Reading Infantino's Book So You Never Have To

A Rainbow of Nonsense

Gianni Infantino’s biography is not just a book. It is a glittering monument to self-delusion, a printed parade of name-drops and autocrat cuddles that reads like a corporate fever dream. Barney Ronay endured every page, and his verdict is damning: this is a work that peddles magical thinking because there is no other way to explain the FIFA president’s ludicrous proximity to power.

The prose is as hollow as a World Cup promise. Infantino doesn’t so much write as float through a fog of platitudes, punctuated by jarring encounters with strongmen. It’s a book where football is merely the backdrop for one man’s relentless self-mythologizing.

The Quote That Says It All

Ronay highlights a moment of unintended poetry that encapsulates the entire project:

“Gliding through time as if surfing a rainbow, you can transform uncertainty into something beautiful.”

That’s not a rejected Coldplay lyric—it’s a genuine line from the FIFA president’s biography. It’s the kind of vapid positivism that brushes past real issues like human rights abuses or corruption investigations. The book never surfs the rainbow back to accountability.

The Despot Fluffing

Infantino’s memoir is essentially a who’s who of authoritarian regimes, each head of state lavished with the same oily praise. The president doesn’t just govern football—he collects despots like trading cards. The book’s pages are sticky with forced intimacy: private dinners, glowing testimonies, shared moments of “vision.”

• Vladimir Putin appears as a wise, misunderstood statesman.
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is painted as a generous host.
• Gulf state royals glide through as generous partners in the beautiful game.

Ronay’s review spares no one. The book, he argues, is less a biography and more a forensic exhibit of soft power laundering through football.

The Real Worst Book?

Ronay jests that the title of “worst book ever” should go to something that tried to be good—a terrible Norman Mailer novel where a tough-guy genius fistfights a zebra on an oil rig. But Infantino’s book is uniquely awful because it weaponizes banality. It’s not just badly written; it’s a political tool disguised as a memoir.

The Verdict

This volume won’t be found in the sports section. It belongs in the horror aisle, next to manuals on autocracy and propaganda. Reading it, you don’t learn about football. You learn how a bureaucrat with a messiah complex sees the world—distorted, sweet-smelling, and utterly detached from the terraces.

Ronay’s sacrifice spares the rest of us. Let his eye twitches from 300 pages of rainbow-surfing prose be a warning: this is not a book. It’s a symptom.