The Times' Apology and the Transparency Gap FIFA Has Still Not Closed

The apology ran at the foot of the page, in small type, under two hundred words. It conceded that two details in the mid-October investigation were wrong: the “second salary” The Times said FIFA President Gianni Infantino had failed to declare, and the price he paid for a house in Miami. Above it, in a far more prominent position, sat the article that raised the questions in the first place. In my trade, the distance between those two positions on the same sheet of paper is worth measuring more than any scoreline.

I have sat through hundreds of press conferences, and I have learned one thing about how sports institutions answer questions about money: they answer in law, not in numbers. The Times' apology is a rare event — a major newspaper publicly conceding error and naming the person it wronged. But it is not an audit, and FIFA has never published one.

The sequence, condensed: in mid-October, The Times published an investigation into how the FIFA president declares his income. Two specific claims — an undeclared second remuneration stream, and an allegedly irregular price for the Miami property. FIFA responded within the same cycle, describing the coverage as part of a “coordinated and ongoing effort” to discredit the organisation and its president, citing a statement it had already issued in August, calling for fact-checking before publication, and closing with a warning that it would keep confronting any publication it deemed inaccurate or defamatory. Weeks later, The Times published its apology.

The decisive technical point sits in a single line of that apology: The Times accepted that under Swiss law, expenses and reimbursements are not classified as remuneration and therefore need not appear in FIFA's annual report. That is a sound legal argument. It is not a transparency argument, and the two are routinely conflated in sports coverage.

Infantino has held the presidency since 2026. The article notes he is ready to stand for re-election and names no rival. Across every information point in this story, no confederation spoke, no member association commented, no sponsor asked a question. The story is told as a two-party contest: FIFA and the press.

It also crossed a notable threshold. A governance story surfaced on a mass-market football outlet, where readers normally consume transfer news and results. When institutional content enters the daily information diet of ordinary supporters, public salience is higher than the calm surface suggests.

Start with the most easily missed point: an institution can act lawfully and still leave an information gap wide enough for the story to return. FIFA is constituted as an association under Swiss law, not a listed company. European exchanges require listed businesses to publish board pay line by line. An association does not. So when The Times retracted, it retracted exactly the part that was legally wrong; the remainder — expenses, travel, security, residence, reimbursements — stays outside public view, and stays lawful.

I have read FIFA's 2026 annual report. The organisation published revenue of roughly USD 1.17 billion and reserves approaching USD 4 billion. Those headline figures are printed well, with charts and footnotes. The actual total cost of a presidency has no line of its own. For an organisation running a multi-billion-dollar budget, the absence of that one line is not a clerical slip; it is an architectural choice.

History explains why that choice is hard to challenge. In 2026 FIFA went through a crisis that forced it to rewrite its own rulebook, including presidential term limits. That reform package answered a question about power, not a question about money. A decade on, the remuneration disclosure structure has barely moved while public expectations have travelled a long way.

And this is where the women's game enters, the way it always does in my work: on the men's football calendar, I quietly slide women's records into every bulletin. The 2026 World Cup will be staged across the United States, Mexico and Canada with 48 teams — and Miami, precisely the city in this story, is one of the host sites. A president buying a private home in a host market, even at market price, is an image-sensitive detail. The paradox is that this same FIFA publishes very specific numbers for women's football. The 2026 Women's World Cup prize pool was USD 110 million, against USD 30 million in 2026. The 2026 men's pool was USD 440 million. FIFA has stated an ambition of parity for the 2026 and 2027 editions.

Which means the organisation is entirely capable of granular disclosure when it chooses. It discloses where the story helps and stays silent where the story hurts. That is the nature of institutional communications. Readers simply need to see the mechanism rather than only the outcome.

Based on my experience covering matches and major tournaments, there is a recognisable signature. When an institution replies with “check the facts before publishing”, it is talking about the newspaper's process, not the substance of the question. When it cites a statement already issued in August, the playbook was drafted in advance. When it closes with a legal warning, it wants the other paper's editors to price the next piece. Those three steps fit together too neatly to be improvisation.

In 2026 I sat with Wang Shuang when she was twenty-two, listening to her describe the pressure of proving she belonged in Europe. She talked about wages in the voice of someone used to being asked questions no one asks male players. Conversations like that taught me that transparency is not an abstraction; it decides who is seen and who is overlooked.

And The Times? A named, unambiguous apology published openly is usually the conclusion of a legal department that the claims could not be defended in court. Under UK defamation practice, early correction and a clear apology are the standard route to reducing damages. That does not make the original investigation worthless; it means two specific details were wrong, and the paper said so.

The contrarian angle I want on the table: this communications win for FIFA is, in the narrowest sense, a step backwards for the quality of information about football.

The reason is that an apology does not merely correct one article; it reprices the risk of every similar article. An editor reading this precedent sees expensive investigations, real legal exposure and unmeasurable benefit. When an institution declares it will keep confronting publications it considers wrong, it does not need to win in court to produce an effect; it only needs people to know it is willing.

The people who lose are not the big newsrooms. When the pandemic silenced the game, the dressing room spoke — I was only the person holding the microphone. In 2026, with competitions suspended, I opened a livestream series so women players could speak for themselves. One goalkeeper told me her wages had been cut by sixty per cent and that she had sold medals to cover her mother's hospital bills. No newsroom investigated that pay cut. If investigative pressure on football institutions falls, stories like hers are the first to disappear — because the person telling it has no lawyer, and the person listening has no commercial stake.

In fairness: The Times' apology settles two claims. It is not a confirmation that FIFA's remuneration disclosure is adequate. Reading it as a certificate of transparency misreads the document. And an organisation that can publish the number USD 110 million for women's football can also publish the total cost of a presidency — if it chooses to.

The real test will not come from London. It will come from the 2027 Women's World Cup ledger: whether the prize fund, broadcast revenue and operational costs are published with the same granularity as the men's figures. At fifty-six, I still ask one question: where exactly are women scoring in this game? If the answer remains “on the pitch, but not in the annual report”, then that apology, however correct, is only a page already turned.