Pressure mounts on Infantino to quit

**Ankur Desai** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Uncle Desai, and at 16 Hours GMT on Monday the 3rd of August, these are our main stories. The head of world football, Gianni Infantino, is coming under increasing pressure to quit after some governing bodies consider withdrawing support for his re-election as head of FIFA. Water bombing planes are being used to help hundreds of firefighters in Greece battling wildfires on three fronts west of the capital, Athens. Japan and the US say they took coordinated action to prop up the yen last week after the Japanese currency fell to a 40-year low.
Also in this podcast, the family of the detained former leader of Myanmar, An San Suu Kyi, have welcomed her being allowed to meet a delegate from the Red Cross. And…

**Maisie Savage** (0:50)
He's completely fine. Yeah, he's amazing. Everything they did just completely reversed what could have been a really horrible start to his life.

**Ankur Desai** (0:59)
The remarkable womb surgery, which fixed a miracle baby with intestines outside its body.
First, could the man in charge of world football soon lose his iron grip on the game? Two weeks ago, standing alongside Donald Trump in New Jersey, Gianni Infantino handed the World Cup trophy to Spain after a lucrative and largely successful tournament. Since then, his position has weakened considerably. After his plan to sell stakes in competitions like the World Cup, to private investors had to be abandoned following widespread condemnation from the world football community. Now UEFA, who govern the European game, have threatened legal action against that plan. And the English and Welsh Football Associations have signalled their withdrawal of support for Mr Infantino and his re-election due to take place next year.
Only the Confederation of African Football has remained largely silent so far, believing that it could benefit financially. So where does this leave Gianni Infantino? Can he survive and should he stay in his post? David Bernstein, former chair of the English Football Association says he shouldn't.

**David Bernstein** (2:14)
I don't think he can survive in place and he should not. Just to recap, this was a very, very bad deal. It was a sweetheart deal.
It was a secret. I think it was done as an undervaluation and it was done with a very tight timetable to squeeze it through. Totally unacceptable. So the answer is it was excessively negative that deal and he has to go. What I would consider, and this is absolutely radical, and I have to say, I haven't seen anybody else come up with this idea yet, is FIFA is of huge value. And I'd say it could be worth $50 billion. I would think about listing it on a stock exchange, probably in the USA. In other words, floating as a public company. You could attract hundreds of thousands of fans as shareholders. Their fans could be encouraged to put out $100 or $1,000 or $1,000,000.
They went in between into the FIFA, become shareholders as you would do in Apple or Microsoft and so on. And by doing so, A, you would empower to some extent to certainly get involved with the worldwide fan base of football to invest in FIFA. And anybody I've spoken to about this, by the way, they're all, yes, I would love the opportunity to invest in FIFA. And then you get regular reports that accounts for them and so on. So number one, it would be democratic. Number two, you get, I think, a much higher value, which means that the countries you're talking about could get much more money than they were going to get under this deal. And thirdly, and not the least important, it would bring proper governance to FIFA. They would be subject to the sort of governance that you would get in a public company.

**Ankur Desai** (3:47)
Tarek Panja is Global Sports correspondent at The New York Times. Rebecca Kesby asked him what he thought of David Bernstein's idea to put FIFA on the New York Stock Exchange.

**Tarek Panja** (3:58)
He's not the first person to say this, and this isn't the first scandal FIFA has had. What David was saying just takes me back to May 2015, when the Swiss authorities acting on behalf of the Department of Justice dragged the previous group of FIFA leaders out of luxury hotel bedrooms in Switzerland and replaced them with what we've had now, with Gianni Infantino and co. And there was talk then of this. And the reason we won't have this is because if you do a listing, you become a public company, guess what? You need to have a greater degree of transparency over your operations. And as we've seen here from these people, whether it's Sepp Blatter's period, Joe Havilland before him and now Gianni Infantino, the light is not something that this organization seems to enjoy.