Gianni Infantino will be questioned by Fifa council members over his involvement in the aborted World Cup sell-off plan, the Folarin Balogun affair and the decision to award Donald Trump the inaugural Fifa peace prize at what is expected to be a heated meeting at the world governing body’s headquarters in Zurich on Thursday.
It will be the Fifa president’s first encounter with his critics since the summer, when he rejected repeated calls for an extraordinary general meeting of council following the emergence of the controversial Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposals. One attender predicted the talks could be “explosive”.
The three confederation presidents who have publicly called for Infantino to resign will be in the room. Aleksander Ceferin of Uefa, Victor Montagliani of Concacaf and Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa of the Asian Football Confederation are all expected to press home demands for an independent review of Fifa’s governance. In response to letters the trio sent last month, Infantino pledged to commission an external review of Fifa’s future governance, but no details have been forthcoming and scepticism remains over whether it will be genuinely independent.
FFE, Balogun and the peace prize all featured on an agenda circulated by Fifa last month, but the president is also likely to face questions about a report in the Times this week that he received a “second salary” of about £1.3m in 2024 on top of the £3.9m declared in the governing body’s accounts.
US Internal Revenue Service filings show a Fifa subsidiary in charge of running last summer’s World Cup paid Infantino $1.76m, a sum that was not mentioned in Fifa’s annual report, where his salary is recorded as 4.27m Swiss francs (£3.88m). Fifa’s statutes state that “the individual compensation of the Fifa president … shall be made public”.
The governing body has denied wrongdoing, saying: “Fifa does not pay a second salary to the Fifa president and complies with all reporting requirements in relation to compensation. The Fifa president’s annual compensation, as well as other contractual benefits, are decided by the independent compensation subcommittee. Fifa strongly rejects any claims that it has failed to disclose any financial information and has violated Fifa’s statutes. Fifa accounts are independently audited, and all declarations are in line with tax regulations in Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere.”
Despite those controversies and the public opposition of the European, Asian and North and Central American and Caribbean confederations, Infantino is on course to be re-elected unopposed in March’s election. Montagliani has rejected calls to stand against him in order to focus on being re-elected as Concacaf’s president, while Uefa has yet to find an alternative candidate despite tentatively sounding out high-profile footballing figures including Arsène Wenger and Michele Kang, the owner of clubs including London City Lionesses.
The deadline for candidates to declare their intention to stand is 18 November, with the election to be held at the Fifa congress in Rabat on 18 March.