).

And, according to reporting in The Times, the man who would run this new entity as a chief-executive-slash-commissioner, long after his presidency formally ends, is Gianni Infantino himself. FIFA says such a role “has never been discussed.” Note the tense. Note what is not being denied.

Understand the elegance of it. FIFA the association cannot be sold; it is a Swiss non-profit owned, in theory, by its 211 members. So you do not sell FIFA. You move the ostensible crown jewels - the actual revenue engine of world football - into a company FIFA controls but that answers to equity investors, and you make sure the departing president has a seat waiting for him on the far side of the term limits that were supposed to constrain him. Power laundered through a corporate structure. Perpetuity purchased at a discount.

UEFA, to its credit, saw it immediately. “It is not FIFA’s to sell,” they said. “None of us are the owners of football.” The soul and governance of the game, they added, are not assets to trade, least of all with no transparency about who actually profits. They are right. They are also, I will argue, not the answer.

This is not a scandal. This is the design working as intended, and here is what I need you to sit with, because it is the whole argument.

The problem with FIFA is not that bad men keep finding their way to the top. The problem is that FIFA is a machine that manufactures bad men; or, more precisely, a machine in which behaving well is a competitive disadvantage and cannot survive contact with the incentive structure.

In December 2024, the human-rights research group FairSquare published a 174-page report, Substitute, built on more than a hundred interviews with administrators, economists, lawyers, and governance experts. Its central finding is the one I have been trying to articulate on television and in print for a decade, stated with the authority of exhaustive evidence. FIFA, it concludes, is structurally resistant to internal reform, because its senior officials and a critical mass of its member associations are locked into a mutually dependent system of patronage.

Graham Allison's paradigm of bureaucratic politics, in its perfect real-world form.

FIFA’s development money flows out to the associations; the associations’ votes flow back to the president. This is not a bug that a better man could fix. It is the load-bearing wall.

Look at the numbers that make it concrete. Between 2016 and 2022, FIFA distributed around $2.8 billion to its members through the Forward programme. Germany, a football superpower of eighty million people, received about $9.2 million. The Cook Islands, population seventeen thousand, received about $9.7 million. On the Congress floor, both cast exactly one vote. This is the “democracy” FIFA celebrates: a structure in which the vote of a federation that could not fill a Premier League stadium counts equally with the vote of a nation that has won the World Cup, and in which the smallest, most dependent members are precisely the ones most easily kept loyal by a cheque.

Now ask the question that dissolves every reform fantasy. Why would a delegate vote to change this?

Every serious reform proposal (Mark Pieth’s independent governance commission, the 2016 reforms, the endless task forces) has run aground on the same rock. To reform FIFA, you must persuade the Congress to vote for it. The Congress is the 211 associations. And a controlling bloc of those associations receives more from the current arrangement than they could ever extract from a transparent, merit-weighted, accountable one.

You are asking a delegate to walk into a room and vote to make his own federation poorer, his own position weaker, his own patron less generous, in exchange for the long-term health of a global game whose benefits are diffuse, delayed, and shared with everyone. This is a textbook collective-action failure. The rewards of reform are spread across billions of people and several generations. The costs of reform land immediately, personally, on the exact people holding the ballots. No one votes against their own dinner for the sake of a stranger’s grandchild.

That is why the 2016 reforms produced, in FairSquare’s assessment, little to no improvement and in some areas obvious regression. That same year, the Bureau of the Council was quietly introduced, concentrating executive power in the president’s hands. The independent Governance Committee chairman was pushed out in 2017. The human rights advisory board was dissolved in 2021.

Each oversight mechanism that developed the capacity to actually check power was, in turn, neutered, dissolved, or expelled.

The reformers keep believing they are losing a series of winnable battles. They are not. They are playing a game whose rules guarantee their defeat, and the rules cannot be changed by the people the rules protect.

I said it on Sky. We changed the criminals. We did not change the machine. And a machine that selects for corruption will, given a decade, produce a president who awards a self-invented “Peace Prize” to a head of state, then lifts a player’s red-card suspension after a phone call from that same head of state, then tells the journalists who noticed to go and pray.

Do not let the football’s brilliance launder the governance. This was a tournament in which the Council of Europe accused FIFA of enabling something close to fraud. In which a prediction-market firm was made an official partner, so that money could be laid on every card and every corner while FIFA’s own disciplinary decisions bent under political pressure; “when the rules bend under pressure,” as the Council’s Alain Berset put it, “every result is open to doubt.” In which Norway’s federation, led by Lise Klaveness, moved toward an ethics complaint over the Balogun affair. In which FairSquare filed what it hoped would be the largest complaint FIFA had ever received about its senior officials’ conduct. In which supporters and officials from competing nations were denied visas to the host country while the president insisted football had united the world.

