The most preposterous man in football is staggering on, drowning in such vanity and ego that he cannot see how he embarrasses himself, so perhaps that’s why the biggest hypocrites of another dark week for football appear to have got away with it.On Sunday, Real Madrid decided to weigh in on the Gianni Infantino scandal, instructing their media people to put out a sanctimonious statement welcoming the scrapping of the egghead’s plans to sell off a slice of the World Cup, and thanking UEFA for fulfilling their ‘duty’ to ‘protect football’.You really could not make some of this stuff up. Yes, that moralising really did come from the same Real Madrid whose avarice stank football out when they led the contemptible group of 12 clubs who attempted the European Super League breakaway coup, a few years back.Infantino’s intellectual and moral decrepitude may have been there for us all to see in his email offering nations a small cash consideration if they back his plans to raise $20billion, but have we forgotten the European club men with whiteboards and coloured marker pens, explaining their own despicable little earner in 2021?Real’s executives back then were just as atrocious as Infantino is now – worse, in fact, given that the FIFA scheme was not actually a breakaway proposal designed to leave the have-nots behind – while the money men they indirectly inveighed against on Sunday are the one and the same suits from JPMorgan Chase, hired by them to advise on the Super League. Given that the US finance house were forced to apologise for their part in that episode, you might have fancied they’d learned their lesson about how ferocious the backlash to a sell-out like this would be. No. They just couldn’t resist getting their snouts in the football trough again. Gianni Infantino is somehow staggering on as FIFA President, drowning in such vanity and ego that he cannot see how he embarrasses himself But many of his critics do not have a leg to stand on. These are clubs that tried to form the breakaway European Super League – and only buckled after immense fan pressure (pictured)So, please let’s get this right. The new flank in football’s civil war is not between the idealists and the profiteers, but between competing profiteers fighting over who gets to cash in on the game. UEFA, under Aleksander Ceferin, are currently casting themselves as the defenders of football’s traditions, protectors of the meritocracy, guardians of the fans against billionaire opportunists. Yet this is the self-same organisation which expanded the Champions League into a sprawling competition with 64 extra fixtures in 2024, to create greater TV income and more sponsorship revenue.The self-same organisation which has been engaged in a pitched battle for territory with FIFA. That fight has spawned the Nations League and the expanded Club World Cup, with each governing body viewing the other’s new tournament with deep suspicion. UEFA’s objection is not to football becoming more commercial but to someone else collecting the commercial rewards.Our own Premier League claim a moral high ground for themselves, too, proclaiming to be the world’s greatest and most unpredictable domestic competition, while generating more money than any such league in history. Yet it is driven by the same monopolistic greed, behaving as though sharing a fraction of the wealth with the rest of the football pyramid would be an act of unconscionable sacrifice.Don’t let it be forgotten that its biggest clubs, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, made their own power grab through Project Big Picture in 2020. Or that the Premier League held talks with CVC Capital Partners, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, about selling a stake in future broadcasting and commercial revenues, at the same time. That came to nothing, either, but here was an elite equally willing to explore new ways of extracting financial value from our game. The people’s game.Whenever the redistribution of Premier League wealth is discussed, we witness the language and narrative suddenly change and those overseeing the competition which has negotiated television contracts worth billions begin to fret about the pennies.It was clear when a White Paper on football governance was published a few years back that a greater flow of money down from the Premier League would be egregiously hard to extract. UEFA, under Aleksander Ceferin (right), are casting themselves as the defenders of football’s traditions. Yet they expanded and distorted the Champions League to generate more revenue It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Premier League’s biggest clubs, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, made their own power grab through Project Big Picture in 2020The gilded elite division continued to maintain the fallacy that they were helping the rest, when 70 per cent of the money they sent down below was Championship parachute money. An insurance policy for the division’s own members laughably dressed up as ‘solidarity payments’.It has taken Government intervention to force a more equitable share of the Premier League’s wealth throughout the game, in the shape of the Independent Football Regulator, with its ‘backstop’ power to force a settlement if none is agreed.Faced with such a prospect, the Premier League have finally just voted for an additional £1.5billion from those in the gilded cage, to be shared with the EFL’s clubs, though even that is not allocated yet. The cash, to be funded by a two per cent lift in the transfer levy on all top-flight deals, will clearly need to be crowbarred from clubs swimming in wealth, given the opposition led by Manchester City’s petro-dollar billionaire owners – another of the merry little European Super League band.We understand other members of the so-called ‘Big Six’ are also unhappy that they may now find themselves coughing up more than less elevated Premier League clubs. It’s been left to the more moderately wealthy members of the division, who faced down the big clubs over the Super League, to challenge them again. If there was one positive to come out of the Super League scandal, it was the way it cut the grasping, spiritually remote ‘Big Six’ down to size. ‘It’s like emerging from a slightly abusive relationship,’ the owner of one of the smaller Premier League clubs told me at the time.This weekend, the FA Cup begins its beautiful seasonal arc once more, carrying the customary thrill and sense of pride among all who will compete in its extra preliminary round. North Ferriby, at home to St Helens, Northwich Victoria, playing away to Beverley Town, and Nelson, entertaining Stockport Georgians, are just three of those taking part who know what a precarious financial reality and existential threat look and feel like.For all the weekend’s 438 competing clubs, reaching the first round proper – six ties away, in November – would be monumental, with £47,750 prize money for those who win at that stage.But any who progress that far will also experience the chill of strictures forced down from the top of the game. This will be the second season with no replays from the first round proper onwards – a diminishment the FA said was necessary because of increasing pressure on the calendar, particularly following UEFA’s expansion of their club competitions. The early rounds of the FA Cup still bring with them a sense of thrill and pride – though replays with England’s top clubs are now sadly a thing of the past Infantino is taking the logic of those presiding over the elite game to its natural conclusion, not dragging them somewhere they do not wish to goCritics, especially in the EFL and non-League, have argued that a vital source of income is being removed from smaller clubs, who can no longer earn lucrative replay gates against bigger opponents. But those little people are shouting in the dark. The abolition of replays, fourth-round matches spread over five days and the scheduling of the 2027 final before the Premier League campaign finishes, rather than as the climax to the season, belong to the story of the competition’s devaluation and diminishment. The Cup has been crushed into virtual irrelevance by football’s high and mighty.As of last night, Infantino’s brazen conceit and vanity were keeping him in a job which any intelligent and self-respecting industry would by now have forced him from. He is no doubt banking on the relentless news cycle moving on and UEFA’s threat to boycott FIFA’s competition receding into the distance. Qualification games for the 2030 World Cup are just a year away and Infantino can safely calculate that national associations will not want to take the financial hit that a boycott would carry. It seems significant, and concerning, that a mere 11 national associations, including England and Wales, have voiced opposition to him remaining in post.Yet for all the sound and fury, there is something deeply unsettling and incomplete about some of this moralising. Infantino is taking the logic of those presiding over the elite game to its natural conclusion, not dragging them somewhere they do not wish to go. He is the most despicable emblem of a game which is slowly devouring itself, but by no means the only one.