A series of meetings at the offices of the Italian Football Federation and Saudi Embassy were arranged by Gallavotti, who saw the prospective pairing as a way of bypassing FIFA’s own limits on placing the tournament twice in Asia just eight years apart. He was “very, very persistent,” said one senior European soccer official with direct knowledge of Gallavotti’s previously unreported lobbying effort.
Gallavotti, according to five officials with direct knowledge of the partnership, has played a central role developing a commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia that has transformed world soccer over the course of Infantino’s presidency. Some of FIFA’s most lucrative and controversial relationships are now in the Persian Gulf, including a sponsorship deal under which Saudi state-owned energy giant Aramco pays FIFA hundreds of millions of dollars through the end of 2027 and a decision to place the 2034 men’s World Cup in Saudi Arabia.
That FIFA-Saudi alliance represents an opportunistic relationship for both sides. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership, the Gulf petromonarchy has spent lavishly on sports, from golf to boxing to motor racing, while facing criticism over its human-rights record and state-sanctioned killing of a prominent journalist.
Before Saudi Arabia eventually secured the 2034 tournament, officials in Riyadh had maneuvered to try to obtain the 2030 World Cup. Due to FIFA limitations on Asia hosting the quadrennial soccer jamboree again so soon after Qatar in 2022, Saudi Arabia attempted to partner with countries in other confederations — including Greece, Egypt and Italy — to give their bid a trans-continental identity.
Italy demurred, wary of the Gulf nation’s widely criticized human-rights record and at loggerheads with Egypt over the killing of Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, a rejection that durably damaged relations between FIFA and Italy.
“When Italy decided not to join this project, there were some rather intemperate reactions, and from that moment Italy was no longer in FIFA’s orbit, regarded by Infantino as an ‘unfriendly’ federation,” the senior European soccer official said.
Vesel ascribed that type of reaction to Gallavotti’s personality, noting that he “changes his temper when you don’t agree with him. When he notices that you’ll go another way from what he wants, then he becomes another person.”
A second former senior FIFA official described him as a “ruthless [but] clever” operator, who rose to lead an “Italian clique” that effectively controls FIFA under Infantino, outside of the established secretariat.
