take up to three flights a day<\/a>, watching two games, throughout the 2026 World Cup. <\/p>\nThat type of arrival does look presidential – only more like a president of a country than a sports body.<\/p>\n
It enables him to travel the globe, visiting Fifa’s official offices like Rabat, where he was based over the past week as the Fifa Forward Enterprise controversy developed.<\/p>\n
In his role Infantino is expected to visit the 211 member nations, to see the grassroots projects Fifa has funded. <\/p>\n
Part of his remit is to unify football, which cannot be achieved from within the Fifa headquarters in Zurich.<\/p>\n
It requires international travel to attend confederation meetings, and the global tournaments Fifa organises. Infantino needs to build relationships with officials and politicians.<\/p>\n
In April, before the Fifa Congress in Vancouver, local authorities rejected a request for a level-four motorcade, usually reserved for heads of state or the Pope. <\/p>\n
New Zealand police said they had declined a similar request during the 2023 Women’s World Cup.<\/p>\n
Alongside the cavalcade of cars and the private charter flights comes a large salary, too, three times what he first earned when elected in 2016.<\/p>\n
Infantino, who was paid about \u00a31.3m 10 years ago, now takes home about \u00a34m – a base salary of \u00a32.2m plus a confirmed variable bonus payment of \u00a31.8m.<\/p>\n
His predecessor Sepp Blatter was paid a \u00a32.6m package for his final year as Fifa president.<\/p>\n
Infantino gets a ‘per diem’ too to cover expenses and living costs, worth \u00a320,500 a year on top of his salary.<\/p>\n
As the head of the most popular sport in the world, it should be expected that there is a wage to match. <\/p>\n
Infantino would argue that by driving record revenues and funding for member associations, he has proven he is worth the salary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cavalcade of blacked out Mercedes, flanked by police cars, rolled into the Fifa headquarters in Rabat, Morocco,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-806076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}