UEFA said on Saturday it has lost confidence in Gianni Infantino’s leadership of FIFA, after the embattled president scrapped a plan to sell stakes in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors. The withdrawal of the proposal, which would have created a $20 billion entity controlling commercial rights to FIFA’s events, came after European nations voted to boycott FIFA competitions and confederations on three continents voiced opposition.
The plan unraveled quickly. First reported in the media on Tuesday, the proposal would have sold a roughly 20 percent stake in a new unit, FIFA Forward Enterprise, to an investor group led by Thrive Eternal. That firm is run by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is married to President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Each FIFA member country would have received an initial payment of $20 million and a doubling of their annual stipend to $5 million. FIFA aimed to raise up to $4.2 billion through the sale.
UEFA, which governs European football, voted on Thursday to boycott FIFA events, including the World Cup, if the plan moved forward. European football’s governing body said the World Cup “cannot be treated as an investment product.” On Saturday, after Infantino announced late on Friday that the plan would be withdrawn, UEFA issued a lengthy statement welcoming the decision and describing it as “a victory for the whole game.” But the statement went further, accusing Infantino of failing to deliver on transparency promises he made during his 2016 campaign for the FIFA presidency.
How the opposition mounted
UEFA was not alone. Concacaf, which governs football in North, Central America, and the Caribbean, said its members “rejected” the proposal, with sources telling the BBC that the vast majority of associations from the region are losing, or have lost, faith in Infantino. The Asian Football Confederation said it stood in “solidarity” with UEFA and Concacaf. The Kuala Lumpur-based AFC, one of FIFA’s six confederations, is responsible for running regional club and national team competitions across continental Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. Andy Burnham said Infantino was “the wrong man” to lead FIFA, the BBC reported.
Resistance came from inside FIFA. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s senior adviser on global strategy and governance, resigned over the matter, calling the proposal “a bad deal for football” that would “mortgage football’s future.” On Friday, FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said the governing body’s own administration had been “deceived” about the project. Lamour described the plan as “the project of one person” and said the time had come for football’s political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions. He added that he had a duty of loyalty to certain values and to supporting his colleagues. “If that means I lose my job, then so be it,” Lamour said. “I will understand and respect that decision. At least I’ll sleep well tonight.”
Infantino responds
Infantino, in a statement released late on Friday, said it had “become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.” He said his intent was to bring all interested parties back together in the coming days and weeks in the spirit of shared interest in the game. Following the backlash, Infantino said FIFA had scrapped the plans after listening “carefully to all the views.”
UEFA was not satisfied. “We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game,” the statement read. “We must identify those responsible and hold them to account.” The statement quoted Infantino’s 2016 campaign promise that “of course we have to be transparent.” He had also told assembled stakeholders: “The money of FIFA is your money. It’s not the money of the FIFA president. You are the national associations and the money of FIFA has to serve for the development of football and not for anything else.” On both promises, UEFA said, he has failed to deliver. The organization called the deal “shabby” and “opaque,” saying it was “anything but transparent.” UEFA added that it wants to work with partners and stakeholders to propose new ways of distributing resources through the existing FIFA Forward Programme.
The AFC echoed those concerns. AFC President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa posted a letter on the confederation’s website on Saturday. He said he expects “any initiative that has the potential to impact global football will be presented and discussed with the Confederations, the FIFA Council, Member Associations and other stakeholders in a timely, transparent and meaningful manner.” “The future of global football must always be shaped through proper consultation, collective dialogue and respect for the established governance structures of our game,” Sheikh Salman said. On Thursday, he had told member associations that the way the FIFA proposal was made was “totally unacceptable.”
UEFA warned that the withdrawal is not the end of the story. “The proposal has gone. The task of rebuilding trust in FIFA has only just begun,” the statement read. Infantino faces re-election for a fourth term as president at the FIFA Congress in March, and his survival is now in doubt.