Uefa legal case may be beginning of the end for Infantino as Trump’s support evaporates | Barney Ronay

The order of discovery related to Fifa’s failed plan to sell the World Cup will worry the American president, a situation that tends to end badly for the culprit

“Tell Mike it was just business. I always liked him.”

“Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times’ sake?”

I never believed it would actually happen. Not really. Not until this week, when, for the first time, there was a sense, as The Godfather makes so abundantly clear, that you really can get to anyone.

Gianni Infantino is beleaguered. Gianni Infantino is re-beleaguered. Gianni Infantino has been beleaguered for almost six weeks, since news emerged of his grotesque undercover plan to sell off, for related personal gain, the shared global property he’s employed to preserve, protect and safely pass on.

There has been hopeful talk in that time of toxic status attained, a base being hollowed out, a rival presidential candidate next March. But power runs deep. Entrenched dictatorial power runs even deeper. Time passes. The doorway narrows. Infantino is already the man who sold the world, not once, but twice, most recently to Donald Trump in return for a peace prize , a scrunchie and a fawning presence around the sub-table of power.

Give it a month. Chuck in a Football Jesus turn at the lighted lectern a few weeks from now, arms whirling like a street magician, reeling off the usual stuff about caring and sharing, égalité, fraternité, fiscal stimuli. Look deep into those weirdly flat painted-on eyes, cold and hard behind the papier-mache mask of power. You don’t buy me out. I buy you out.

But something has shifted this week. It was never going to be the gnats around his ankles that did for Infantino: another thundering newspaper column, the latest stern denouncement from – whoah, hang on – former Manchester United utility defender Mikaël Silvestre.

Hard power is something else, however. And two things have now happened, both responses to the threat of a Uefa lawsuit , which I believe has no really serious notions of ultimate victory, but which may turn out to be an expert chess move, a zugzwang that leaves the king having to go somewhere, but with no safe spaces left to hide.

The first response was Josh Kushner’s statement this week after being named as a party to discovery in Florida. Kushner was the money guy behind the Fifa Forward fiasco. Nuts isn’t it? The person you come to for finance and macro-favour just happens to be, by an accident of talent and destiny, the brother of the president’s son-in-law.

Kushner said he “would not have gotten involved” in Fifa’s plans had he known the full picture. He said this was all regrettable. Ostensibly mild and reasonable words, but with a sense of distance being carved out, of a cutting loose from the protective apron.

Kushner has also hired a nuclear option lawyer, Alex Spiro, who defended Elon Musk when he called a caver “a pedo” and Alec Baldwin when he accidentally shot someone. It’s a serious defensive move. As is, to a more rattled degree, Fifa’s counter-filing this week , which dismisses the whole episode as a “smear campaign”, then says the quiet thing out loud. Specifically, Fifa mentions discovery and a very urgent intention to resist it.

This is the real point. No one on the Infantino side wants discovery. Which is, to be clear, the sharing of related documents, from internal memos down to relevant emails sent from your smartphone on the golf course after lunch.

This, as Gianni knows, is always a worry to those in power. And you really don’t want to be a worry to anyone in any way connected to Trump. This is why, behind the sabre rattling, there is for the first time a sense of a thinning out, of nobody there on the ward, no cops on the doors, of the old man up there unprotected.

Even Trump’s early support for Infantino was a little over-juiced in the media. The president Truth Socialed his assurances in early August. It still felt a little qualified. “If for any reason” Fifa got rid of Infantino, well, this would be really bad. And nothing since.

There is a vague sense of a shrug here, of an amble away from the stage. We remember the good times for the Gianni-Trump bro-tocracy, laughing together like men in a Brooks Brothers senior knitwear advert, the gleaming bald impresario to power and his tolerant daddy-patron looking as ever like a giant man-size unit of American food, as though something deep-fried, honey-glazed and dished up at an out-of-town hotel conference buffet has somehow learned to walk around in a baggy suit and say things like “a very tall, very handsome man”.

This is always brittle. Trump will walk you in, remember your name, glad-hand you by the stairwell. But once you’re gone you really are gone. There is no loyalty, and logically so, because Trumpian politics has no core belief, no substance, just a cold, hard matrix of winners and losers.

And if you lose, or look like you might, then by coincidence bad things tend to happen. The Guardian published a list a while back of Trump enemies who now find themselves subject to charges , exile, security clearances revoked, mortgage fraud investigated. And that list does include some pretty high-profile one-time golden boys.

Michael Cohen, the fiercest of Trump loyalists, who famously stated he would “take a bullet” for the big man? Legal difficulties and fallings-out intervened. Cohen has since been imprisoned, disbarred and sent into exile. The former US attorney general Jeff Sessions was among the first to call Trumpism “a movement”. He’s now not only out of the game, but has apparently been described by Trump, variously, as weak, confused, dumb, an idiot, a disgrace, and “mentally retarded”. There is a pattern here. If you’re in then you’re in. But don’t fly too close to those flames.

The decision of the court on allowing discovery could well be key. Make no mistake, Uefa is accusing Fifa and Infantino of “criminal mismanagement”. The key issue is an alleged undervaluing in the sale of the World Cup. Unrelated, and arguably standard industry practice, Infantino also stood to take a huge personal salary from all this.

It is a clear attempt to peer inside and see what, if anything, is in that box. Uefa wants discovery from Fifa, Thrive Capital and the Trump donor and deal adviser Greg Maffei, all of whom will have paper trails from that period when Infantino was granted intoxicating access to the halls of power. It puts you in mind of the Club World Cup trophy, a weird, frightening-looking thing, all razor-sharp odd nooks and crannies, the secret little drawer full of human toenails. Do you really want to know what’s in there? Is it safe to look?

“ Please Mike, don’t do this, don’t do this to me”

“Today I settle all the family business. So don’t tell me you’re innocent.”

How is this going to play out? Infantino is doing what he can, touring his outer provinces and pressing the flesh. Saudi Arabia has offered qualified backing (“at this time …”). There’s a Fifa congress in November. Really, though, you wonder about votes, and to what extent votes are the thing here. It is hard not to muse on how it ended in football for Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini. That one-shot illegal payment allegation really did come out of the blue.

For now the process will simmer on. Legal challenges often fail or melt away. Uefa just needs to keep pressing, to make it clear that coals will be raked. Keep the pressure up and you never know what may fall out, or from where. Mr president, you can have my answer now. Our offer is this. Nothing.