A parliament with 211 seats
FIFA likes to remind you that it is bigger than the United Nations. One hundred and ninety-three countries sit at the UN. FIFA has 211 member associations, each with one vote, from tiny island federations to the giants of Europe and South America. On paper, that is about as democratic as global institutions get: no permanent seats, no vetoes, one nation, one voice.
So why does the presidency of this vast, formally egalitarian body keep looking, in practice, like a one-man show?
The company a whistle keeps
This week's headlines are full of a familiar shape: power that prefers a personal envoy to an institution. A presidential son-in-law flies to Israel for Gaza talks instead of career diplomats leading the room. A president alone decides, over a weekend announcement, to scale back military drills with an ally. Families of sailors on the USS Lincoln say conditions on board embarrass the country, and ask, pointedly, whether anyone at the top is answerable for it.
None of this is about football. But it describes a habit worth noticing wherever it appears: decisions that used to run through slow, accountable structures increasingly run through one office, one phone call, one man standing next to the cameras. Gianni Infantino has made himself remarkably good at standing next to the cameras. He turns up beside heads of state with the ease of someone who has stopped distinguishing between hosting a tournament and hosting a summit.
Is that a scandal? Not by itself. Someone has to represent an organisation of 211 members. But representation is not the same as accountability, and the two have been drifting apart in football's governing body for a while - term limits quietly stretched, votes on hosting rights bundled and rushed, an expanding World Cup whose commercial logic is easier to trace than its democratic one.
The golden rule, applied to a golden trophy
Here is a simple test, the kind Einstein's razor would approve of: strip away the sport, and ask whether you would call this structure democratic if it governed anything else. A body where one official increasingly personifies the institution, where member associations vote the way capitals expect them to vote, where the biggest decisions get made in rooms far from any of the 211 votes that supposedly hold the power - would you call that self-government, or would you call it a monarchy with a very large electoral college?
The honest answer is uncomfortable, because football matters too much to shrug at.
Why it is still worth defending
And here is the case for not simply cynicism-ing the whole thing away: a genuinely accountable FIFA would be one of the better rehearsals humanity has for living together. Mixed squads, shared offside rules, a Senegalese striker and a Croatian midfielder chasing the same ball under identical laws - that is a small, repeated proof that people from anywhere can agree on something and play it out without hating each other afterward. That is worth protecting, which is exactly why it is worth governing honestly.
A democracy of 211 votes that quietly narrows into a democracy of one whistle is not a scandal on the scale of a war or a famine. It is smaller than the Ebola outbreak now tearing through Congo, smaller than the drownings off Zimbabwe, smaller than a missionary's nine months in captivity in Niger. But it is a useful, low-stakes classroom for a habit that shows up in bigger places too: institutions that keep the vote but lose the accountability, that keep the paperwork of democracy while the substance drains toward one office.
The stance
Fans, federations, and sponsors should ask FIFA the same question this newspaper asks of governments: not merely who gets to vote, but whether the vote still decides anything. Term limits that mean something. Hosting votes that survive daylight. A presidency that behaves like an office, not a brand. None of that requires abolishing the game's global family. It only requires taking its own founding claim seriously - that 211 votes, not one whistle, are meant to run the show.