Fifa president Gianni Infantino has had a rough go of it of late. Turns out the world is not too enthused about the prospect known as Profit. He may have a strong right kick, but the world does not want to sacrifice the sport at Profit’s altar. At least not yet. And so Infantino’s plan, announced shortly after the World Cup closed out in the States, to partially privatise the event, landed with a rancourous thud upon its arrival. So much so that a few of the football confederations are now refusing to support him and threatening to boycott future Fifa events.
But what does that look like?
Thankfully, the BBC put together an interactive map—and, less thankfully, a doughnut chart—wherein countries were classified by their openly announced support or opposition to Infantino, or their assumed support or opposition. See any patterns?
Design-wise…eh…missed attempt here?
This is not a Mercator projection, because the 49th Parallel, which forms most of the land border between Canada and the United States, is depicted as a curved arc rather than the straight line you commonly see in, say, online mapping tools. But it is not too dissimilar from a Mercator, because Greenland is enormous in comparison to equatorial African, Asian, and Latin American countries.
And that does this a disservice, because the story here is that those Asian countries, in particular, will be the battleground whereon Infantino’s campaign to stay on as Fifa president will be fought.
I suspect a different projection would have been a more useful tool. Or, perhaps, a more cartogram-like approach where equal size objects—squares, hexagons, triangles, circles—represent countries. That way massive countries by area, e.g. Russia, Canada, the United States, are seen at the same scale as smaller countries, e.g. Andorra, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong. Americans in particular revisit this debate every two years when it comes to elections for the US Senate—the Constitution allocates each state two senators regardless of size or population so that the smallest states like Delaware and Rhode Island are often lost next to their larger counterparts like California and Texas.
I also wonder if an outline for the different associations, e.g. UEFA, could have been added. There is an important layer of nuance to the story where the member associations may be opposed to Infantino but powerful individual members are, in fact, supportive. Case in point would be North America’s opposition via CONCACAF, but Mexico’s individual support.
Nonetheless, this is an important graphic, because it shows just how split the world is on Infantino, and where that split falls.
Whether he survives his mistake…we shall see.