The celebration ends. The questions do not.

And FIFA’s answer to the questions is to sell the answers to Joshua Kushner and give Gianni Infantino a job for life.

If you were waiting for proof that this institution cannot be reformed from within, you have it. The people who run it have just told you, in a press release, that they intend to place it permanently beyond your reach.

So stop trying to reform it. Build the alternative.

Here is where I part company even with the good-faith reformers, the UEFAs and the FairSquares, whose diagnosis I share entirely and whose remedy I think is a decade too cautious. External regulation - an EU intervention, a Swiss legal challenge, an institutional separation of FIFA’s functions - is worth pursuing. But it still treats FIFA as the necessary center of the football universe, an object to be corrected rather than replaced. I no longer believe the center holds. I believe we build a new one.

I would call it simply GF. Global Football.

Not a breakaway league. Not a European Super League cash-grab dressed in the language of merit. Something structurally different at the root: a governance body owned by the game rather than extracting from it. Picture its architecture as the deliberate inversion of everything FIFA is.

Where FIFA gives one vote to each federation regardless of the players, fans, and football it represents, GF weights participation by the actual footballing public - players registered, matches played, supporters counted - with a hard floor so the small nations are never voiceless and a hard ceiling so the giants can never simply purchase outcomes. Representation that reflects the game, not the patronage.

Where FIFA’s money flows top-down as a loyalty payment, GF’s revenue is constitutionally ring-fenced: a fixed, non-negotiable majority to the grassroots and the domestic game, distributed against transparent public criteria and independently audited, with the books open to any citizen who wants to read them. Brennan’s First Law of Transparency, if you’ll permit me the reference: sunlight is not a feature you add later. It is the foundation you pour first.

Where FIFA claims to own football, GF asserts the opposite; that no one owns football, that the governing body is a steward and a servant, that its officers are term-limited, recallable, and paid like public servants rather than sovereigns. Where FIFA sells shares in the World Cup to a president’s in-laws, GF’s founding charter makes the sale of competition rights to private equity a constitutional impossibility. You cannot sell what you hold in trust.

This is not utopian. It is how the best of the cooperative and mutual movements have governed enormous enterprises for a century. It is how the game is already organized at its healthiest levels: the member-owned German clubs, the Green Bay Packers of the world, the fan trusts. GF simply asks: what if the world body worked that way too?

I will not sell you a painless transition.

Building GF means challenging the most entrenched monopoly in world sport, and monopolies do not concede. The path runs through three distinct phases, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

First, the legal challenge. GF would begin, whether it wished to or not, as an antitrust and competition-law fight. FIFA’s control rests on its ability to declare rival competitions illegitimate and to threaten any player, referee, or federation who participates with exile. But that power is already cracking. The European Court of Justice’s *Superleague* judgment established that FIFA and UEFA abuse a dominant position when they block rival competitions through opaque, unaccountable pre-authorisation rules. Players’ unions and leagues are already suing FIFA over the match calendar. The legal ground has shifted. GF’s first act is to stand on it — to force, in open court, the question FIFA has never had to answer: by what right do you claim to own the game?

Second, the chaos. There will be a period - a year, maybe several - of genuine schism. Two bodies claiming legitimacy. Federations forced to choose. Sponsors nervous. Broadcasters hedging. FIFA will use every weapon: bans, threats, the withdrawal of that patronage money from any association that dares to move. This is the phase that kills most challenges, because this is the phase that requires nerve. The Packer revolution in cricket survived it. The breakaway that became the Premier League survived it. The ones that failed, failed here, not because the idea was wrong but because the founders blinked. I am telling you in advance that it will be ugly, so that when it is ugly you are not surprised into surrender.

Third - if, and only if, we stand firm - a new form of governance. On the far side of the chaos is the prize: a body that reflects the needs of the many rather than the wealth of the few. A World Cup held in trust rather than sold in tranches. Development money that reaches a girl on a dirt pitch in a form she can actually verify. A game whose highest institution answers to its players and its public. This is what I mean by an Age of True Sport: sport organized around the thing it is for, rather than the thing that can be milked from it.

Gianni Infantino wants to be the first commissioner of a privatised World Cup. I want him to be the last president of the old FIFA; the final name on a list we close for good.

