Every Story Needs A Villain
Get In The Binfantino: Every Story Needs A Villain, While Football Has Several (Except They’re All The Same Person)
Good morning leaders, welcome back to MU90.
This Week: As the World Cup draws a close, we have our very own Leo Messi of marketing newsletters Harry writing about the villain of football (or basically the sporting world) Giovanni Vincenzo Infantino and the many sides of his actions and what marketing can learn from it…
Last Week: If you missed last week, I broke down Reddit & how to balance the risks and benefits and how to think about ChatGPT ads.
Last weekend I created a 10 point action sheet for MU readers, its free to download on Google Docs.
Now onto Harry’s unfiltered take….
Every Story Needs A Villain, While Football Has Several (Except They’re All The Same Person)
By Harry Lang - Connect On LinkedIn
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by The Oxford AI School - where your teams can learn basic AI in an easy, practical and fun way
The truth about great leadership is that the best purveyors go about their task with minimal fanfare. They exude quiet confidence, motivating, educating, strategising and cajoling their teams over a long period of sustained success without feeling the need to become the hero or the focus of their own story.
Look at our late Queen who, apart from the actual fanfare that occasionally greeted her arrival in a room, exhibited all these traits and more in a career spanning over seventy years. Humour, gravitas, common sense, strength and intelligence all wrapped up in a diminutive, bejewelled package.
Getinfantino
Now have a look at the other end of the leadership scale - FIFA’s abhorrent President Giovanni Vincenzo Infantino, a man so bereft of positive traits his Who’s Who entry should simply read:-
“A preening, contemptuous dick - don’t emulate him in any way”.
So how does Gianni get to collect over $6 Million a year (plus backhanders) as leader of football’s governing body?
Sinfantino
Infamous multi-headed wronguns originated from Greek mythology, most notably the Lernaean Hydra and Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the passage to Hades. Infantino, however, is a lawyer who was born in Switzerland, has Lebanese citizenship by marriage and speaks seven languages, meaning he’s most closely related to Chimera, a fire-breathing creature with the heads of a lion, goat, and snake (although he’s clearly only ‘The Goat’ in his own mind/ bedroom).
Adminfantino
He started his slithery climb up the walls of football power as a legal administrator at UEFA in 2000, eventually coiling himself into FIFA in 2015 when he went for the top job at FIFA in the 2016 Extraordinary Congress.
Winfantino
In February 2016, he was elected FIFA President for a period of three years. Football died a little that day.
Assassinfantino
By elbowing out his competitors and dismissing his detractors, he managed to cling on to the walls of football power for ten years, with a powerbase so honed there’s no clear rival prepared to challenge him before the next World Cup.
Mannequinfantino
He may be a power hungry, media savvy roll-on deodorant of a man, but he knows that to maintain control at this level, it helps to be backed by the very few men more powerful than him. That Trump FIFA Peace Prize? A genius piece of ego-massaging nonsense that bought him the backing of the most influential dumbass in the world. Then there was the last World Cup in Qatar. What does Qatar have? Sand and shit loads of money (Gianni has no interest in sand).
Toxinfantino
During his reign, he’s been accused of facilitating sportswashing (which I wrote about at length for Marketing Week back in 2022), cozying up to autocrats, manipulating FIFA voting, daisychaining sponsors, a lack of transparency, corrupting the game, creating an ethical vacuum and force-feeding bloated tournament schedules like he’s stuffing a Foie Gras goose. In fact, if he did have one discernable trait, it would’ve died of loneliness long ago.
Chagrinfantino
On his watch the beautiful game has morphed into an embarrassment, looking every inch the elderly Hollywood starlet, manicured, plucked, acid washed and stapled until it became the bastard child of the original sport.
Ginfantino
During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he defended the tournament hosts when they decided to ban alcohol sales in the stadia for religious reasons, controversially stating:-
“I think personally if for three hours a day you cannot drink a beer, you will survive”
Major sponsor Budweiser was understandably a little miffed.
Alladinfantino
Why was he so keen to park the biggest football tournament in a country with only twelve pro teams that had never qualified to play itself? OK, so this one’s a little more straightforward - it’s shiny and rhymes with ‘bold’. He found a lamp in an unknown middle eastern desert, rubbed it and a genie appeared, granting him three wishes. Gianni likes having his wishes granted.
Zeppelinfantino
If history has taught us anything it’s that all good despots eventually come to a sticky end. Their hubris, greed and flaky grasp of what is true or right causes them to ultimately succumb to an Icarus moment, sparking a PR explosion of stratospheric proportions before crashing to the ground in a heap of burnt reputation dressed in the remnants of a shiny Boggi Milano suit.
This moment for Kremlinfantino really should have come about in 2022 in Doha. Remember, gay people were made to feel particularly unwelcome at the Qatar World Cup and a reported 6,500 migrant workers died constructing the stadiums. It was off the back of these abhorrent events that Gianni gave a sickening pre-tournament press conference where he announced:-
“Today I feel gay, today I feel like a migrant worker”
The man is a rotten apple presiding over a punnet of maggots. If the ugly game ever hopes to become beautiful again, it needs to throw him in the bin.
Harry Lang runs The Oxford AI School to teach teams the basics of AI in a fun, easy and practical way and is the author of ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit,’ available on Amazon. You can connect with Harry on LinkedIn, check out his socials or email him at Harry@TheOxfordAISchool.com
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
PS Need Some Inspiration? If football isn’t your thing but you would like to inspired by social ads, here is a great example from Bud and an organic piece of social content by adidas that is very smart in execution.
If you enjoyed this article theme, you will l❤️ve
Writing this was somehow cathartic