Like a cockroach in a well-cut suit, Gianni Infantino is the kind of man who survives

Donald Trump won’t take his calls, Uefa wants him gone, and he has drawn mockery and outrage for trying to flog the World Cup to a political contact (not even the highest bidder at that). I’m worried that Gianni Infantino won’t be the new secretary general of the United Nations after all.

The man summoned senior Fifa officials to a crisis meeting in Morocco on Wednesday in a bid to save his presidency. And he did just that – Infantino clung on to his presidency after Fifa bigwigs “reaffirmed full support” for him at the meeting.

Infantino is the kind of man who survives. The bald head, the easy smile, the well-cut suit, the travelling court, the dollops of cash for minor nations, the hour-long rants; the roots pushed down into the great global game until they are everywhere. Relax and crack open a World Cup edition Coca Cola.

For we simultaneously live in two worlds. The first is clean: democracy, rules and merit. That is how we are taught the way the world works. But, behind the walls, rattling away like cockroaches that never can quite be caught, is the one where backroom deals and deep connections take place.

So this is a man with the chutzpah to hand out peace prizes, to collect honorary citizenships, to lecture the internet with a 15-slide sermon on the meaning of love.

People like him know every so often, when a move has been too bold, when to pull back from the attack. The World Cup sell-off – to an investment firm led by Joshua Kushner, husband of the supermodel Karlie Kloss and brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – is shelved, announced FIFA in a statement “attributable to the President [Infantino]”. A quiet kick around behind the centre line is about to begin.

Gianni has learnt a lot from the Donald Trump playbook. Elected in 2016, just as Trump first seized power, Infantino has staged World Cups in two of the world’s more delicate host nations, Qatar and the USA, and proved he can do Realpolitik with anyone. Russia gave him its Order of Friendship. He defended Qatar against the self-righteous wailing of the West, and in Qatar he went preposterously off-script, explaining that he knew what discrimination was because that day he felt, by turns, “gay … disabled … a migrant worker … an Arab … an African”. He understood it all because, as a boy, he was teased for red hair and freckles.

What he also understands, apparently, is the world of power and politics. Popularity is something for little people, and the need for it is a character flaw to shun. Other qualities are valued: you must be teflon, but also sticky. What you really need is the capacity to cling-on.

But to say he’s moulded himself in Trump’s image misses the chameleon nature of a Fifa president. He comes with a European finish. Trump’s politics grew out of the culture of property deals, and mercenary money. Infantino is Swiss, a lawyer by training, from a southern Italy family.

This is where the perceived betrayal lies. He should be one of ours in theory (Sepp Blatter, the previous president of Fifa, was Swiss too) but his ethics seem to be flexible wherever he is.

As football associations including England’s FA “withdraw support”, to pretend the World Cup was ever about equality is absurd. What we cannot forgive is anyone saying out loud that this is what the game we profess to love actually is: a circus of money and power.

Football politics rarely unseats a Fifa president. Sepp Blatter survived 25 years of scandal and coups, and was re-elected even as the US Department of Justice raided his own congress – only to fall within the week (in the Obama era, mind; perhaps less of a worry now).

Infantino arose after the fall of Sepp Blatter, in a corruption scandal. We feel distaste for what he has become over the past decade: someone will to sell our beloved game for hard cash.

But Infantino is not a man who will be dislodged easily. The system, of which we are part, has tolerated a subterranean layer to football for decades, one which accepts there’s a dirty trade for the glory of the game.

Fifa has to straddle curious politics. But it needs a certain kind of person to manage it. If not Infantino, who? Someone similar. He and his ilk won’t be stamped out any time soon.