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One opposing team is pressing its case.
Sadly to say, I think power has gone to his head.
They're crowding the box.
Infantino has debased the office that he promised to elevate.
He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game.
He should go now.
Can FIFA's president defend his own goal?
That's World Business Report from the BBC.
I'm Ed Butler and tonight we will be talking with another former FIFA executive as the embattled Gianni Infantino holds crisis talks in Morocco.
Also in the show, how a record drought is cutting rail freight in Europe and why the Saudi crown prince is buying one of the world's top video game developers.
The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has been meeting senior leaders of football's world governing body today in what's been widely described as a crisis meeting.
Criticism has certainly intensified by the day.
In the last couple of weeks over his now scrapped plan to sell off part of FIFA's commercial and event operations.
The former Portugal, Real Madrid and Barcelona superstar Luis Figo, for example, who stood for the FIFA presidency in 2015,
Was today calling for Infantino to resign in no uncertain terms.
His tweet was written on X and it's read now by a BBC producer.
Today I join others from across our game and call for Gianni Infantino to resign as FIFA president.
Infantino has debased the office that he promised to elevate.
He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game he's supposed to serve.
He's lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisors, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport, and even, it would seem, the FIFA Peace Prize winner.
It is too late to save his dignity, but it is not too late to save football.
He should go now.
While Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has also weighed in despite being the joint host of the recent World Cup, Mr Carney has said he too has lost confidence in Mr Infantino.
Certainly I don't have confidence in him.
Mr. Infantino, after this point, given what transpired and given the nature of what transpired.
Look, I'll give you an example.
Carlos Cordero is someone I've known for
More than three decades, very high integrity individual and he was his advisor and had expertise in all the aspects of what was proposed and he was not consulted.
Well, Alexandra Addison is a former member of the FIFA Governance Committee based in Canada too.
She's also president of Trace International Incorporated, an organisation that...
Focuses on anti-bribery compliance and good governance.
Hello, Alexandra.
So, Mr Infantino, he's today meeting his critics.
It's a clear-the-air meeting.
His team are calling it constructive, a positive meeting.
I mean, he's doing his best to appease everyone, isn't he?
Yeah, I think that's in the category of too little, too late.
Just when you think FIFA's reached a new low-water mark, they surprise you.
Really?
I mean, what's he actually done?
Where is precisely point to the smoking gun in this plan that he cooked up to raise all this money and sell off part of the rights for future World Cups?
Well, cooked up is the right expression.
He came up with this, it seems, almost entirely on his own, or at least with no transparency at all, not checking in with his advisors, not sharing the information with
The stakeholders, the FAs and others, and then rolled it out.
Well, inadvertently, I guess, when there was a leak.
With no justification.
FIFA doesn't need the money, so selling off one of their greatest treasures for no apparent reason requires at a minimum...
An explanation.
And so there's so much suspicion of the organization already that the assumption is he's trying to circumvent term limits.
He's going to have to leave in 2031.
And wouldn't this be a fabulous segue into the nicest private role in the soccer world?
Right.
So what you mean, he's setting up this new body in order to lead it even after he ceases to be president of FIFA.
That's the idea.
Yeah, it looks that way.
We have no idea because there's no transparency.
That's exactly the problem.
But people will assume the worst of FIFA because that's always been a problem.
Pretty reliable position.
But the lack of transparency means everybody is left to devise their own theories.
Right.
Okay, so...
FIFA doesn't need the money, but football needs the money, doesn't it?
I mean, certainly grassroots football does in places like Africa and in Latin America and a lot of those places.
There are a lot of supporters for Mr. Infantino.
We've heard from him this week saying, you know, he's great.
He's expanded the World Cup.
He's been good for us.
And here he is coming up with a plan to actually spread more money to the outlying regions.
Sure, but that's part of the problem.
It looks an awful lot like vote buying when he says, when Infantino says, if you support this, more money will flow your direction.