That is the choice in front of the football world in 2026. Accept FFE, and we ratify the machine’s ultimate evolution: corruption made permanent, laundered through a Delaware-style corporate wrapper and sold to a president’s family. Or refuse it, and begin the long, painful, necessary work of building the thing that should have existed all along.

I made a prediction years ago and I hated being right. So let me make a different one, and this time let me be wrong only because we made it come true instead. If we stand together - players, supporters, the honest administrators, the federations sick of choosing the cheque over the game - we can build GF. We can make Infantino the last of his kind. And we can begin, at last, an era in which football is governed by those who love it rather than owned by those who would sell it.

The celebration ended the other night. The building can begin tomorrow.

This is the entrance to the suite once occupied by TourProdEnter in Aventura. Jay Weaver jweaver@miamiherald.com | July 9, 2026 | Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article316457190.html

A Miami Herald reporter walked into an office suite at 2920 NE 207th Street in Aventura, Florida, and found a private-wealth management firm sitting where a soccer company used to be.

The signage in the hallway still listed a business connected to the old tenant. But the tenant itself, TourProdEnter LLC - the Florida company that served as the Argentine Football Association’s “exclusive international commercial agent” - had moved in at the beginning of the year and moved out by spring. The FBI is investigating whether that company illegally routed more than $300 million in sponsorship receipts through the U.S. banking system and remittance companies to top AFA executives and associates in Argentina for their personal use over the past four years.

Three hundred million dollars. An empty suite. A sign nobody bothered to take down.

I want you to hold that image, because it is the most honest photograph anyone has taken of confederation football in the Americas. Not the trophy lifts. Not the Copa América. A vacated office in a strip of Aventura where the money used to pass through on its way to somewhere it was never supposed to go.

So what was actually taken, and from whom?

Well, sponsorship payments to the AFA used to move directly to Argentina, where a substantial portion was distributed to youth soccer clubs throughout the country. That structure reportedly changed after Argentina won the 2022 World Cup. Winning the World Cup made the money bigger. Making the money bigger made the money worth diverting.

So what was taken was resources - money! - and the “from whom?” is simple…from children.

TourProdEnter, founded in 2021, allegedly took 30 percent of AFA international revenue plus a 10 percent commission on expenses, and moved funds into its own banking accounts. Investigators have traced roughly $90 million in potentially irregular transactions; about $42 million through shell companies, another $16.5 million allegedly spent on luxury goods. Reporting in Argentina has linked the funds to private jets, yachts, and mansions. Roughly $468,000 went to a company linked to AFA Treasurer Pablo Toviggino, $40,000 to his business partner, and $2.3 million to a U.S.-registered company tied to an individual with no clear financial history. Federal authorities routinely watch South Florida remittance companies precisely because so many are suspected of evading bank-reporting requirements…the same channels used by drug traffickers.

This did not arrive out of nowhere.

In December, Argentine federal police executed more than 30 simultaneous raids on AFA headquarters and at least 17 first- and second-division clubs, in a money-laundering and tax-evasion investigation involving Sur Finanzas, a financial firm that sponsors AFA tournaments and multiple clubs. The raided clubs included Independiente, Racing, San Lorenzo and Barracas Central, the club founded by AFA president Claudio Tapia’s son Matías. The complaint from Argentina’s revenue agency alleged illicit transactions totaling roughly $560 million. Separately, an appeals court upheld criminal charges on June 26 against the AFA, Tapia, and Toviggino over roughly $13 million in workers’ pension contributions withheld from staff and never remitted to the state.

Nobody has been charged in the U.S. Nobody has been convicted. Tapia and his officials deny wrongdoing and say they are being politically targeted amid their fight with President Milei over the future of Argentine football. Fine. Note it. Hold it.

Now notice what is missing from every account of this story.

Not one Argentine club forced this into the open. Not one CONMEBOL committee. Not one confederation audit, ethics body, or member vote. The disclosure came from a customs agency, a federal judge, an American newspaper, and the FBI.

The people whose money it was had no mechanism to ask where it went.

Withheld pension contributions belong to AFA staff. Grassroots distributions belong to youth clubs. Those are the vulnerable parties here, the kit-and-fees clubs in the provinces, the administrative workers whose retirement was quietly financing something else. And their only available remedy was an American criminal investigation that may or may not produce charges, initiated for reasons having nothing to do with them.

That is not a corruption problem. That is a design problem.

That is, these confederations we have - CONMEBOL and CONCACAF? This shows that they are working as designed.

