With its generals, teams in fighting kit and baying, flag-waving fans, sport is made for battlefield metaphors. It’s not a big leap to think its officers might learn something from military history, so much of which has been recorded over the millennia.
To Vietnam then and Dien Bien Phu, where, in late 1953, French commanders committed 15,000 paratroops, foreign legionnaires and colonial troops to an undefendable sprawl of muddy hills at the foot of jungle-encrusted mountains. After a brutal six-month siege by the Viet Minh, the survivors marched themselves into captivity. Most never came home, and France said goodbye to its Indochine empire.
In the space of just a few days, Fifa president Gianni Infantino seems to have launched his own Dien Bien Phu with his Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan to sell a 20% stake in the World Cup tournament. That the investor group would be led by Thrive Capital, co-founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of US presidential son-in-law Jared, did not help.
While no backlash can compare with the tempest of hundreds of Viet Minh artillery pieces, it has been blistering. Just hours after Infantino’s senior adviser, former banker Carlos Cordeiro, quit the team, COO Kevin Lamour told the Associated Press that staff had been “deceived”.
Football associations have been lining up to drop a couple of bunker busters themselves. European football’s governing body, Uefa, voted to boycott Fifa and future World Cup tournaments. Concacaf, which represents North and Central America and the Caribbean, also objected, along with the Asian Football Confederation.
Those three bodies alone carry a majority of votes at a Fifa congress that, when it kicks off next March, will decide whether to re-elect Infantino for a fourth term as president.
A red card for the football general would be an irony indeed.