No oversight, too little accountability, any real controls that are in place are largely cosmetic.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that this money should flow to the FAs, but it's got to be accompanied by real accountability.
And that's always where
Okay.
Quick thought then.
You, it sounds like, and your Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and pretty much everybody I've ever heard from in UEFA and other parts of the world, too, are calling now.
For Mr. Amatino to go.
But he does seem to have still a lot of support elsewhere.
There is this vote, this election next March.
I mean, how do you see this playing out?
Well, it's interesting because he has nominally embraced better governance in the past.
And I think he could probably recover if he took that more seriously now, a truly external, independent body for more oversight, more transparency.
But his modus operandi has always been just to brazen it out and proceed with impunity.
So we'll see.
There's a lot of anger, as you note, in UEFA, in CONCACAF.
And can he keep the coalition together?
It will depend, I think, on just a very few small FAs who are keen to get their hands on that money.
It will depend on that.
It will also depend, won't it, on a viable rival candidate?
True, yes, there's going to be somebody who will step forward and challenge him, but that person is also going to have to win over those FAs.
The membership voting structure makes it very difficult for a newcomer.
What do you think?
Do you think Mr Infantino will be here in, let's say, four weeks' time?
Do you think he can survive this onslaught of anger we're hearing right now?
I would never bet against the cheekiness of FIFA officials.
Really?
OK.
So survival does look like the likeliest outcome, at least for the time being.
My thanks there very much to Alexandra Addison, a former member of the FIFA Governance Committee based there in Canada.
Now in Hungary, well, in fact, across Europe, after weeks of drought and extreme heat, river water levels are getting critically low.
On the Rhine, for example, in Germany, they are having such a disruptive effect on the freight there that the country is expecting to experience as much as a 0.1% or 0.2% fall in GDP over the next year.
Quarter as a direct result.
Earlier this week, we heard from a Hungarian cargo shipping owner, Boton Salma, who is only able to load half of his cargo because of the critically low water levels.
Think about it.
I'm going to fix with you 1,000 tonnes of cargo to Rotterdam.
And you pay me 20 euro per metric tons my income is 20 000 but i am going to load only 500 which means i'm going to get only half of the freight but the salary of the master the insurance
My expenditures in the office, blah, blah, blah, blah, are the very same.
The price of the gas oil are not going to decrease because of my half that big cargo capacity.
It's a double headache for the shipping companies.
While in Hungary, in Romania, in Bulgaria, nuclear power stations are also having to cut their production or even shut down altogether because they can no longer access water which they need for their cooling systems.
The Hungarian government is urging households and businesses therefore to cut electricity use during peak hours.
Because there isn't enough electricity to go around for those countries.
The railways are one of Hungary's biggest electricity users.
I spoke earlier to Csaba Reis.
He is the chief financial officer of the country's biggest rail cargo firm.
We need to stop trains, we need to have the locomotives at the right time, at the right places.
We need to reorganize the shifts of our long drivers.
It takes up a lot of measures.
Of course, it has an impact.
Approximately 30-40 trains are impacted a day.
And the measures practically aim at flattening out, smoothening
Out the consumption electricity consumption during the evenings
So so the essence of the measure is to to postpone the traffic not to cancel the traffic
So this is how we look at the situation and we try to resolve it the best possible way
So so what are the rules exactly that are being applied here
The rules levied by the government are very simple, so starting from 5pm until 10pm there is a restriction on the rail cargo traffic practically, with the exception of certain goods, like those goods that are essential for the political Hungarian national economy, like oil, certain chemicals, raw materials for power plants.
Coal and so on and so on.
And we are involved in the transportation of those goods.
We are well positioned to do so because we are the biggest real cargo company in Hungary.
And not just we are well positioned to do so, but we are trying to do that in the most efficient manner to really to reduce the energy consumption.
I mean, the restriction here is because of electricity use, right?
