Victor Montagliani has told Concacaf staff that he intends to stand for re-election as the confederation’s president next year, a decision that would rule him out of challenging Gianni Infantino for the Fifa presidency. The Canadian businessman is understood to have relayed the same message to most of the 41 members of Concacaf, the North and Central American and Caribbean confederation.
Montagliani had been widely touted as a potential candidate to take on Infantino, particularly among Uefa member associations. Those associations are conscious that a European candidate would have no chance of beating Infantino in a ballot of Fifa’s 211 members, which helped fuel the interest in Montagliani as an alternative. At a town hall meeting of Concacaf staff late last month, however, he is understood to have said that despite the Fifa governance crisis and calls for him to stand, he wants to continue serving members in the region.
The timing of the two elections pushed Montagliani to clarify his intentions. Concacaf’s presidential election will take place in the first quarter of next year, ahead of the Fifa vote on 18 March in Rabat, and the similar timelines made it necessary for him to set out his plans to staff.
Montagliani, 61, was elected Concacaf president on a reforming mandate a decade ago, in the wake of the corruption scandal that culminated in the arrest of the then Concacaf president Jeffrey Webb following an FBI investigation. Webb admitted he had taken “bribes and kickbacks”.
Attention will also turn to Uefa, which will hold its own presidential elections next year. Aleksander Ceferin, the incumbent, confirmed his intention to stand at a meeting of Uefa’s 55 member associations in Berlin on Thursday. Montagliani and Ceferin are expected to continue working together to bring about governance reform at Fifa after the World Cup sell-off scandal, which will be on the agenda at next Thursday’s Fifa council meeting in Zurich.
Fifa’s council has not met since Infantino’s Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan was exposed in July, despite repeated calls from members for an extraordinary general meeting. The Zurich summit will be its first meeting since the Fifa congress in Vancouver last March. Montagliani, Ceferin and the Asian Football Confederation president, Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, are expected to use the council meeting to demand an independent review of FFE and to call for broader governance reforms at Fifa, which would give a greater voice to stakeholders and formalise the council’s role in decision-making. Previous calls from the trio, expressed in letters sent to Infantino last month, for Fifa to allocate a portion of its $6bn (£4.5bn) cash reserves to members will also be discussed.