The woman who would fix FIFA by Kasie Hewitt

She appears to believe that institutions should be run by rules, that power should have limits, and that football might actually belong to the people who play it, watch it and pay for it.

Klaveness has spent years discovering that the easiest way to annoy powerful men is to ask them questions in public. It exposed a larger disagreement about what FIFA is for. Is it a federation of national associations, serving the game, or a commercial machine whose president acquires the instincts of a sovereign?

Klaveness seems to have made her choice. That does not necessarily mean she wants Infantino's chair. Her greatest asset may be that she treats the presidency as less important than the institution.

Her argument is essentially impolite, replacing one president with another is not reform. It is musical chairs. FIFA does not need a new face. It needs fewer opportunities for the person at the top to behave as though FIFA were a personal kingdom. Decisions need scrutiny. Commercial ambitions need institutional checks. National associations need consultation. Conflicts of interest need consequences rather than press releases. And the presidency needs to become a job, not a geopolitical lifestyle.

This is why Klaveness is dangerous to FIFA culture. She is not proposing a Scandinavian utopia in which everybody holds hands around a conference table. She is proposing something much more threatening: boring accountability.

The irony is that football's governing institutions have become sophisticated at producing spectacle while remaining primitive about governance. The World Cup is a cultural phenomenon; FIFA can negotiate billions in commercial revenue; presidents can speak to heads of government. Yet the democratic question remains medieval: who watches the people who run the game?

Klaveness's appeal lies in her refusal to separate football from politics, because football has never been separate from politics. Stadiums, money, migration, human rights, national identity and diplomacy walk onto the pitch. Pretending otherwise leaves political decisions to people who prefer not to discuss them.

That distinction matters because FIFA's problem has never been a shortage of executives. It has been the temptation to confuse charisma with legitimacy, influence with accountability, and success with institutional health. A reformer entering that palace can easily discover that the furniture is more comfortable than the principles.

Klaveness seems alert to the trap. Would she be a good FIFA president? Perhaps. She has the legal background, football experience and political nerve. More importantly, she has demonstrated something rarer: a willingness to spend political capital without knowing what she will receive in return.

But should she become president? Only if she can resist becoming the kind of president she has spent years criticising. That is the test. FIFA does not need another saviour. It needs an institution capable of surviving its saviours.

Klaveness may therefore be the future of FIFA precisely because she understands that the future cannot sensibly belong to one person. If she wants the presidency, she will have to convince the world that she wants to change the office more than she wants the office itself.

And if she does not want it? That may be the most encouraging possibility of all. Perhaps the person FIFA needs most is the one willing to rebuild the house without insisting on sleeping in the biggest bedroom today.