Who is Dan O’Toole, the Irish Fifa executive at the heart of deal to sell off World Cup? – The Irish Times

One of the most remarkable things about Dan O’Toole’s rise to the top of world football is how few people in Ireland knew about it.

O’Toole is chief of staff at Fifa, but was a largely unknown figure even in Irish football circles until last week, when he was named by the New York Times as one of only two men at Fifa who have known for months about the World Cup sell-off plans that have shaken the world of sport.

The other man in the know was Fifa president Gianni Infantino.

The sell-off plans were shelved four days after they first emerged in the London Times following a furious backlash from Fifa member nations and high-ranking employees. Several member nations complained of a lack of transparency and consultation, while Carlos Cordeiro, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, resigned as an adviser to Infantino saying he knew nothing of the proposals.

Fifa chief operating officer Kevin Lamour released a blistering statement saying staff were “deceived” by Infantino’s lack of openness around the proposals, claiming they were “the project of one person”.

The New York Times subsequently confirmed the proposal was driven by Infantino, but added that O’Toole was handpicked by the Fifa president to work in the background on the plan. O’Toole, according to the New York Times, had knowledge of the plan for “months” before Infantino presented it to a quintet of staff known as the bureau of the management board on the eve of the World Cup final in New York.

O’Toole, secretary general Mattias Grafstrom and legal head Emilio Garcia reportedly backed the plan, while Lamour and chief financial officer Thomas Peyer voted against it. Infantino pressed on with his plans, incurring a backlash that has left him clinging on as Fifa president.

O’Toole did not walk the traditional career path to the top of football administration, as he has not worked for either the Football Association of Ireland or Uefa along the way.

He is from Dublin and went to school at the exclusive, fee-paying St Michael’s College on Ailesbury Road. WhatsApp groups of former Michael’s students were abuzz after O’Toole was named by the New York Times, with many stunned that their former classmate had risen so quietly to a role within the inner sanctum of power at Fifa.

Former classmates describe O’Toole as highly academic and extroverted. One old schoolfriend says O’Toole was very funny and “loved a bit of chaos and anarchy”.

But where many Michael’s students make their mark on the sporting landscape through rugby, O’Toole, a Shamrock Rovers fan, chose football.

He left St Michael’s in 2004 and studied business and law in UCD, going on to work as an accountant at KPMG. It was in 2013 he made his move into football, enrolling in a one-year course titled the Fifa Master programme.

Organised by the Fifa-funded International Centre of Sports Studies (CIES), the course educates the sports administrators of tomorrow by teaching sports law, sports management and the humanities of sport. It is taught across three separate universities in Italy, England and Switzerland.

The course was cofounded by Infantino in 2000 while he was working at CIES as legal counsel and general secretary. In an interview with CIES in 2019, O’Toole credited the course with giving him a grounding in the “specificity of sport” to supplement his “experience in the generic business world”.

O’Toole used this education to move into sport, initially with TSE Consulting in Switzerland. In 2016, he was named by the Sport for Business website as one of 12 Young Leaders in Irish Sport. Even this achievement left little imprint in Ireland. The founder and chief executive of Sport for Business, Rob Hartnett, said he had no detail to add about O’Toole when contacted by The Irish Times. Another person on the list told us he had never heard of O’Toole.

O’Toole, meanwhile, posted regularly about sport on X, formerly Twitter, with a focus on sports law and finance. Some of these posts appear bitterly ironic in the light of the World Cup sell-off plans. In 2015, for example, he shared a news article that alleged a commercial company dictated squad selections to the Brazilian national team with the caption, “More concern for football’s governing bodies as investor influence accused of creeping into national football”.

O’Toole started working with Fifa in April 2016, initially in the financial governance department, a body created as part of the reform process that followed the corruption scandal that had forced out Sepp Blatter a year earlier.

He rose through the ranks at Zurich, joining the office of Grafstrom, who was then the deputy secretary general. He subsequently became the head of that office and ascended to his current role when Grafstrom was promoted to secretary general after the resignation of Fatma Samoura.

His work at Fifa brought him around the world on visits to national associations. In the 2019 interview with CIES, O’Toole explained he managed the financial side of Fifa’s Forward programme, the mechanism by which Fifa distributes funds to member associations. It was via this mechanism that Infantino proposed distributing the additional funds of the now-scrapped private investment plan.

In the same interview he was asked to give advice to future students of the Fifa Master programme, and replied by quoting Eric Cantona’s rambling and nihilistic speech at a Uefa Champions League draw event from six weeks earlier.

“I would borrow the wise words of the great footballer and great philosopher Eric Cantona, who himself borrowed the same words from King Lear. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport”. Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state and so we will become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars, will still kill us but unfortunately, crimes, wars, will multiply. I LOVE FOOTBALL!’”

Though the sell-off plans have been junked, their reverberations continue. Uefa members are boycotting Fifa competitions until Infantino resigns, and the European governing body has held discussions with the confederations of North America and Asia about organising their own competitions should Infantino continue. Should all sides refuse to budge, the private equity plans to which O’Toole found himself privy will precipitate the greatest rupture in the history of the sport.

O’Toole is backing his boss at Fifa. He was among a small cohort of senior staff summoned by Infantino to a meeting in Rabat on August 5th. Lamour did not attend following his public reproach of Infantino. Infantino and Grafstrom issued a joint-letter to the Fifa board after this meeting, apologising for errors in the process of the sell-off proposals. The letter also said the management board in attendance, which included O’Toole, affirmed their support for Infantino.

Uefa responded with a statement confirming their boycott remained active, dismissing the relevance of the joint-letter from Rabat.

“That some people employed by the Fifa president (and whose careers depend on his favour) agree with him changes nothing,” said Uefa in its statement.

O’Toole did not respond to a request for comment.