England's defeat should be the least of football fans’ worries

England fell short in a semi-final.

Within minutes, the national inquest was underway. Everyone's got an opinion: wrong substitutions, poor tactics, bad luck. We’ll hear it all for days.

But the real problem with football wasn’t what happened on the pitch last night. It was sitting in the VIP seats, smiling for the cameras.

FIFA's Gianni Infantino was there, surrounded by politicians and power brokers, looking entirely at home. And that tells you something about what has happened to the world’s game.

We’ve become so used to the grubby politics around international football that we don't notice it anymore.

International football has gradually coarsened. The commercialisation feels grubby, and the politicisation is heinous. FIFA increasingly looks less like the guardian of world football and more like a medieval court with a football tournament attached.

This is the body that's been dogged by scandal for decades. In 2015, US law enforcement exposed a sprawling corruption scandal involving more than $150 million in alleged bribes and kickbacks. There were even dawn raids on luxury hotels in Zurich.

Then there are the regimes FIFA has been happy to endorse by cosying up to them. It handed showpiece World Cups to Russia and Qatar amid huge controversies over human rights and the bidding processes.

With FIFA, the faces change and the scandals change. But the one constant is a governing body with too much power and too little accountability.

Look at the extraordinary politicking around Donald Trump. During the tournament, Trump publicly intervened in the controversy surrounding American striker Folarin Balogun, questioning the referee. FIFA subsequently suspended Balogun's automatic one-match ban.

Whether Trump’s intervention directly caused that decision almost misses the point. We'll probably never know. But the fact that anyone could seriously wonder whether the US President had influenced a FIFA disciplinary decision tells you how bad things have got.

Even the appearance that political influence can bend the rules makes a mockery of the game.

And now we have the FIFA Peace Prize. FIFA, an organisation hardly famous for moral leadership, has decided it is qualified to judge who deserves recognition for their contribution to world peace. The recipient of this newly created honour? Donald Trump. The whole thing is so transparently sycophantic that it is almost beyond parody.

So why do the great football nations continue to put up with it?

FIFA is powerful only because they allow it to be. Without England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Argentina, it is nothing. It can have all the stadiums, sponsors and ceremonies it likes, but without the great football nations it doesn't have a World Cup anyone wants to watch.

England should lead this challenge. Not by storming out tomorrow or announcing some half-baked breakaway competition. But by working with the other major football nations to make FIFA believe, for the first time, that its authority is not unlimited.

A credible threat of a rival governing body would certainly wake FIFA up. Suddenly, the balance of power would look very different. FIFA has survived scandal after scandal because the countries that make international football valuable behave as though they have nowhere else to go.

They do.

Last night’s defeat was disappointing, but losing a semi-final is sport. Allowing politicians and unaccountable administrators to turn the world’s game into their personal playground is something much worse.

Football belongs to the players and supporters. It is time they took it back.

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Andy Preston is a political commentator.

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