In the 1990s, I asked the CEO
of ATT whether there is not a conflict of interest in him being chairman of the
board tasked with holding the corporation’s management accountable. “The buck
stops here,” Armstrong replied as the dean of Yale’s business school looked on,
uncomfortably. Fortunately, I was a student in another school at Yale at the
time. Fast forward to 2026. The board of FIFA backed up its president, Gianni
Infantino in spite of the fact that he had overruled a red-card to favor the
U.S. team in that year’s World Cup and then he proposed selling a minority
share of FIFA to private investors—a plan that was almost universally viewed by
the regional football (soccer) associations as selling out the world’s game to
private financial interests so they might profit from the non-profit international
organization. FIFA had Infantino’s back, which prompted regional associations,
namely UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC to publicly raise a red flag concerning the very
credibility of Infantino for having tried to sell out a minority financial
interest in FIFA. Albeit sheer speculation, given U.S. President Trump’s
interest in financial transactions in relation to his political office, and
Infantino’s having acquiesced to Trump’s request that the one-game suspension
from a red card against a player on the U.S. team be revoked, I wonder whether the
two men hatched the idea of selling off a minority stake in FIFA to private
investors, which might have included Trump himself, his family members, and even
the Trump Organization. Such is the nature of collusion in what James Burns refers
to in his text, Leadership, as transactional, as distinct from
transformational, leadership.
The full essay is at "FIFA's President."