If you think the AFA case is an aberration, consider the record of those two confederations, the ones that govern football throughout this hemisphere.

CONMEBOL. Juan Ángel Napout, president of CONMEBOL, convicted in a Brooklyn federal court of racketeering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy tied to media rights for the Copa América and Copa Libertadores. Prosecutors said he took $10.5 million between 2010 and 2016. José María Marin, president of the Brazilian federation, convicted on six counts, sentenced to four years, fined $1.2 million and ordered to pay $3.3 million in damages. Nicolás Leoz, then CONMEBOL president, alleged in an unsealed indictment to have taken bribes to vote for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid. The government’s star witness, Argentine marketing executive Alejandro Burzaco, testified that he and his company arranged $160 million in bribes over several years until his 2015 arrest. Napout was handed cash wired from U.S. accounts to a money changer in Argentina, deposited in a marketing firm’s safe deposit box, and passed to him by hand…plus, you know, some concert tickets and - of course - the use of a vacation house.

CONCACAF. Three consecutive presidents implicated: Jack Warner, Jeffrey Webb, Alfredo Hawit. Webb and Hawit pleaded guilty. Chuck Blazer, general secretary from 1990 to 2013, pleaded guilty to racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion, forfeiting over $1.9 million — and told a federal judge that beginning around 1993 and continuing into the early 2000s, he and others agreed to accept bribes and kickbacks tied to broadcast rights for the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2003 Gold Cups. You know, the tournament he helped create in 1991. Blazer also admitted involvement in bribery around the 1998 and 2010 World Cup host votes. Warner’s ownership of a $22.5 million CONCACAF “center of excellence” in Trinidad (and the unauthorized mortgage he and a vice president took out on it in 2007) stunned officials when it was revealed. In 2011 in Port-of-Spain, a Bahamas FA vice president reported receiving a brown envelope containing $40,000 in exchange for a FIFA presidential vote. The confederation failed to file U.S. federal income tax returns from 2007 to 2011 and lost its tax-exempt status; its marketing affiliate filed nothing from 2003 through 2011. On the morning of the 2015 indictments, federal agents executed a search warrant at CONCACAF headquarters in Miami.

In total, the FIFAgate prosecution charged 42 people and entities, produced at least 24 guilty pleas, and, in the Attorney General’s words, described corruption that was rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted, spanning at least two generations of officials.

Two confederations. Two generations. Both hemispheres of the Americas. And when it broke, FIFA had to freeze payments to both bodies simultaneously, including a $10 million transfer to CONCACAF, until it could get some assurance the money would not simply evaporate.

Then came what some chose to call reform.

CONCACAF appointed a three-man committee, published an anti-corruption framework, elected a new president in its first-ever secret ballot, rebranded from CONCACAF to Concacaf, launched a Nations League, and declared the culmination of its transition to a new era for its 41-member family.

That was 2018. It is now 2026, and the FBI is investigating $300 million routed through a Florida shell whose office sign nobody removed.

The reforms changed the letterhead. They did not change the ledger. They certainly didn’t change who sees it.

Here is the part that has nothing to do with any individual’s guilt.

CONMEBOL has ten members. CONCACAF has forty-one. UEFA has fifty-five, CAF fifty-four, AFC forty-six.

Ten members in South America is not a confederation. It is a table. Ten men can reach an understanding over dinner and never write anything down. There is no bloc large enough to force a vote, no quorum of dissent, no faction with an interest in disclosure. In a body of ten, the cost of being the one who asks is total and the benefit is zero.

Forty-one members in North, Central America and the Carribean is a different con: dozens of tiny associations, each dependent on confederation development grants, each holding a vote worth cultivating. That is not a democracy, it is a patronage market. It is exactly what a brown envelope in Port-of-Spain was designed to purchase.

And the sporting cost falls on everyone.

The United States spends a qualifying cycle beating opponents who cannot prepare it for anything. CONMEBOL nations play a ten-team league of ferocious quality that they have been running, essentially unchanged, since before television, and with the same power - none - of scale at the FIFA level. Both arrangements are the residue of mid-20th-Century geopolitics, not of any sane assessment of what would make football better in this hemisphere.

Six World Cup places for CONMEBOL. Six for CONCACAF. Twelve slots between two bodies that between them govern the entire Western Hemisphere, distributed by structures neither of which any member public voted for.

Now the part that matters. Because cataloguing rot is easy, and I have spent enough of my life doing it.

Dissolve both. Charter one: the Confederation of the Americas. CoA.

