FIFA president Gianni Infantino appears to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
A month after the final of 2026 World Cup, which earned FIFA a record $15 billion in revenues, Infantino is fighting to keep his job. His controversial plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup to a group of private investors led by Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, sparked a global backlash that shows no signs of abetting. The past week, soccer legends, sports authorities and even world leaders have called for Infantino to resign.
“Infantino must go,” wrote Portuguese soccer legend Luis Figo in an op-ed for the Daily Mail. “The Infantino era is over,” added Javier Tebas, president of Italy’s La Liga, an interview with French newspaper Le Monde. “It should be fatal,” said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, on Infantino’s misstep with the sell-off plans. “Certainly I don’t have confidence in Mr. Infantino.”
The pile on has continued despite Infantino dropping his plan, officially ditching the proposal on July 31. The deal would have seen FIFA, a 96-year-old nonprofit, spin off its commercial interests into a new division, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE). Kushner’s private equity group Thrive Capital would then buy a 21 percent stake in FFE for $4.2 billion. FIFA had argued the arrangement would raise billions to fund global sports development.
European soccer body UEFA called it an attempt to sell “the soul” of soccer and threatened to boycott future FIFA tournaments if the deal went through. The Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF, which represents national organizations in North America, Central America and the Caribbean. also rejected the proposal.
FIFA quickly backed down. UEFA has not. Last week it said its boycott is still in place. The group reiterated its position that it has “lost confidence in Gianni Infantino’s presidency.” UEFA’s boycott will be tested at FIFA’s Under-20 Women’s World Cup, which kicks off in Poland Sept. 5.
On Friday, Norwegian soccer association directly called for Infantino to resign. “The trust is now gone for us,” Norwegian Football Federation president, Lise Klaveness, told The Guardian. “There is no way back for Infantino.”
Underlining that sentiment was an open letter, published Monday, and signed by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, Asian Football Confederation head Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, and CONCACAF president, Victor Montagliani, sharply criticizing Infantino. “When trust is broken through deception,” the letter reads, “when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”
The Canadian Montagliani is believed to be one of the leading contenders to replace Infantino as FIFA president.
The letter calls out FIFA’s response to the crisis. While FIFA and Infantino dropped the World Cup sell-off scheme, it says, they showed no remorse for the proposal itself.
“[FIFA] did not acknowledge that the proposal itself was inherently wrong. There remains no recognition that attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup was a profound failure of judgment – not just a procedural misstep, but a fundamental breach of trust with the very institutions FIFA exists to serve,” the letter reads. The letter calls for an independent review into the scandal.
Adding to the pile on was a report on Friday that a female employee alleged to have been in a relationship with Infantino when he was general secretary at UEFA, received a six-figure “departure payment.” UEFA confirmed the payment but FIFA said the allegations of inappropriate conduct by Infantino are “categorically untrue” and “defamatory,” adding that “no employee at UEFA and FIFA has ever raised a complaint regarding Mr Infantino’s behavior because there never was an incident where he was involved.”
FIFA on Saturday fired back at Infantino’s critics, accusing them of trying, “through allegation, insinuation or misinformation” to undermine “FIFA’s established democratic processes” by trying to oust Infantino before presidential elections next March.
UEFA is reportedly seeking support from other soccer confederations to call an emergency FIFA Congress to trigger a vote of no confidence in the president. UEFA, with 55 members, easily meets the threshold of 43 votes to call an emergency meeting. To topple Infantino, however, would require a majority of FIFA members, or 106 of the 211 national associations. The Confederation of African Football and South American confederation CONMEBOL have both publicly announced their backing for Infantino. Last week, Mexico broke with North American confederation CONCACAF to support FIFA’s beleaguered president.
The pressure is mounting on Gianni Infantino, but there is still time on the clock for him to turn this defeat back into a win.