Europe's Infantino chosen to lead FIFA into new era

Commercial Acumen

Newly elected FIFA President Gianni Infantino attends a news conference during the Extraordinary FIFA Congress in Zurich, Switzerland Feb 26, 2016.[Photo/Agencies]

Much of Infantino's pitch centred on his commercial acumen; during his seven years as UEFA general secretary, revenue from Europe's club competitions has grown dramatically, but so has inequality between the rich, powerful elite clubs in Europe's four big leagues and the rest.

Many of the skills now required will, however, be in crisis management.

Infantino will hope for at least a brief honeymoon after the firestorm that broke out last May when seven soccer executives due to attend a previous Congress were arrested on suspicion of corruption in a dawn raid on their Zurich hotel.

Blatter survived long enough to win re-election at that Congress, but stepped down four days later as the scandals took their toll.

Since then, criminal investigations in the United States and Switzerland have resulted in the indictment of dozens of soccer officials and other entities for corruption, many of them serving or former presidents of national or continental associations.

In addition, FIFA has been forced to investigate controversies surrounding the awarding of its showpiece, the World Cup finals, especially the decision to grant the 2018 tournament to Russia and the 2022 finals to Qatar, a small, scorching desert state with little soccer tradition.

Swiss authorities are reviewing more than 150 reports of suspicious financial activity linked to those awards, and said on Thursday they had sent more documents including an internal FIFA report to U.S. investigators.

Many key sponsorship deals have been put on hold until FIFA can be seen to have cleaned up its act, resulting in a $108 million deficit for 2015, an official said on Thursday.

Infantino welcomed that challenge.

"I will work tirelessly to bring football back to FIFA and FIFA back to football, this is what we want to do," he said in his first news conference as president.

"I am not a candidate of Europe I am a candidate of football and football is universal."

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