Sunday Edition - August 16

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Today, we’re covering the growing battle for control of Fifa and what Uefa’s push to restructure the organisation could mean for Gianni Infantino’s presidency. It’s a 10-minute read and today’s edition is completely free.

RouteOne, for the thinking fan. Enjoy the read.

Tarik

Once seen as a break from Fifa’s corrupt past, Gianni Infantino is now facing pressure to resign. With few mechanisms to oust Infantino, Uefa and its allies are looking for other ways to remove the incumbent president.

On Thursday, August 13, The Independent reported that a Uefa-led alliance is exploring plans for Fifa presidency to be rotated between the confederations to reduce the power of the office. A meeting between many of football’s leaders took place before Paris Saint-Germain and Aston Villa’s Super Cup match in Salzburg. It was the first in-person meeting with confederation leaders since Fifa announced, and subsequently scrapped, its plans to sell a minority stake in a new commercial entity, named Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE), to private investors.

Since that announcement, Uefa’s president Aleksander Ceferin has rallied support from other confederations in a move to remove Infantino from his position. Last week, without naming Infantino, Uefa published an open letter alongside the Asian Football Confederation and Concacaf, calling for a change in Fifa’s leadership. “Leadership in football is not a possession,” the letter reads. “When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”

More than a week after Infantino’s apology, Fifa has yet to announce details of the review into the abandoned proposal.

With this, Uefa and other confederations are now plotting how to restructure Fifa’s governance. Reports suggest that an independent review is now being discussed, which will inform a policy document recommending the future structure and ideals of the world’s football governing body.

One of the clearest proposals to emerge publicly so far is to rotate the Fifa presidency among the confederations. The details – the selection process, each president’s tenure period, and the order of rotation – have not been outlined. This proposal is perhaps inspired by the European Union, whereby the presidency of the Council of the EU rotates among member states every six months. The aim, of course, is to ensure that no single president can wield too much power.

Infantino is fighting to retain his position. Uefa and its allies are considering how to prevent any future Fifa president from accumulating the same degree of authority. And at the heart of both battles is a question that extends beyond the current crisis: whether Fifa can remain an organisation dominated by one powerful president, or whether this moment will force football’s global governing body toward a more collective model of leadership.

Since its inception in 1904, Fifa’s governance structure remained largely static for over a century. World football’s governing body was largely responsible for governing itself, with significant power concentrated in the Executive Committee. This small group of elected officials made all major strategic and operational decisions, including the highly lucrative awarding of World Cup hosting rights.

In 2016, this changed. Following the fallout from the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding processes and the subsequent arrests of top officials, Fifa was forced to modernise its corporate governance. Going forward, the game’s protector was to look more like a modern, publicly listed company rather than a private club. Transparency and trust were the name of the game.

On February 26, 2016, Fifa’s members voted 89% in favour of a reform package to overhaul the organisation’s governance. “Today we vote for reforms that will allow us to build a stronger Fifa so football can prosper in the long run and so the events of the last months will never happen again,” Issa Hayatou, Fifa’s acting president, said. “It will win back the respect of everybody throughout the world.”

One of the most significant changes was an attempt to draw clearer lines between political oversight and the organisation's day-to-day management. The Executive Committee was abolished and replaced by the Fifa Council, which would focus on strategic direction, while greater responsibility for Fifa’s operational and commercial management was placed with the General Secretariat. Alongside new term limits, transparency measures, and independent oversight, the reforms were intended to make it harder for power to concentrate in the hands of a small group of officials.

A couple of hours after the reforms were voted in, then-Uefa general secretary Gianni Infantino was elected as president of Fifa. Forty-five years old at the time, Infantino was considered a welcome departure from Fifa’s previous leadership under the disgraced Sepp Blatter. At the time, David Conn of The Guardian said that Infantino’s appointment offered a hope of a brighter future for Fifa, but primarily because it meant that the only other real contender, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, did not replace Blatter.