Roughly fifty member associations, North and South, from Canada to Chile, Curaçao to Colombia. That puts the Americas at parity with UEFA, with CAF, with the combined weight of Asia and Oceania; one continental bloc, one voice, one vote count that FIFA cannot route around. Not a merger of two bureaucracies. A dissolution of both and a chartering of something that has never existed.

I want to be precise about why this is worth the disruption, because “new body, same people” is the correct thing to be afraid of. Here are five reasons to dissolve CONMEBOL and CONCACAF, and to build CoA:

1. Real-time transparency, written into the charter as a condition of membership

Not an annual report. Not an audited summary published eleven months late. Live.

• Every committee meeting streamed, live and archived for public access at any time. Cameras in the room. Executive Committee, Competitions, Finance, Development, Judicial. Anyone, anywhere, at any time, can watch the body that governs their sport make decisions in their name. Executive session permitted only for individual personnel matters and active legal proceedings, invoked by recorded vote, with the vote itself public and the minutes released on a fixed clock. Make it illegal and a dismissable offense to have any meeting outside the public ones. My county commissioners can make sure they don’t meet outside the official meetings, people at this level can too.

• A public financial ledger updated continuously. Every dollar in, every dollar out, every counterparty, every contract value, published to an open API. Not a PDF. A queryable database. If a commercial agent in Aventura receives a payment, it appears in public the day it clears, not four years later in a newspaper.

• Every commercial contract published in full. Sponsorship, broadcast, licensing. If a company is taking 30 percent of international revenue plus 10 percent on expenses, every member association and every journalist in the hemisphere can read that term the week it is signed and ask why.

• Distribution tracing to the point of delivery. When the confederation sends development money to a member association, the obligation does not end at the wire transfer. It ends when a named club, in a named town, confirms receipt in a public register. Broken chains are visible immediately, not after a decade.

The AFA case is the proof of concept. It took a customs agency, a judge, thirty raids, a foreign newspaper, and the FBI to surface what a public ledger would have shown in an afternoon.

2. Governance the members actually control

• Term limits, hard, non-renewable, with no lateral moves into general secretary or committee chair roles. Warner ruled CONCACAF and Caribbean football for almost three decades. Nobody should ever be able to do that again.

• An independent judicial and audit chamber appointed by a supermajority of members, budget-protected, with subpoena power over confederation books and standing to compel disclosure from member associations. It should not require a foreign government’s prosecutors to audit hemispheric football.

• Standing to complain, granted to the vulnerable. Not just member federations. Clubs, players’ unions, referee associations, and administrative staff should have direct access to the judicial chamber. The AFA staff whose pension contributions were allegedly withheld had no forum. Under the CoA charter, they would.

• Whistleblower protection with teeth; anonymous filing, mandatory investigation timelines, independent ombudsmen and automatic suspension of any official found retaliating.

• One member, one vote, with weighted committee representation so that neither the largest markets nor a bloc of grant-dependent micro-associations can be assembled into a permanent captive majority.

3. The two-pillar mandate

This is the reform I care about most, and the one no existing confederation has ever attempted.

Pillar One: Power and Performance sport. The elite pyramid: a continental championship worthy of the name, club competition across both Americas, high-performance pathways, the World Cup qualifying that produces the best national teams on earth.

Pillar Two: Pleasure and Participation sport. Football as a public good. Recreational leagues, adaptive and disability football, walking football, women’s and girls’ participation, school and community programs, free-to-play access in every member association, funded at parity with the elite pillar, audited at parity, and reported at parity.

A statutory floor: no less than fifty percent of confederation distributable revenue to Pillar Two, ring-fenced, publicly traced to delivery. Not “development” as a slush line. Participation, measured in bodies playing, published quarterly.

The entire logic of the AFA scandal - the reason it hurts - is that money which used to reach youth clubs - for our children - stopped reaching them. Every governing body in this sport calls grassroots funding a priority and then treats it as the residual after the elite pillar has eaten. A confederation that put the participation mandate in its charter, at a fixed percentage, with live tracing, would make the AFA diversion structurally impossible. You cannot quietly reroute a payment stream that the public is watching arrive.

4. The championship is called the Copa América. It was always called that.

There is one more clause I would put in the charter, and I would put it near the front, because it settles a question that would otherwise poison the whole project.

The continental championship of the Confederation of the Americas is the Copa América. The name, the Spanish pronunciation, the trophy, the record book, the roll of champions going back to 1916. Uruguay’s fifteen. Argentina’s sixteen. Every edition. Continuous. Unbroken. Not “the CoA Championship, formerly known as.” Not a rebrand with a heritage-nod logo. The Copa América, the oldest continental championship in the world, older than the European Championship by forty-four years, older than the World Cup itself.

