Mario Gallavotti: the Italian lawyer who holds real power behind Infantino at FIFA

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BRUSSELS — Gianni Infantino shut FIFA’s top leadership out of his bombshell plot to sell off parts of the World Cup to private investors. But he probably couldn’t have gotten even that far without the help of a largely unknown Italian lawyer who enjoys significant sway at the top of soccer’s global governing body .

Mario Gallavotti, whose relationship with FIFA’s president stretches back more than two decades as Infantino amassed power and cultivated ties with politicians including Donald Trump , Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin , has taken charge of some of the most sensitive political and commercial initiatives at the Zurich-based nonprofit.

“From time to time, you don’t know who is more important between him and Infantino,” said Tomaž Vesel, who served for five years as chair of FIFA’s independent audit committee under Infantino. Gallavotti “has a more political role than anybody in FIFA,” Vesel added.

The Roman lawyer , a supporter of local club SS Lazio who likes to vacation in the Italian countryside, was responsible for letting slip details of the secret “FIFA Forward Enterprise” plan that rocked world soccer last month , according to two high-ranking soccer officials briefed on the discussions. The indiscreet revelation helped turn a closely guarded FIFA pitch deck into a media firestorm and political crisis that now jeopardizes what until recently appeared to be Infantino’s lock on a third full term as president.

Gallavotti’s influence derives from an unlikely power center within FIFA: A post created as part of an organizational overhaul Infantino engineered upon taking office in 2016 with vows to clean up endemic corruption in international soccer. Instead of delivering promised transparency and accountability, Gallavotti’s murky roles reflect the reality of Infantino’s reign — centralized power in the seemingly endless pursuit of political influence and financial opportunity.

“He has always been more than a lawyer; a man with a political function, acting as a link between different protagonists in the world of football,” said a senior European soccer official who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity in order to protect relationships — and has known both Gallavotti and Infantino for years. “He is the man who operates for Infantino worldwide.”

FIFA and Gallavotti responded to questions in a single statement attributable to the organization, which said it was “simply wrong” to claim Gallavotti was exercising significant political authority within FIFA.

Dynamic duo

Gallavotti joined FIFA after it was rocked by a 2015 corruption investigation led by the U.S. Department of Justice that forced the body’s leadership to resign, sent senior soccer officials to prison and paved the way for Infantino to take charge. As president, Infantino oversaw an internal reorganization he said would bring transparency and accountability to FIFA’s working, placing a plethora of committees under a single director — and tapped Gallavotti for the job.

The two men had met about 15 years earlier, according to three current and former senior European soccer officials with direct knowledge of the connection, when Infantino was a rookie soccer bureaucrat serving as an interlocutor between the Union of European Football Associations and the continent’s national leagues. Gallavotti was a legal consultant to the Italian league, which was then grappling with the implications of a landmark 1995 ruling from the European Court of Justice that brought free agency to professional soccer.

Although largely invisible to the outside world, the position managing committees responsible for disciplinary matters and ethical complaints placed Gallavotti astride some of the most sensitive issues of Infantino’s presidency.

As Covid-19 ravaged the world in spring 2020, female players accused Haiti’s soccer president Yves Jean-Bart of sexually abusing them at the national training center. It was not the first such allegation: Just 18 months earlier, female soccer players leveled sexual abuse allegations against the Afghanistan soccer president Keramuudin Karim, which eventually led to him receiving a life ban from the sport.

Such cases were intended to be handled by the Ethics Committee, one of the independent bodies under Gallavotti’s oversight. But victims and survivors of the abuse, along with their advocates, argued that FIFA mishandled complaints in their dealings with soccer authorities in Haiti.

“The systems that FIFA had in place under Mario Gallavotti were completely inadequate,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, who has pressed FIFA for more than a decade to apply international human-rights rules and standards for more transparent governance and ethical commitments, “to provide trauma support for young women, teenagers and recent teenagers to tell the worst thing that happened to them over and over again. They had no systems to protect them and their families from death threats.”

Jean-Bart, who consistently denied the allegations, received a lifetime ban from soccer from FIFA in November 2020 that was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport two years later.

“In 2020 the investigatory chamber of the Ethics Committee opened an investigation for sexual abuses at the Haiti FA which resulted in several bans decided by the adjudicatory chamber of the Ethics Committee,” FIFA said in its statement. “At the time, Mr Gallavotti was coordinating the secretariat to the Independent Committees and providing the administrative support required as mentioned above.”

For Worden, the Jean-Bart case exposed a broader failure in an organization with vast financial and political reach, but inadequate systems for protecting vulnerable players and investigating abuse allegations.

“Human Rights Watch research shows the governance problems of FIFA stem from the cascade of money in Zurich to places with little to no financial controls,” Worden said. “It is that exact same lack of governance and financial controls that creates systems where safeguarding and reporting systems are a sham and teenage girls and boys can be abused with impunity.”

Man in the Gulf

When representatives of the Saudi Arabian Football Federation arrived in Rome in April 2021, they came bearing a gift of traditional clothing for their hosts. The Italians put on their new thawbs for photos and then got down to business: negotiating over whether Italy and Saudi Arabia could co-host the World Cup in 2030.

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A series of meetings at the offices of the Italian Football Federation and Saudi Embassy were arranged by Gallavotti, who saw the prospective pairing as a way of bypassing FIFA’s own limits on placing the tournament twice in Asia just eight years apart. He was “very, very persistent,” said one senior European soccer official with direct knowledge of Gallavotti’s previously unreported lobbying effort.

