I read Gianni Infantino’s name-dropping, despot-fluffing book so you don’t have to | Barney Ronay

Gliding through time as if surfing a rainbow, you can transform uncertainty into something beautiful. People sometimes like to talk in general terms about the idea, the abstract concept of the worst book ever written. Probably this title should belong to a book that is supposed to be good in the first place, like a really terrible Norman Mailer about a super-tough, hard-drinking American fiction genius who has a fist-fight with a zebra on an oil rig. In The Information, Martin Amis has one of his characters write a modernist novel so complex and tortured it keeps inducing strokes, allergic reactions and minor brain aneurysms in the publishers he sends it to, which is a good joke, possibly even the best joke in The Information. I wouldn’t know because I kept choking on my own vomit and bleeding out of my eyes every time I tried to get past page 20. Sport has made its own bid for this crown at various points. Alex Ferguson wrote a book about leadership so boring it was actually quite dangerous when mixed with any kind of alcohol or medication. More recently there’s a new kind of sports book, the AI-generated Arne Slot biography you buy online and which unspools in a strangely cold and meandering tone, as though the author has been bitten by a venomous snake and is being encouraged to talk in a quietly droning voice about Arne Slot’s childhood in order to try to stay awake until the ambulance arrives. …