You're trying to restrict and ration the amount of commercial electricity use because of the challenge to the nuclear reactors in Hungary and, of course, in Romania as well.
That's correct.
So the root cause of the issue is that the nuclear power plant in Palkswitz contributes a very, very significant portion of the Hungarian construction cannot take cooling water from the river, and now the reactors are running at a reduced load.
We are not just aiming at reducing the consumption, but also to flatten out the consumption curves, because naturally when people go home in the evening after 5pm, so we are discussing exactly the same time window, they turn on the air conditioning, they turn on the household appliances, so there is a load, a big load there.
And that peak load, that peak needs to be flattened out.
And that's the reasoning behind these measures.
How much is this going to hurt you as a business?
I mean, this could be very expensive.
Of course, it has a significant impact.
But we are hopeful that the situation is not going to clear up for a long time.
So everybody hopes for that.
The Hungarian rail cargo operator Chaba.
Hi, this is Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast.
We have an exclusive report from the Black Sea as the Ukrainian Navy tries to stop Russia targeting trade vessels.
For all the day's top stories, search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now, in today's Business Daily podcast, Leanna Byrne has been speaking to Ola Sars, who's spent two decades helping shape the way that music is discovered, streamed and licensed.
He co-founded Beats Music, the streaming service that helped lay the groundwork for Apple Music before launching Soundtrack, a company that...
Provides licensed music to restaurants, cafes and other hospitality businesses.
But setting up a business servicing the hospitality industry just as Covid hit nearly meant it was all over before it properly began for him.
The story of my life is obviously finding sometimes good timing, but most often bad timing.
Just when we had gone through rollout funding close to death experiences trying to fund the kind of carve out from spotify with new investors and you know a whole bag of problems
I was able to kind of steady the ship.
Then I looked out of my window and there was no one on the street.
And that was March 2020 and the kind of formal breakout of COVID and obviously servicing hospitality, restaurants, bars.
And hotels was right in the sweet spot of total disaster.
So how close did Soundtrack come to running out of money?
Very close.
Multiple times I've stood in front of the team and said, I can only pay your salary next month.
Oh, I mean, you'd already lived through the disappointment of leaving Beats.
Did the pandemic ever make you question whether you actually wanted to head up another business at all anymore?
Oh, you know, you know, it could.
I don't think it could get any worse.
And I've said that multiple times, and it just keeps getting worse.
But it is the reality of trying to build something.
But I do think I've been over-indexing in events that have created some extra excitement.
Hmm.
You can hear more from Olusas by downloading today's edition of Founders from Business Daily, wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, for years, the Philippines built one of the world's biggest outsourcing industries, employing almost 2 million people.
Serving customers around the world.
But as artificial intelligence spreads through workplaces like theirs, some employees say that they're already being replaced by the technology that they were asked to use.
Our Asia business correspondent, Surenjana Tiwari, now reports from Manila.
I'm standing in Cubao in Quezon City and it's about 6pm.
Call centre workers with lanyards still around their necks are gathering by the roadside waiting for minibuses to go home.
Around them are malls and coffee shops which are still busy.
They're really catering to office crowds.
The outsourcing industry employs around 1.9 million Filipinos.
It generates roughly 40 billion dollars a year.
Workers say artificial intelligence is changing jobs.
And in some cases, ending them.
None of the people we spoke to were willing to share their real names.
They'd signed confidentiality agreements in exchange for severance pay and feared speaking publicly will make it harder to find work in an industry they say is small and competitive.
Of course, they won't say it's because of AI.
They'll not admit it was AI, but that was the root of it.
Lisa, not her real name, is a single mother.
She says she lost her job one month before it would have become permanent.
I feel like I dug my own grave.
We were the ones who trained the AI that replaced us.
Mary was also made redundant.
Before that, AI was introduced to help content writers work faster.
We had to edit more, fact check more since the data spewed by AI was this inaccurate once.
So technically it was more work for us.
