The boat

There is a moment in every marriage, apparently, when one partner realises the other has been quietly emptying the joint account to buy a boat. Nobody tells you when this moment arrives. It just does. You're doing the washing-up, minding your own business, and suddenly you're staring at a bank statement wondering how you missed eleven years of warning signs that, looked at individually, seemed like nothing at all — a slightly odd expense here, a business trip that didn't quite add up there — but which, viewed together, spell out one word in enormous letters: BETRAYAL.

I mention this because I have just read a 60-page legal filing lodged by UEFA against the president of FIFA, and it has exactly the same energy, except instead of a boat it's a $4.2 billion stake in the World Cup, and instead of a suspicious credit-card statement it's Vladimir Putin's private jet.

Individually, each item looks like an oversight. A lift from the Kremlin looks like bad scheduling. A lift from the Emir of Qatar two days later looks like more bad scheduling, though at this point you'd think a man who runs a global sporting body might learn to book ahead. A trip to see the Pope that somehow becomes a family holiday for one's mother looks, at worst, like the sort of thing you'd forgive your own father for doing, mostly because you'd be too embarrassed to bring it up at Christmas. But stack them all up — the jets, the tuxedo on expenses, the £942 of football boots, the refusal to sign a contract because £1.5 million a year was "insulting" — and you don't have a series of oversights. You have a boat. A large one. Possibly with a helicopter pad.

Enter the man with the boat

Which brings me, at last, to the actual subject of this column: whether England, France, Germany and the Netherlands — four countries that between them have won the World Cup nine times, invented most of the sport's tactical grammar, and produced more useful footballing ideas than the rest of the confederation put together, Cruyff turn included — should ever again turn up to play a FIFA competition while Gianni Infantino remains in charge of it.

My answer, delivered with the same weary certainty I reserve for people who think a diesel Golf needs a remap and a set of go-faster stripes, is no. Absolutely not. Not one match. Not a friendly, not a qualifier, not so much as a testimonial for a linesman's dog.

The charge sheet, read very slowly

Here is the argument, stripped of sentiment and delivered the way a solicitor might read a will to a room full of relatives who are trying not to look pleased. In July, Infantino tried to sell a stake in the World Cup — the actual World Cup, the tournament itself, the thing people bunk off work to watch — to a consortium fronted by Joshua Kushner, at a valuation UEFA's lawyers now describe as "fraudulently off-market," while apparently lining himself up for a role in the new entity worth roughly ten times his FIFA salary. Ten times. I have known lottery wins that were less generous.

His own chief operating officer said staff had been "deceived." His own secretary general was reportedly kept out of the room, which for the second-most senior official at the organisation is quite the trick, rather like discovering the ship's first mate wasn't told about the iceberg. Carlos Cordeiro, his own senior adviser, resigned and called it "a bad deal for football." When your own colleagues start using the word "deceived" about you, in public, on the record, you have not had a difficult quarter. You have had a diesel-emissions scandal, minus the diesel, plus considerably more private aviation.

A small diversion involving the Pope and somebody's mum

I would be doing this story a disservice if I skipped the bit where the president of world football, having been invited to a private papal audience in an official capacity, brought his wife and his mother along on a jet borrowed from a Russian businessman, presented Pope Francis with a bespoke Adidas shirt and a Champions League winners' medal, and then told investigators the whole excursion was "purely private." The ethics committee, showing admirable British-style understatement for a Swiss body, concluded he "might be considered as not having acted with complete integrity." Might be considered. That is the diplomatic equivalent of a maître d' informing you, very quietly, that your trousers appear to have fallen down.

In fairness to the defendant

Now, at this point I should offer the reversal, because I always try to be fair, even to men who accept private jets from Vladimir Putin twice in one fortnight. And here it is: nobody has proved Infantino broke the law. The 2016 ethics investigation cleared him on all seven counts, and there's no suggestion the investigator was leaned on. He is, by any reasonable reading, entitled to the same presumption of innocence the rest of us enjoy, and it would be grubby to pretend otherwise just because the man has the transport habits of a minor Bond villain. Fine. Understood. Noted, in writing, for the record.

The boycott that wasn't

But — and this is the entire point of a boat — you don't need to prove a crime to know you shouldn't be sailing with someone who keeps borrowing yachts from people who happen to want something from him. That isn't corruption in the legal sense. It's just what corruption looks like from a distance, through a long lens, before the paperwork catches up.

Consider the counter-argument, because it deserves airtime: withdrawing from FIFA competitions punishes players, not presidents. That's true, and it's the strongest card UEFA's opponents hold. It is also exactly the calculation Infantino is relying on — that nobody with real leverage will ever pull the trigger, because the cost to the players always looks higher than the cost to him. Which is precisely why a boycott announced and then quietly shelved, as happened this week, is worse than no boycott at all. It teaches him the gun isn't loaded.

What I would actually do about it

So here is my practical, mildly bossy proposal, addressed directly to the football associations of England, France, Germany and the Netherlands: do not wait for Swiss prosecutors, who may take years, or a vote of no confidence that may never gather quorum. Announce, jointly and now, that no senior men's or women's side will play a single FIFA-sanctioned fixture until Infantino has actually left the building — not "stepped back," not eased sideways into a consultancy with a nice title and a nicer car park space, but gone. Suspend the friendlies. Cancel the away trips. Let the qualifiers run without you if they must.

It will cost you a tournament, possibly two. But a boat, once you've finally spotted it, doesn't get any less real by looking away from the marina.