Gallavotti, according to five officials with direct knowledge of the partnership, has played a central role developing a commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia that has transformed world soccer over the course of Infantino’s presidency. Some of FIFA’s most lucrative and controversial relationships are now in the Persian Gulf, including a sponsorship deal under which Saudi state-owned energy giant Aramco pays FIFA hundreds of millions of dollars through the end of 2027 and a decision to place the 2034 men’s World Cup in Saudi Arabia .

That FIFA-Saudi alliance represents an opportunistic relationship for both sides. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership, the Gulf petromonarchy has spent lavishly on sports, from golf to boxing to motor racing, while facing criticism over its human-rights record and state-sanctioned killing of a prominent journalist.

Before Saudi Arabia eventually secured the 2034 tournament, officials in Riyadh had maneuvered to try to obtain the 2030 World Cup . Due to FIFA limitations on Asia hosting the quadrennial soccer jamboree again so soon after Qatar in 2022, Saudi Arabia attempted to partner with countries in other confederations — including Greece, Egypt and Italy — to give their bid a trans-continental identity.

Italy demurred, wary of the Gulf nation’s widely criticized human-rights record and at loggerheads with Egypt over the killing of Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, a rejection that durably damaged relations between FIFA and Italy.

“When Italy decided not to join this project, there were some rather intemperate reactions, and from that moment Italy was no longer in FIFA’s orbit, regarded by Infantino as an ‘unfriendly’ federation,” the senior European soccer official said.

Vesel ascribed that type of reaction to Gallavotti’s personality, noting that he “changes his temper when you don’t agree with him. When he notices that you’ll go another way from what he wants, then he becomes another person.”

A second former senior FIFA official described him as a “ruthless [but] clever” operator, who rose to lead an “Italian clique” that effectively controls FIFA under Infantino, outside of the established secretariat.

Gallavotti’s influence across FIFA’s Saudi portfolio extended beyond sponsorship deals and tournament hosting. He was also a principal character at the intersection of sports, media and politics during the Middle Eastern blockade against Qatar, which unfolded during the first Trump administration.

As regional powers collaborated to isolate Qatar diplomatically and economically, Saudi Arabian audiovisual pirates targeted beIN Sports, a Doha-based media giant which dominates sports broadcasting in the Middle East and North Africa. After Egyptian regulators banned the channels, Qatari leaders raised concerns directly with FIFA about Gallavotti’s contacts with those Egyptian regulators on the matter, according to contemporaneous notes reviewed at the time by POLITICO.

One regional participant who took part in calls at the time between the Confederation of African Football and beIN said the Italian lawyer appeared to be in effective charge of the confederation between 2018 and 2021, leading and moderating discussions despite having no formal role there.

In 2021, Gallavotti left his role overseeing FIFA’s independent committees before joining the president’s office as a senior adviser, just as Infantino’s attention was beginning to turn to the political challenges and economic opportunities that would accompany the 2026 tournament in North America.

In that role, the second former senior FIFA official said, “Gallavotti is running the show because Infantino is always on tour.”

Summer of discontent

After Trump pressured Infantino to overturn a red card issued to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun ahead of a must-win match during this summer’s World Cup, the issue was sent for review to FIFA’s disciplinary committee. There a little-known Emirati official complied with an appeal formally submitted by the U.S. Soccer Federation and backed by the White House: Balogun’s suspension was dropped.

The incident reflected what those around FIFA characterized as a pattern of behavior from Infantino to use the committee structure developed by Gallavotti — and the appearance of independent professionalism it projected — to advance his political aims. Vesel, who led the audit committee between 2016 and 2021, said that Gallavotti “controlled the independent bodies” and alleged that he used financial sanctions as a “political instrument” to strengthen Infantino’s support among national football federations. “There was a constant pressure not to do this or that, or to dilute suspensions” against Infantino’s backers, Vesel added.

FIFA denied what it called “unfounded and unsubstantiated claims” in the statement released on Gallavotti’s behalf. “FIFA’s independent committees as well as their individual members conduct their activities and perform their duties independently and in accordance with the Statutes and regulations of FIFA,” it said.

Two weeks after the red-card controversy, Gallavotti found himself in the middle of the biggest crisis of Infantino’s presidency. As Infantino told his inner circle about his plans for commercial sell-off days before the World Cup final, Gallavotti privately relayed contours of the proposed arrangement — which would exploit opportunities to maximize private investment in global soccer — to an industry expert in New York City, according to two high-ranking soccer officials briefed on the discussions.

That sparked fury among top sports officials who lobbied the world soccer governing body to ditch a plan they characterized as a naked money grab that would compromise the sport’s marquee event. National leaders, including Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney , have since called for Infantino’s ouster.

This week, European confederation UEFA filed a demand in a U.S. court to subpoena Joshua Kushner’s venture capital firm to support what it said would be a criminal case in Switzerland against Infantino for his role in the so-called FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, as European soccer officials gathering in Monaco for an annual season-opening bash ramped up pressure on the president to step down ahead of an election in March next year. Infantino has now mobilized his political apparatus to line up support from a majority of FIFA’s 211 member associations, which each have one vote in the March election. On Thursday, the Saudi Arabian Football Federation announced it would stand with Infantino.