Uefa's Strong Reprimand of Gianni Infantino's Presidency

Uefa has delivered its most ferocious public rebuke of Gianni Infantino’s presidency, warning that his style of rule at Fifa has reached a breaking point and demanding a “thorough and fundamental” overhaul of the organisation’s governance.

In a blistering statement laced with references to “secret schemes”, “shabby backroom deals” and “faceless individuals”, European football’s governing body made clear that Fifa’s overnight U-turn on Infantino’s controversial plan to sell off stakes in World Cup and other commercial rights has not cooled its anger.

The message from Nyon was stark: this crisis is Infantino’s, and he should not be allowed to simply ride it out.

Uefa turns on Infantino

While Uefa stopped short of explicitly calling for Infantino to resign, senior European figures are understood to be united in their belief that he should not survive the fallout. Influential associations across the world share that view, and leading officials have already begun the process of identifying a candidate to run against him in next year’s Fifa presidential election.

That search is expected to intensify in the coming days.

Under Aleksander Ceferin, who last week secured unanimous backing from all 55 Uefa member associations for a World Cup boycott threat, Europe has moved from grumbling opposition to open confrontation. The statement under his leadership made clear that Uefa intends to keep pushing.

“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,” it read. “We must identify those responsible and hold them to account.”

The language marked a dramatic escalation in the long-running tension between Uefa and Fifa, turning a simmering power struggle into an outright challenge to Infantino’s authority.

Broken promises and lost trust

Uefa’s leadership accused Infantino of betraying the very pledges that carried him into office in 2016. In a pointed move, it quoted his own campaign words back at him, recalling his promises of transparency and of treating Fifa’s money as belonging to the national associations and the development of football, not to the president.

“On both these promises, he has failed to deliver,” Uefa declared. The “shabby, back room, opaque deal” he tried to push through, it said, was the antithesis of transparency. With Fifa’s reserves now above $5bn, Uefa argued, Infantino has also failed to use those funds properly “for the benefit of the game”.

For Europe’s powerbrokers, the abandoned proposal to sell 20% of a new commercial vehicle – Fifa Forward Enterprise – to private investors was not an isolated misstep. It was evidence, they believe, of a pattern of governance that sidelines stakeholders and centralises power in the president’s office.

Uefa made clear it wants to know exactly how the plan was developed and who drove it. It called for a deep, no-limits review of Fifa’s governance, insisting “no option should be off the table”. The current leadership, it said, has lost not only Uefa’s confidence “but also that of many other members of the football family”.

An election no longer a formality

Until this week, Infantino’s re-election at the Fifa Congress in Rabat next March looked like a formality. The 56-year-old had been expected to run unopposed for a third full term and had already secured more than 200 letters of support from member associations endorsing his campaign.

Those letters can be withdrawn. And the deadline for rival candidates to declare is 18 November.

Suddenly, the landscape has shifted. Uefa’s intervention has turned a coronation into a contest waiting to happen.

Names are already circulating. Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi is favoured by many in Europe, though he is understood to be reluctant and his role as chairman of the influential European Football Clubs lobby group complicates any potential bid. Other possibilities include Victor Montagliani, the Canadian president of Concacaf, and Salman al-Khalifa, the Asian Football Confederation president who lost narrowly to Infantino in the 2016 Fifa election.

Whether any of them steps forward remains to be seen. But the idea of Infantino gliding unchallenged into another term has been shattered.

Money, power and the Fifa Forward fight

At the heart of the row lies Fifa’s financial muscle and how it is used.

Under the current Fifa Forward programme, all 211 member associations receive the same central payment from Fifa over each four-year cycle. Infantino’s aborted plan would have seen 20% of a new commercial company sold to private investors, with the promise of boosting those payments from $8m to $20m in the next cycle, plus a one-off $20m bonus for associations that signed up by 19 September.

Critics have long argued that showering millions on the smallest associations entrenches a system of patronage that protects the incumbent president. The proposed $20m signing bonus only intensified those accusations.

Uefa’s statement attacked both the scheme and the logic behind it. It argued that Fifa does not need to “sell off the family silver” to invest in the game when billions are already sitting in its accounts.

“Uefa will begin work immediately with partners and stakeholders all over the world and right across the game to propose a new way of distributing resources through the existing Fifa Forward programme,” it said. The aim, it stressed, is to unlock the money “sat idle in Fifa’s bank account” and channel it into the grassroots and wider game in each of the 211 member countries.

That is not just a technical dispute over funding formulas. It is a direct challenge to one of the key levers of presidential power inside Fifa.

A victory – and a warning

For now, Uefa has claimed a significant win. Infantino’s proposal has been scrapped. The World Cup and other blue-riband properties will not, for the moment, be partially sold off to private capital.

But Europe insists this is only the beginning.

“This is a victory for the whole game. But it must not be the end of the story,” the statement concluded. “The proposal has gone. The task of rebuilding trust in Fifa has only just begun.”

Infantino once campaigned as the reformer who would clean up world football’s governing body. A decade on, the same words he used to win power are being deployed against him, and the continent that helped elevate him is now leading the charge to cut him down.

The question now is not whether Fifa needs change. It is whether Gianni Infantino will be the man in charge when it finally arrives.