Little more than two months ago, Gianni Infantino looked vulnerable. News had broken of his Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal — a plan to sell off commercial rights in the World Cup to a private equity firm — and the man who had seemed impregnable as the head of world football’s governing body suddenly appeared, to many, to be in an untenable position.
Now the picture has changed. With 40 days remaining until the 18 November deadline for nominations for the presidential election, senior figures in world football firmly believe the 56-year-old may well be unopposed — setting up another coronation at the Fifa Congress in Rabat on 18 March.
Uefa had seen FFE as its chance to remove Infantino, believing the proposal finally handed it the opportunity to cut the head off the snake. But the confederation did not have the necessary weapons to pull it off against a figure who has built up considerable levels of support in the rest of the world.
Since summoning the Fifa management board to Rabat on 5 August to discuss FFE, Infantino has been on a tour of the world to cement his position. He travelled to Colombia for the inauguration of the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, then visited a Fifa-funded youth football tournament in the Dominican Republic. At the weekend he was at the Fifa Asean Cup final in Jakarta, Indonesia, and this week he attended an African football conference in Cape Verde. It has been business as usual for the Swiss-Italian.
A rudimentary split remains in world football. Uefa, Concacaf and Asia are against Infantino; Africa, South America and Oceania are in support. That raises the prospect that he will be returned despite carrying the backing of only roughly half of Fifa’s 211 members.
It is the funding model that has made his position so impenetrable, even in the face of accusations that he has worked against the wider interests of the game. “We have invested $1bn in 10 years in Africa,” Infantino told delegates in Cape Verde. At the same event, and for the third time this year, the 54 African nations — carrying more than a quarter of the votes — pledged their unconditional support. That buys votes, and it buys loyalty too. Away from Europe, which has 55 votes, Infantino has that in bucketloads.
Uefa wants a president who is “a respected and unifying figure, deeply rooted in football” with “an unequivocal commitment to development, reform, integrity and independence”. It has not, however, been able to identify that person itself.
Victor Montagliani, the president of Concacaf, had been put forward as the most credible opponent — a non-European who could unify opposition to Infantino and perhaps persuade others to swap sides. But the Canadian never publicly said he even wanted the job, or to be the face of the campaign against Infantino, and he has told staff that he intends to stand for re-election with Concacaf, ending any suggestion that he could enter the race at the last moment. Only Ramon Vega, the former Tottenham and Switzerland defender, has put himself forward to stand. As was the case four years ago, it seems unlikely that Vega will even get the required five letters from the 211 member associations to back his candidacy.
To those on the outside looking in, it might seem preposterous that Infantino will be free to continue, considering the scandal and the reputational damage Fifa has faced. But the power of the position makes replacing the president incredibly difficult. Fifa has had only five presidents in the past 65 years, and only once — England’s Sir Stanley Rous in 1974 — has an incumbent lost an election. When Sepp Blatter resigned in 2015, he did so just eight days after winning re-election.
Next Thursday, Infantino will come face to face with his fiercest critics for the first time at a meeting of the Fifa Council in Zurich. The agenda is not limited to FFE: it also takes in the Fifa Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump and the US President’s subsequent intervention in Folarin Balogun’s red card at the World Cup. Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin is expected to attend in person, along with the other eight European representatives, including Football Association chair Debbie Hewitt. Ceferin, who on Wednesday confirmed he will stand for a fourth term in the role, has been unrelenting in his campaign to replace Infantino.
Even so, Uefa accepted internally some time ago that there was little chance of removing Infantino democratically. Its one key hand to play was a threat to boycott Fifa’s competitions, and it had to be used to get FFE scrapped. Hours after peace appeared to break out and Uefa rescinded that threat, it lodged claims in three US courts in an attempt to procure documents related to FFE. If those papers include anything incriminating, Uefa intends to pursue “criminal mismanagement” through the Swiss courts in the hope of forcing Infantino out. Up until now there have only been tit-for-tat legal exchanges, and even if Infantino does not have an opponent at the ballot box, the battle looks set to continue among the lawyers well into next year.
Infantino’s initial statements after the fall of FFE included some criticism of those who opposed it, but more recently he has appeared more conciliatory, perhaps aware that this approach may be more effective in winning the war. “When you go through a journey, sometimes concerns are raised,” he told the conference in Cape Verde. “When they are raised, we have to address them. As far as we are concerned at Fifa, we address them always with the spirit of dialogue and with open arms, an open heart and an open mind. We can always be better and do better.”
If, as expected, Infantino does stay, Uefa wants reform of Fifa governance — and it may run into trouble there too. Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, the president of the Asian confederation and a Fifa vice-president who sits on the Council, had been a fierce critic of Infantino. But this week, in a letter sent to Ceferin, Montagliani and Infantino, he distanced himself from a “wholesale redesign of Fifa’s governance system”, saying change should be “driven by the football institutions themselves, rather than being outsourced to an external party”. It makes it less likely that Uefa will once again get what it wants.
Uefa also wants each country to be paid an additional $10m (£7.6m) from Fifa’s vast reserves of around $6bn (£4.5bn). In a perverse kind of way, Infantino bowing to that demand would probably cement his position even further. After all, money is a vote-winner for the Fifa president.