Who is Gianni Infantino? Sizing up FIFA's potential savior

Gianni Infantino, that's our man. That's the man with the plan, the world hopes, to salvage FIFA's rotting ship and restore honor and dignity to the global game. 

Infantino won Friday's FIFA election -- he's now FIFA president and effectively the king of world soccer. But will he be able to change FIFA's corrupted culture? 

We can't tell Infantino's future, but we can glean clues from the past -- including a ringing post-vote endorsement from none other than Sepp Blatter, the disgraced ruler Infantino now replaces. 

Shortly after Infantino was elected Friday, Blatter issued a statement that said the 45-year-old Infantino "has all the qualities to continue my work and to stabilize FIFA again."

Um ... come again? 

Blatter is currently the subject of a Swiss criminal investigation for corruption and is universally reviled among soccer fans for turning FIFA into a corporate slush fund at the expense of the sport's integrity. So, yeah -- let's hope Infantino does not, in fact, have the qualities to continue Blatter's work.

Interestingly enough, however, Blatter and Infantino share more similarities. Both are Swiss, for one thing, and come from towns located just six miles apart. But that's coincidence. Of more interest: Both were elected to FIFA presidencies after serving as secretary generals for presidents whose terms ended in shame, as pointed out Friday by ESPN investigative reporter Jeremy Schaap. Blatter served as first mate to a disgraced FIFA president, while Infantino was more recently first mate to the president of FIFA's most wealthy regional confederation. 

Blatter was FIFA's secretary general under Joao Havelange before being elected FIFA president himself in 1998. Havelange has since been tainted by his own bribery scandal. 

Infantino, meanwhile, wasn't even supposed to be in Friday's election as recently as six months ago. But he entered officially when his former boss, Michel Platini, was suspended alongside Blatter from world soccer for six years as part of the sprawling corruption scandal that's still rocking FIFA. Platini was the president of UEFA, European soccer's governing body, and Infantino served as his secretary general. 

We're not even done here -- Blatter and Infantino have still more in common. Infantino won the presidency Friday by beating out Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa from Bahrain, seen as the heavy favorite entering the vote. Blatter was elected in 1998 over Lennart Johansson, which many also regarded as a surprise at the time.  

What does this all mean? 

Maybe something, or maybe nothing at all -- at least, we hope. But it's worth keeping in mind when Blatter says Infantino "has all the qualities to continue my work." 

Is highlighting such parallels between to Infantino and Blatter unfair? Perhaps -- but  whoever won on Friday was destined to inherit such skepticism and scrutiny from many corners. 

Infantino, for his part, talks the renewal talk. No surprise there. 

"We enter now a new era," he said after Friday's win. "We’ll restore the image of FIFA and make sure everybody will be happy with what we do.”

Infantino became UEFA's secretary general in 2009. He's credited with helping to raise the profile and profitability of the UEFA Champions League, which is the world's top club competition. At FIFA, he'll need to continue shepherding the game's economic growth, while ensuring the spoils are distributed among poorer soccer nations as well as the wealthy ones he's accustomed to working with at UEFA. 

Infantino campaigned relentlessly in the run-up to Friday, casting himself as a candidate of inclusion and reform. He says he'll expand the World Cup from 32 countries to 40 and enact more transparency in everything from executive pay to the World Cup selection process. 

Now he gets his chance to do all that, all while facing the considerable task of rehabilitating FIFA's reputation. That reputation suffered considerable harm under Blatter, the man who preceded Infantino -- and with whom he shares so many career similarities. 

“It’s over," Infantino said Friday of the scandal that defined Blatter's presidency. "It’s over and we can move forward.”

FIFA will indeed move forward, in one way or another -- such is the nature of how time progresses, after all. It's whether those next steps lead to a more righteous future, or to more of the same malfeasance, that remains to be seen. 

Fair or not, Infantino now assumes a role about which fan-skepticism reigns supreme. He'll bear that burden until he earns his freedom from it. True reform sounds lovely, and we're sincerely pulling for that -- but we'll believe it when we see it. 

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