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The President of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is not just another title. Therefore, when Gianni Infantino expresses his opinion, not just about football, but on any other issue of global governance, about half of the world listens.

Indeed, Infantino is a global leader. According to FIFA, there are five billion football fans around the world, with Latin America, the Middle East and Africa – basically Global South nations – representing the largest fan bases. These fans will very often support their national team, their local club, a “world” club, and sometimes even a particular player.

Now, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. On October 19 Infantino was trending following his slamming of Western countries for their “hypocrisy” regarding organization of the World Cup in Qatar. He stated that the West had no moral authority to give “moral lessons” to other nations.

In a press conference full of fire and fury in the Qatari capital in front of hundreds of journalists on the eve of the World Cup, Infantino minced no words: “I’m European. For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,”

He blasted European and Western business companies who had earned billions of dollars from Qatar over the years, but never once addressed the issue of migrant workers, something which he said he had personally undertaken over the last several years. Basically, he meant that the West is utterly dishonest and needs serious soul searching.

The Western critics of the FIFA World Cup had also criticized the Qatari government for allegedly banning gay displays – homosexuality is illegal in the country – and outlawing alcohol in the football stadiums. But this simply proved the West’s intolerance against, and disrespect of non-Western cultures. Tolerance is a two-way street, not a one-sided condescending relationship where one side feels superior than the other by virtue of the color of the skin.

Clearly, the FIFA president was on point about Western hypocrisy. For instance, the United States and its allies have especially called out China using false accusations of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. According to the U.S., the Chinese government has actually carried out genocide against the region’s Uygur Muslim minority.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Open and transparent fact finding missions in the Xinjiang region by various diplomatic missions and international bodies, including the so called human rights organizations, have found nothing to that effect. The accusations have been malicious aimed at besmirching China’s reputation and sabotaging its constant rise.

Today, these same Western countries purport to censure African governments for human rights abuses, even in clear cases that involve national security. But the same West can ride roughshod over countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and for years preside over the death of thousands of innocent civilians in the guise of fighting terrorism. To the West, these are children of a lesser God compared to their own citizens.

Infantino’s sentiments carried more weight due to the fact that he is not a politician. FIFA is also not a profit making commercial company. It has no shareholders keeping an eye on the bottom line. It mobilizes funds from its activities mainly through advertising, most of the latter revenue obviously coming from Western multinationals.

In football parlance what the Western media termed as a tirade was the equivalent of an own goal by Infantino. The alleged betrayal was unthinkable. One of their own had broken the code of silence, and freed himself from the mental shackles of capitalism, imperialism and hypocrisy.

Likely, the same sentiments would not have hit global headlines if they were uttered by someone outside the Western bloc. They would have been dismissed as the rantings of an unenlightened player or disgruntled rabble rouser not deserving any attention or response.

 According to Infantino, the West needs to undertake an audit of its dark past, from its involvement in slavery to colonialism and even neo-colonialism. Continents like Africa are still suffering after centuries of imperialism and plain atrocities by Western countries.

And by the way, the West’s human rights abuses across the globe have also been occasioned by some of its foreign policies, particularly economic conditions for aid that have disenfranchised whole nations.

While Infantino acceded to the fact that things were not perfect in Qatar, the West’s holier-than-thou double standards by pointing a finger at others was unjustified. The FIFA president has definitely opened a hornet’s nest which in the coming months and years might witness the expression of similar sentiments from unlikely sources, and call for amends. 

Indeed, the sins of the Western world over the centuries are catching up with it. Instead of perennially trying to pull the speck from eyes of others, the West should remove the log of stubbornness lodged in its eyes and own up to the blinkers that have stopped it from seeing the utter social, cultural and economic brutality it has wrought in other societies.