Ken Early: Infantino unlikely to reflect on World Cup host US attacking participant Iran

In 25 days, Ireland play their biggest match in a decade – a World Cup qualification playoff that was secured thanks to two of the most beautiful victories in the history of the national team. It is sadly typical of today’s football that what should be a time of excitement and anticipation has instead been dominated by an increasingly acrimonious debate over the unfortunate Nations League draw against Israel.

The FAI reaffirmed last week that Ireland would be fulfilling the fixtures. Good luck to them making that decision stick, as just a couple of days later, Israel and the United States launched their latest illegal attack on Iran.

This time, there was not even any token effort to manufacture a legal justification – we’ve all come a long way since 2003. As US president Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview after the US captured the Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro: “Jake, we live in a law … or, sorry, we live in a world – you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

You could see that Miller, an archetypal pencilneck, really relished this muscular rhetoric. No longer was he merely a little fish-faced man with a high-pitched voice. The figure that stood before Tapper was imperial grandeur incarnate, a mighty and majestic American eagle, red in beak and claw.

That interview took place on January 5th, a month to the day after Gianni Infantino had awarded Miller’s boss the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, a decision that instantly made a global laughing stock of the world governing body. Infantino has always insisted he wanted to expand the game into new markets and, with this move, he succeeded. All kinds of people who have never been and will never be interested in the sport of football have heard about Fifa inventing a peace prize to give to Trump and most have made at least a few lame gags about it.

[ Malachy Clerkin: Trump is showing Fifa what a shameful mistake its bogus peace prize wasOpens in new window ]

Last week Infantino celebrated 10 years as Fifa president. Now, his peace prize laureate has presented him with a problem by attacking the country with the best record in Asian World Cup qualifying.

The chances of Iran actually participating in this World Cup – where they are scheduled to play two group matches in Los Angeles and one in Seattle, and would play the United States in the second round if Iran and the USA finish second in their groups – must be rated doubtful at best.

Irritatingly, Infantino had been forced to spend the momentous first day of Operation Epic Fury at a castle in south Wales, deliberating various football minutiae at the latest meeting of the International Football Association Board (Ifab), the body that sets the rules for the world game.

Infantino’s globe-spanning role puts him in some awkward situations. He spends so much time hanging around billionaires and trillionaires that, despite commanding a €2.9 million salary and the use of a private jet courtesy of his admirers in Qatar, he must often feel deprived.

He also increasingly enjoys the profile of a world leader, appearing at Trump’s recent summits in Washington and Sharm El-Sheikh as though he were a statesman commanding actual power, so it must feel rather stifling to be sitting in Wales talking about corner kicks with a bunch of Ifab bores.

This Ifab meeting was preoccupied with tackling the scourge of tempo disruption and time-wasting. It seems that football fans worldwide are angry that the game has degenerated into a succession of periods where everyone stands around waiting for play to restart.

So the Ifab decided to do the obvious thing, and abolished VAR. Only joking – actually, they gave VAR some new powers, to adjudicate on the award of corner kicks and to overrule second yellow cards they think have been given in error.

VAR’s role as the cause of most of the tempo-killing periods of inaction that plague the modern game was again overlooked, but the Ifab did introduce some petty new countdown rules to clamp down on things like players taking too long to walk off the field when they’ve been substituted.

All the while, Infantino must have been mulling his response to events in the Middle East. He knows that, with nothing in the Fifa guidebook to govern “what happens when World Cup host attacks a participant”, it will fall to him to improvise a solution to the Iran question. It would be a surprise if the thought of penalising the host nation for attacking one of the participants had ever occurred to him. Maybe the crisis will abate in time for the Iranian team to travel. If it doesn’t, then, on the positive side, Infantino will have the chance to do somebody a favour.

First in the hypothetical line of succession to replace Iran might seem to be Iraq, who are scheduled to compete in the intercontinental playoff later this month. They qualified for that playoff by defeating the United Arab Emirates, still so much more powerful off the field than on it, in the AFC playoff in November.

Yet the UAE finished third in their third-round qualifying group, with Iran and Uzbekistan finishing first and second to qualify. If Iran disappears from that group, the UAE would sit in one of the two automatic qualifying spots.

Only presidential discretion can weigh these competing claims. Infantino displayed his discretion last year when deciding which US club side would fill the “host” slot at the 2025 Fifa Club World Cup. LA Galaxy, as the reigning MLS champions, might have felt they were the most deserving US team to be included, but Infantino decided to include Inter Miami, the club team of Lionel Messi, on the basis that they had won something called the Supporters’ Shield after having the best regular-season record.

It was a bit like saying Messi’s team had earned the place as they had the pinkest shirts, but Infantino has never been afraid to risk a little embarrassment in the pursuit of what he wants.

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