The Gold Cup does not survive the transition. It was created in 1991 by a man who pleaded guilty in federal court to taking bribes on its broadcast rights for five consecutive editions. Whatever affection has accumulated around it (and to my estimation there is none, only mockery), it does not carry a hundred and ten years of anything. It carries Chuck Blazer’s fingerprints on Rothenberg’s wife’s ungainly trophy (I know, I used to have to, on occasion, carry the bloody heavy thing).

Any proposal that merges North and South America will be read in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Montevideo, and Bogotá as a hostile acquisition — as the largest television market in the hemisphere absorbing the best football culture in the world and putting its own name on the door. That reading would be reasonable. It is, historically, what happens.

So the clause is a submission. It is the founding act of the confederation, and its content is: the North defers. We are not bringing you into our structure. We are dissolving ours, dissolving yours, and building a new one whose highest honor bears your name, in your language, with your history intact and your champions still counted. CONMEBOL was founded in 1916. CONCACAF was assembled in 1961 out of two administrative bodies and has spent the sixty-five years since being investigated. There is no question about which tradition the new confederation should inherit, the same way there remains no question that neither confederation is doing The Good, and that both - both! - must be obliterated.

This is not sentiment. It is the only way the thing gets built. A confederation that asks ten proud football nations to surrender the most storied trophy in the sport in exchange for a share of the American media market will be refused, and should be. A confederation that opens by saying your competition is now the competition of fifty nations, and it keeps its name is offering something the South has never been offered by the North: an expansion of standing rather than a dilution of it.

And the sporting logic follows the moral one. The Copa América format - the ferocious, unglamorous, everybody-plays-everybody league that CONMEBOL has run essentially unchanged since before television - is the better model. It is the reason South America produces the players it produces. The CoA should not absorb South America into CONCACAF’s group-and-playoff patchwork. It should take the South American qualifying philosophy and scale it: graded continental leagues, promotion and relegation between tiers, everybody plays a real season against opponents of comparable level, everybody has a route upward.

The North brings the money, the markets, the infrastructure, the broadcast reach, and the transparency architecture. The South brings the football, the tradition, the winning mentality and the name.

That is a trade worth making, and it is the right way around.

5. What it does to the football

The United States would qualify against Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador. Every cycle. Not once every four years in a friendly, but with something at stake, in hostile stadiums, against sides that will punish a lazy third of a match.

That is how a football nation gets better. Not by beating people badly, but by losing to people who are better and going home and fixing it. American football culture has never had a qualifying campaign that mattered in the way South American qualifying matters. Give it one, and give it fifty years, and the argument settles itself.

And the smaller associations (Curaçao, Suriname, Guyana, the Central American federations, the Caribbean) gain something they have never had: a bloc large enough that their votes cannot be individually purchased, and a continental competition structure that puts them in genuine graded pyramids rather than as decoration in a tournament designed around three markets.

Someone will say this is annexation with better paperwork; the United States wanting harder qualifying games and dressing the want up as reform.

Read the charter clause again. The confederation’s championship is the Copa América. Its qualifying format is South America’s. Its founding act is the North dissolving CONCACAF, retiring the Gold Cup, and adopting the South’s competition, its name, its language, and its century of champions. If that is annexation, it is the first one in recorded history where the annexing power surrenders its own flag at the ceremony.

Someone else will say: you cannot dissolve two confederations. FIFA statutes, commercial contracts, incumbency, inertia. Nobody gives up power voluntarily.

Correct. Nobody does. That is why you do not ask them. You tell them.

You build the demand outside the building. You put the charter in public - every clause, every transparency provision, every percentage - and you make it the thing that member associations, players’ unions, supporters’ trusts, sponsors, and legislators can point at and say: this exists, it is written down, and you are choosing not to have it.

Ten of the eleven reforms above cost nothing. Cameras are cheap. A public ledger is a weekend of engineering. Publishing contracts requires no technology at all, only the willingness to be seen. Every single day that CONMEBOL and CONCACAF decline to do these things voluntarily, they are telling you exactly what they are for.

The office in Aventura is leased to a wealth manager now. The sign is still up.

That sign is the whole confederation system in one image: a name still hanging in the hallway of a room where the work stopped happening a long time ago, kept up because nobody with standing was ever authorized to take it down.