“The real reason for a sense of brightness was not, with respect to Infantino, who is a deft operator, because he is innately inspiring or over-blessed with charisma,” Conn said. “It was more that he had beaten the expected victor: Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, a member of the extended ruling family in Bahrain, who trails behind him questions about alleged human rights abuses.” Yet still, “scepticism remains the compulsory default position,” Conn concluded about Infantino’s appointment.

Fast forward to today, any balanced assessment of Infantino’s presidency has to acknowledge that his supporters have positives to point toward. So here’s the bull case for Infantino.

Consolidation of Fifa post-corruption scandal. Five months ago, one of Infantino’s supporters, David Dein, a former FA and Arsenal vice-chair, said: “[Infantino] became Fifa president and inherited a complete mess. You know, the corruption… but he came in, and to his great credit he's cleaned up the shop, and he's improved the governance, the accountability, and the transparency.” This is, of course, Dein’s view, and these claims have been contested.

Modernisation. Some supporters also claim that Infantino has been a reformist during his tenure. They point to the push for the expanded World Cup, the overhaul of the Club World Cup, Fifa’s role in the implementation of VAR, and the increase in women’s national teams participating internationally, rising from 136 to 198 since he took office. Fans, rightfully, are split on the motives and effectiveness of these changes, but supporters of Infantino say they are, at the very least, evidence of a willingness to reform the game.

Record revenues. From a financial perspective, Infantino’s reign has been a success. He has just overseen a period of record revenue for the organisation, with Fifa expecting revenues to top $15bn over the four-year cycle ending with the 2026 World Cup. While it’s a non-profit, if Fifa is effectively and transparently putting those funds back into the game, as it claims, that’s a significant positive for the sport.

Critics, however, say that Fifa has steadily centralised power once again, arguing that the guardrails set by the 2016 reforms have increasingly been ignored. One such example came when Fifa used a loophole to keep Infantino in his position beyond what the 2016 reforms allowed. The reforms introduced a strict three-term - 12-year - limit to prevent a repeat of the decades-long presidencies of the past, but Fifa’s governance committee ruled in late 2022 that Infantino’s first 39 months in office did not count toward his limit as it overlapped with Blatter’s remaining term. It has allowed Infantino to remain in power until 2031, three years beyond what the 2016 reforms had permitted.

Other questions have been raised about how many committees - small groups within Fifa that write rules and advise on specialist matters - Infantino has created. Before 2016, standing committees were seen as a corruption tool, or “systems of patronage”, which were used to secure loyalty from member associations. While the reforms dramatically reduced them, Infantino has since expanded the number of committees from seven back to 35.

Against this backdrop, tensions between Uefa and Fifa have been boiling for some time. Uefa’s president has been critical of Fifa’s attempts to expand the Club World Cup yet again in 2029. Despite positioning his criticism as a welfare concern for players, it’s likely that he saw it as an encroachment on Uefa’s biggest moneymaker, the Champions League.

Further, during the 2026 World Cup, Ceferin repeatedly distanced Uefa from Infantino’s Fifa. As Fifa drew criticism over ticket pricing, refereeing and disciplinary decisions, Uefa conspicuously took the opposite approach; ruling out dynamic pricing for Euro 2028, hiring a referee denied entry to officiate at the World Cup, and saying Fifa “crossed a red line” when suspending United States’ striker Folarin Balogun’s automatic one-match ban.

None of those moves, however, amounted to a serious challenge to Infantino’s position. That changed on July 28, 2026, when The Times reported that Fifa was considering selling stakes in the World Cup’s commercial operations to private investors. For Uefa and its allies, the proposal provided an opening to move against him.

Editor, Tarik Salih: As it was for many football fans, the news that Gianni Infantino’s Fifa was selling a stake in the World Cup was shocking for me — not because the idea of Fifa doing something radical is particularly surprising anymore, but because of the casual way Infantino appeared to approach such a fundamental change to football’s governing structure.

If I wanted to, I could focus solely on the negative aspects of Infantino’s time in office. Most of his critics will emphasise what they perceive as his moral failings, his tendency to appease football’s most powerful stakeholders rather than its fans, and his willingness to politicise Fifa by cosying up to world leaders. There’s plenty to criticise here.