The International Labour Organization estimates that more than a quarter of Filipino workers are exposed to generative AI, the highest proportion in Southeast Asia.
It says many jobs are more likely to change rather than disappear altogether.
The first set of skills that we need to be ready for.
Jack Madrid is president and CEO for the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, which represents the industry.
Obviously, there's a layer of jobs that are automatable or have been automated.
A vast majority of the jobs that have been affected have been able to redeploy.
Within the same organization.
They're competing, right, with other call centers from India.
But researchers say the pressure to automate is increasingly coming from overseas clients who now expect suppliers to integrate AI into the services they sell.
Paul Quintos is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
There's tremendous pressure from clients, from foreign clients to adopt AI just because it's a major cost-cutting measure.
The government has approved funding to upskill more than 300,000 workers in the industry and wants investment to go into building more home-grown technology companies
Alongside the foreign outsourcing firms that help transform the economy.
We are in the process of procuring a learning experience platform.
Leandro Aguirre is Under Secretary for the Department of Information and Communications Technology.
We have a whole lot of catching up to do to put our people in a position that they will not be displaced, but actually be able to thrive in this growing AI race.
For years, Filipino workers helped build the outsourcing industry into a powerhouse for the economy.
Now, as AI reshapes work, the challenge is making sure they are left behind.
Surinjana Tawari reporting there.
Now for a quick look at the news from the markets.
Susan Schmidt is a portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources in Chicago.
Hi, Susan.
Let's start with oil, shall we?
I mean, not much movement today, but there was this deal announced, wasn't there, between Iran and Oman and the Strait of Hormuz.
You do wonder now, don't you, what moves markets on this subject?
Because...
There's a piece of news here, a piece of news there, and it's just who you believe.
There's always something apparently around this topic lately.
Yes, a lot of volatility in oil.
The conflict started.
And we have seen a movement in oil, but it's been happening over the last three days.
Not a lot of movement today, but down about 10% since we started hearing about the potential for yet another deal that will allow for shipping in and out of the Strait of Hormuz without any problems.
We seem to have something that is being worked on now.
The market's certainly acting like we're going to get that free supply going again.
But this is one where I think we can all agree it's a wait-and-see approach.
We're not quite sure what will happen.
Well, one thing the market did seem pretty sure about was the fortunes of Disney, didn't it?
Up considerably today after its results, Toy Story 5 doing well at the box office seems to have helped.
Yes, Disney had a very strong earnings report today, exceeding analysts' expectations on their earnings, talking about how their entertainment division did very well, and also the theme parks in the U.S.
So,
Definitely strong.
Toy Story, one of the big successes of the quarter, as was Devil Wears Prada.
A couple of movies as well, not so great.
The continuation in the Star Wars saga and another Grogu didn't get the headlines and the attendance that they would like.
But still, enough to carry it along, exceed analyst expectations.
And I think really...
Start to get investors interested again in what Disney may be able to produce as they talk about their streaming plans.
Well, so as one reaches for their buckets of popcorn for Disney, I guess we're all watching similarly around SpaceX because its movements have been pretty spectacular over the last couple of months, now 13% down again on Wednesday.
Yes, one could say this is entertainment of a different form.
So we have a lot of movement, a lot of discussion over comments that management made in their earnings call last night, down 13% today.
It was up 9% or so yesterday.
The markets are concerned because in that call, we heard a lot about how much they're spending on
Artificial intelligence, the capital expenditures for them in the last quarter, $16 billion.
And that's something that they're only making $3.5 billion in revenues from has yet to be profitable.
OK, Susan, thanks very much indeed.
The US gaming giant Electronic Arts behind blockbuster games like The Sims and FIFA has been sold for $55 billion in what's believed to be the largest leveraged buyout in...
Gaming history.
The company has been bought by a consortium, including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and affinity partners led by President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
$20 billion of the deal is being funded through borrowing.
Investors are taking EA private, removing it from the stock exchange.