We can take it down. Both of them. And build one confederation, in the open, with the cameras on and the books live and half the money going to our kids and to the people who play for the joy of it.

And at the end of every fourth summer, from Vancouver to Punta Arenas, fifty nations would play for a trophy that has been contested since 1916, under a name nobody had to invent, in a language that was speaking about this game long before Miami had an office to launder anything through.

Fifty nations. One hemisphere. One Copa.

Nothing to hide.

Ṣẹ́gun Irora writes on power, institutions, and the games we let them run. I am the author of Saving Soccer (published internationally as Fixing Football), the former Head of Special Projects at CONCACAF, and was one of five North American delegates to the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

No individual named in this piece has been convicted of any offense in connection with the 2026 AFA investigation. The AFA, Tapia, and Toviggino deny wrongdoing.

I got my first paycheck at sixteen. Well, at twelve. Paper routes. But my first real one at sixteen. Before I ever saw a dime of it, the government took its cut - FICA, right there on the stub - and made me a promise: pay in now, and it will be there for you later. I have paid in with every paycheck since. So have you. So has everyone you know who has ever worked a legal job in this country.

The federal government’s own trustees now project the date that promise breaks: the fourth quarter of 2032. The first day of that quarter is October 1, 2032.

Mark it.

Here is what makes this different from every other slow-motion policy failure you’ve learned to scroll past: nobody has to vote for it. There will be no bill called the Social Security Reduction Act. No roll call to scream about, no signing ceremony to picket. If Congress simply does nothing (its most reliable output, to be frank) the retirement trust fund runs dry and, by law, benefits get slashed automatically to whatever payroll taxes can cover. The trustees say that’s about 76 to 78 cents on the dollar.

A roughly 24% cut. About $500 a month, on average, gone. For people already retired. For people one year from retiring. For the oldest members of Generation X, who will reach full retirement age in 2032 — who will have paid into this system for fifty years and arrive at the window just in time to watch it close on their fingers.

This is not a benefit that was gifted to us. It is a benefit we bought, on layaway, over entire working lifetimes, with money taken from us before we ever touched it. A cut is not austerity. A cut is not belt-tightening. A cut is the largest default in American history, committed against the people least able to absorb it, by a government that found the money for everything else.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the automatic cut would hit 63 million people on day one; 54 million retired workers, plus 9 million survivors and dependents. By 2032, with Gen X pouring into the system, the number will be closer to 70 million. Add the workers in their 40s and 50s watching their own future get repriced in real time, and you are talking about a supermajority of American adults with a direct, personal, financial stake.

Now do a piece of arithmetic that should keep every incumbent awake at night:

One in five of the people whose checks get cut on October 1, 2032 is 13 to 14 million people.

One in five. Not the young, not the radical, not the extremely online. Retirees. Widows. Veterans. Your parents. People with nothing left to lose because what they had left was just taken, and with all the time in the world, because they are, after all, retired. The most reliable voters in America, converted overnight into the most reliable protesters in America; permanently, implacably, unforgivingly in the streets and in the offices and on the phones and at every town hall, every district office, every fundraiser, every airport greeting, every day, until it is not only fixed, but it becomes more, until it becomes reparations.

Gene Sharp catalogued 198 methods of nonviolent action: the strike, the boycott, the walkout, the sit-in, the mass petition, the refusal of cooperation on which every government silently depends. He assumed you’d have to organize people into using them. He never imagined a government helpful enough to schedule the grievance in advance, publish the date in its own annual report, and give the aggrieved six years’ notice to prepare.

So here is the message to every member of Congress, every senator, every occupant of the White House between now and then. You have been given something almost no politician ever gets: a date certain. Not a vague warning. Not a think-tank projection buried in an appendix. A quarter, on a calendar, published by your own trustees, that moves closer every year you stall.

Your predecessors faced this exact moment in 1983, when the fund was months from bouncing checks, and they fixed it; a Republican president and a Democratic House, in an election cycle, because the alternative was unsurvivable. The toolkit hasn’t changed: lift the payroll tax cap, adjust the formula, phase the fix over decades so it lands on no one all at once. Every serious analyst agrees the math is solvable and gets harder every year you wait. This is not a hard problem. It is an avoided one.

So there is no version of October 1, 2032 that you get to call a surprise. If that day arrives and the checks are short, it will not be an accident or an act of God. It will be a choice - your choice, made in full public view, with six (seven, eight, ten) years’ notice - to default on 70 million people who did everything you told them to do.

And they will know your names. All of them. They will have nothing but time, nothing left to fear from you, and a lifetime of receipts.

