Gianni is Running Out of Friends

For a decade, Gianni Infantino has governed FIFA as though scrutiny were an inconvenience. That habit has finally caught up with him. His scheme to sell a multi-billion-dollar stake in World Cup commercial rights to outside investors, hatched with barely a nod to FIFA’s own member associations, was withdrawn only once the backlash became unmanage-able. By then the damage was done: UEFA, CONCACAF and AFC, over half of FIFA’s membership, had already declared they had lost confi-dence in his leadership. Prox-imity to Donald Trump, once an asset, now looks a liability. A presidency built partly on White House access looks increasingly like mistaking one friendship for institu-tional armour.

Arrogance, not miscalculation, is the more accurate diagnosis: not foot-ball’s first brush with Infantino’s unilateralism, merely the one too public to survive. On August 5, he summoned senior officials to a crisis mee-ting in Morocco in a tacit admission of how precarious his position has become. Support persists in pockets of Africa and South America. But withdrawing the proposal has not restored confidence, only postponed the inevitable. Infantino could yet cling to a fourth term in March next year. But his presidency looks like a tenancy on notice rather than a mandate renewed. His apology for “errors” means little to federations and legends — Luis Figo has written a blistering oped — asking him to go.

Schengen after the Ceuta Invasion

When some 60,000 mi-grants surged into the Spanish territory of Ceuta in a matter of hours, the finger-pointing at Madrid was not entirely misplaced. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to shift Spain’s stance on Western Sahara gave Rabat both motive and pretext to loosen its border controls. But the Spanish Supreme Court had played its part with its recent order preventing the immediate deportation of maritime arrivals. The swiftness of the response, howver, de-serves equal notice: within two days troops were deployed, an orderly return process began, and the crisis was largely contained. The reaction from elsewhere in Europe was predictably less measured.

Italy invoked Ceuta to justify its own hardening stance; Denmark and Czechia used it to reinforce internal border checks, quietly straining the Schengen principle they claim to defend. This might look like theatre dressed as policy. But the deeper truth is un-welcome to partisans on every side: Europe has had no coherent migration doctrine since Angela Merkel’s 2015 gamble reshaped the continent’s politics, and none has emerged since. Centre-left governments now compete with the right on deterrence, not because conviction has shifted but because no alternative has held. Ceuta was not an aberration. It was a symptom of an argument Europe has refused to finish.

The El-Sayed Scare

Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow Senate primary win has left Michigan Democrats fractured rather than unified. His single-payer healthcare platform and hostility to unconditional foreign aid, cast by rivals as hard-left overreach, alienated the party’s centrist establishment embodied by defeated opponent Haley Stevens. That rift sharpened over Israel: Stevens and several Jewish Democratic leaders have accused El-Sayed of antisemitism, citing his “genocide” rhetoric and AIPAC attacks, allegations he rejects, arguing his critics conflate the Israeli government with Jewish identity. The result is a Democratic Party split far beyond mere ideology. If elected in November, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim US senator.