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👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 1 August 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
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☀️ The weekend’s weather: A wet morning for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness, although things brighten later. Aberdeen will see showers possible all day, I’m afraid. Tomorrow is better all round: sunny intervals all round, maybe even downright sunny in Edinburgh, and dry. London is set for a dry, hot weekend. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
Infantino abandons plan to sell the World Cup | The magic of Baresi | Trump’s money-making machine | The best wine for a dinner party | Who’s taking pictures, where? | The perfect Scottish log cabin
🍸 It was a plan which sparked an immediate civil war within global football, and now it’s been scrapped. Overnight, FIFA President Gianni Infantino abandoned his plan to sell off part of the World Cup to private investors.
As Martyn Ziegler of the Times puts it: “It was a day that began with Gianni Infantino doubling down on his World Cup sell-off plan, a lame attempt to be defiant in the face of a European boycott. It ended with the Fifa president scrapping his proposal and with his very future in serious doubt.”
Yesterday, Infantino’s chief advisor and FIFA’s chief operating officer had turned the screw by both saying they neither knew of the plan nor approved of it. On Thursday, Europe had said it would boycott FIFA tournaments if the plan went ahead. The Americas federation had also voiced its doubts, followed by Asia. Those objections had immediately devalued FIFA and its tournaments, ensuring the plan was dead in the water.
Kevin Lamour, FIFA’s COO, issued the statement which will have the most lasting damage for Infantino, however, calling his secrecy around the project “a lie by omission” that was “indicative of a lack of trust, a lack of transparency, a lack of discernment, a lack of good governance. And a serious lack of respect.”
It’s hard, but not impossible, to see how Infantino stays in office. Expect some oily contrition along the lines of “If I am guilty, it is only of having deep in my heart too much ambition for our precious football family”. He’ll be hard to flush away.
But want to read someone arguing in favour of Infantino’s deal? Gerard Baker offers the best - well, frankly, the only - column I could find doing that job.
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, including
The magic of Baresi, the player I always wanted to be
Inside Trump’s money-making machine (and meet his “princess of darkness”)
The best wine for a dinner party, by a renowned wine critic
A beautiful visualisation of who’s taking pictures in Edinburgh, where
A perfect Scottish log cabin is up for sale
PLUS: find top TV, film (Spider-Man!) and sporting picks for the weekend.
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