I don’t want that day. Nobody sane wants that day. I want the boring version of history where Congress does its job in some forgettable session in 2028 or 2030, the actuaries update their tables, and this essay ages into an artifact of a crisis that never happened.

But this administration, this ostensible government, seems to be not the end of a type of madness, but maybe the middle, with 2016 as a beginning. And if you will not act your way out of that madness — if you intend to run out the clock and let the automatic blade fall on the people who built this country and paid for their own safety net in advance —

then keep doing exactly what you’re doing.

I dare you.

The projections cited here come from the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report and analyses by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The depletion date is re-estimated every June; the countdown updates annually. Watch it.

WASHINGTON,DC - JULY 14: Hon. Amy Coney Barrett, right, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, testifies during a House Appropriations Subcommittee at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 14, 2026 in Washington, D.C. The two associate justices testified as part of a budget hearing. (Photo by Tyler M. Andrews/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On July 14, 2026, Justice Amy Coney Barrett sat before a U.S. House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee and did something Supreme Court justices almost never do: she got personal.

It was the first time a member of the Court had testified before a House panel since 2019, and Barrett used the rare spotlight to make a plea that was less about line items than about her children.

She told the room that after the Dobbs opinion leaked in 2022, her security detail handed her a bulletproof vest. Her twelve-year-old son later found it. "I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one," she said. She described a recent “swatting” incident; someone phoned police claiming they'd heard a gunshot and screaming from her home, summoning a heavy police response that landed, terrifyingly, in front of her kids. "Those statistics sound abstract," she told the panel, "but being on the receiving end of them is not.”

Life, she said, "has changed a great deal for all of us."

Yeah…no shit, lady.

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In the course of looking for smart and insightful work illuminating “the isms” - capitalism, socialism, et cetera - for my youngest son, I came across something truly fascinating.

In 2020, the Hoover Institution launched, and in 2022 it published, what it called the Human Prosperity Project, “an essay series” promising, in the words of editors Scott Atlas and Edward Lazear, “objective and scholarly analyses of free-market capitalism, socialism, and hybrid systems,” to determine “how well the various governmental and economic forms promote general well-being and prosperity.”

Objective. Scholarly. Well-being. Prosperity.

Hold those four words in your hand. We are going to weigh them.

Because I have read the flagship essays of that series - Niall Ferguson’s “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nationalism: Lessons from History” and Victor Davis Hanson’s “Our Socialist Future?” - and I can report what the objective, scholarly evaluation of American well-being contains.

It contains a chart of Paul Samuelson’s wrong textbook projections from 1961.

It contains an anecdote about Brezhnev’s hunting villa and how much Kissinger guessed it cost.

It contains a Google Ngram of how often the words “capitalism” and “socialism” appeared in books.

It contains a multi-paragraph assault on Karl Marx’s hygiene, his handwriting, his marriage, and his job application to a railway.

It contains a sneer at a young man’s pajamas.

Here is what it does not contain. Not once, not in passing, not in a footnote:

The 131.2 million Americans - 4 out of every 10 people this nation - breathing air with unhealthy levels of pollution. The roughly 58,000 Americans killed prematurely every single year by fine-particle pollution alone: a Vietnam War’s worth of dead, annually, with no memorial, no wall, no crying at the names. The 143 to 200 million Americans drinking PFAS-tainted water. The 9.2 million lead service lines still carrying water to American homes. The one in four Americans served, in a single studied year, by water systems violating the Safe Drinking Water Act, with nearly 90 percent of those violations drawing no enforcement action at all. The 37 million homes still containing lead paint. The three-quarters of a million people, and likely a quarter-million more uncounted, with no home at all.

An “objective and scholarly” evaluation of how well the American system “promotes well-being”…and the well-being of actual living Americans never appears in the ledger.

That is not an oversight. That is the design. And it is time to say so, specifically, and out loud.

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July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Cheney Orr

There is a photograph. You have probably seen it by now. A woman in a green T-shirt sits alone in a Washington Metro car. Around her, filling every seat and every strap, stand males in a uniform they chose for themselves: khaki caps, navy shirts, sunglasses pushed up under the brims, and cloth pulled across the lower half of every face. She is Black. They are the white nationalist group Patriot Front. It was July 4, 2026, the semiquincentennial, or two hundred fiftieth birthday, of the United States of America. Cheney Orr took the picture for Reuters, and within days it had traveled around the world, because millions of people looked at it and understood, without a single word of caption, exactly what they were looking at.

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