Some analysts have expressed concern that the deal could lead to mass layoffs and big cost-cutting measures.
I don't think this is the result that any players wanted.
This is purely driven by the people that own the games and their intentions and what they want.
To see where the money is coming from, I feel like a lot of us are worried that that might impact our experience of the game.
So I feel like a lot of us are kind of holding our breath.
How can you trust an investment body to not be even more profit-driven?
And it just pushes out so many more people.
The thoughts of some gamers there.
Well, I've been speaking to Peter Moores.
He's a doyen of the games industry and himself a former senior executive at EA Sports and Microsoft's Xbox.
Well, you know, it's been a year now since it was announced.
You know, I'm very familiar with what's going on, in particular in Saudi Arabia, having visited there for the Esports World Cup last summer.
And from my perspective, I was at EA for 10 years.
It's an amazing company, incredibly creative.
And one of the things that kind of drove us crazy at times was
Every 90 days having to meet our numbers.
And that's not really conducive for when you think of modern video game development, which takes many, many years.
And I think this gives EA the opportunity to work within a private sector where they're not having to report numbers every 90 days.
It's being bought by Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund and by affinity partners led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Is there politics at play here, or is it simply that the crown prince is a gamer?
I think it's the latter.
MBS is a gamer.
His ministers, having been there and attended the Esports World Cup and attended a meeting with all of the ministers, they're all gamers.
This ties in, Ed, to Saudi's Vision 2030, which is...
To move away from fossil fuels as the main business model for Saudi and move into more digital enterprises.
They're already savvy games is a massive part of what they do.
There are game studios cropping up there in Saudi.
And I think this will be obviously the jewel in the crown.
How would you characterize the state of the industry generally right now, the health of it?
Because, I mean, it seems to be a very mixed picture.
A lot of people feel like, particularly since the pandemic, it's been a lot of doom and gloom.
Yeah, I mean, the pandemic was a huge boost for video games.
We were all stuck inside and more and more people played more games and more and more people discovered video games.
But coming out of the pandemic, those numbers have dwindled as we've all gone back to work and had less time.
I think artificial intelligence is also a boon for development, but it
Requires, unfortunately, less people.
And I think that the industry is going through this transformation.
And hence Microsoft cutting nearly 5,000 jobs, it announced on Monday.
Yeah, sad.
I mean, I worked there, obviously.
I was head of that group.
I think what you're looking at
There is a bigger issue of where, you know, what's known as first parties, the companies that also make the hardware, the game consoles, and how all that fits into the modern world and whether we're...
On the cusp of going to a world that doesn't require hardware and you simply maybe have a chip in your television or pc
Gaming becomes even more um relevant and prevalent in gaming and you know the console goes away
Obviously we're still selling consoles and millions of them but
The future, I think, is probably a hardware-less future when you look at gaming that may be 10 years in the future.
Right, which is depressive for its value as an industry, right?
It shrinks the industry, it perhaps streamlines the industry.
People are talking now about streamers themselves, like Netflix becoming more and more important in the way it's delivered.
All of the platforms, look, you go on Netflix right now and you don't have to scroll too far down the home screen and you hit games.
The ability there, you know, if you will, the Netflix of games has always been the dream of many of the publishers in which they simply can put all of their games on the television.
You've got a controller that's connected.
You don't have lag or latency, you know, when you're playing the game.
And look, there's no doubt ultimately that will be the future.
Right now, people love playing on their consoles, but with the price increases that have been announced on the Xbox, it becomes that much less affordable.
In a world and an economy right now that's inflationary and we're all struggling with the costs of basics, petrol and food.
Gaming unfortunately is a luxury and a lot of people are playing less games and buying less hardware.
Peter Moores, and that's your World Business Report.
Hi, this is Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast.
We have an exclusive report from the Black Sea as the Ukrainian Navy tries to stop Russia targeting trade vessels.
For all the days, top stories search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
