Gianni Infantino frequently speaks like an old man who listens only to old men. He is not quite as brazen as his FIFA predecessor, the dinosaurian Sepp Blatter. But his rhetoric sometimes strays from puzzling to cringey to absurd. On Friday, he went a step further, infuriating many with a quote that spread like wildfire, context be damned. Speaking at FIFA’s second Women’s Football Convention in Sydney, he told women to “pick the right battles, pick the right fights.”
He urged them to “push” for equality in soccer, to “push” on FIFA’s “doors.