But if I wanted to, I could also focus on what Infantino inherited. Fifa was far from a model of institutional credibility when he became president. The organisation was still dealing with the enormous reputational damage of the corruption scandals that had engulfed it, and there was a genuine question about whether it could restore any meaningful legitimacy. Infantino did (albeit for a brief time) restore some sense that Fifa was a functioning and credible institution rather than one permanently on the verge of collapse.

Also, contrary to his demeanour as a plain-Jane corporate suit, he hasn’t been afraid to take risks. This has led to some good outcomes. In my opinion, the expanded World Cup was an overall success. Yes, there were reasonable question marks as to whether the expansion would dilute the quality and integrity of the competition. But, in my view, the expanded tournament was better than many of the critics (including myself, at the time) expected.

Infantino argues these changes are for Fifa’s “next stage of growth.” This rhetoric is understandable. No one in charge of anything - a country, a company, or even a household - wants to be seen as stagnant. But, for me, Infantino’s risk-taking and obsession with growth means he’s making decisions of the same ilk: change for change’s sake to maximise pomp and ceremony with little consideration for any wider impact. It’s led to a completely mixed bag of results, which perhaps fairly summarises Infantino’s time in office.

However, the tipping point for me was not necessarily the sale of the World Cup itself, but instead the price at which Infantino was willing to sell Fifa’s revenue. Fifa is profitable, fast-growing, and essentially a monopoly, with a healthy balance sheet, being offered to investors at five times revenue. That’s underpriced when considering that domestic clubs, which are largely loss-making and have no monopolistic advantage, are valued at six to eight times their revenue. In my eyes, if you’re going to take the risk to commercialise the governing body of the biggest sport in the world for the first time, you'd better get everyone you’re representing a damn great price. To me, that is an obvious, irreversible violation of Infantino’s primary responsibility: to achieve the best outcome for football. And that’s me ignoring his poor procedural conduct, which at best was reckless and, at worst, a serious abuse of process.

Away from Infantino, I am relieved that the public debate around Fifa’s governance has moved from ‘who’ should be in charge to ‘how’ can we do our best to collectively govern this very important institution. It is clear to me that, regardless of who is in charge, the absolute power given to the president in Fifa’s current set-up will always lend itself to problems.

The role itself is inherently challenging. It requires making complicated, long-term decisions about youth participation, international football, commercial rights, tournament structures, logistics and the future development of the sport. At the same time, the incentives facing the person making those decisions do not always perfectly align with the interests of football as a whole. In my view, it would be a lost opportunity if Fifa simply replaced the president and hoped for someone ‘better’, which is hard to define and measure. Ten years ago, that ‘better’ person was Infantino.

This is why I am far more concerned with institutional reform than the personalities in charge. I am naturally distrustful of concentrated power, particularly when it exists within a monopoly institution. I don't believe any centralised authority can be expected to govern itself benevolently forever simply because the person currently holding power has good intentions.

The ideal outcome, then, would be for Fifa's current discontent to produce a professionalised system in which the people making important decisions are meaningfully separated from the people responsible for holding them accountable. And those accountability mechanisms need real teeth. For me, threatening to boycott competitions is not enough. Trying to build alliances between confederations with fundamentally different incentives is unlikely to solve the underlying problem. And vague statements from Uefa about decisions it considers unacceptable, followed by gestures such as hiring travel-banned referees, can easily become little more than virtue-signalling.

A great governing system would keep the key stakeholders in productive tension with one another. That is the rubric I will use to assess any concrete proposals that Fifa’s challengers come up with.

One solution that has been proposed is floating Fifa on the public stock market. The idea is that it would, writes corporate adviser Ken Costa for The Times, bring Fifa “under the cleansing light of a more transparent governance structure.” The logic makes sense, but I don’t think the repercussions of such a drastic move have been thought out in full, so I’d be hesitant to endorse it. That’s for another time.

In summary, I am indifferent to who is in charge next, but not indifferent to the system that enables bad behaviour and needs serious reform. Put another way, anything short of a thoughtful system overhaul to prevent the same powers from accumulating to a single group of stakeholders (or individual person) is a waste of time and thought.

This newsletter was edited by the wider RouteOne team.

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