Gianni Infantino's Fragile Presidency: From Coronation to Crisis

Gianni Infantino’s empire has never looked more fragile.

Less than a fortnight ago, he strode across the MetLife Stadium turf alongside Donald Trump, bathed in the glare of the World Cup final. The US president has taken to calling him the “King of Football”, and on that July night near New York, Infantino looked the part: 104 games completed, record revenues banked, a tournament widely hailed as a success on the pitch and a windfall off it. His re-election next March in Rabat felt like a coronation waiting to happen.

There were boos when he and Trump walked out to hand Spain and Argentina their medals. They sounded like background noise to a man who believed he had bent the global game to his will.

Now they sound more like a warning that went unheeded.

From coronation to crisis

In the space of days, Infantino has gone from untouchable to embattled. The 56-year-old FIFA president has triggered a rupture so deep that his job, once considered secure, is suddenly in play.

The miscalculation? A bold, secretive plan to invite private investors into the heart of FIFA’s money-making machine.

Infantino championed a proposal to spin off FIFA’s commercial operations into a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE). This was no minor restructuring. FFE would control the crown jewels: World Cup organisation, broadcasting rights, sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality – the cash engines of a body that still insists it is a non-profit association under Swiss law.

Into that, he wanted to bring outside money. A lot of it.

FIFA pitched a deal to raise $4.2bn by selling roughly 20 percent of FFE, valuing the new entity at $20bn. The “anchor investor” was set to be Thrive Eternal, a vehicle launched by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

For FIFA’s 211 member federations, the offer landed in their inboxes with a clear price tag. Each association was promised $20m if they signed up by September 19. That was on top of the $10m already due to each federation over the next four years, funded largely by FIFA’s record $15bn revenue for the 2023-26 cycle tied to the World Cup that has just concluded.

FIFA projected that under FFE, those payouts would double immediately and then keep climbing: $20m per federation, rising to $22m through 2034 and $24m through 2038.

For small associations in Andorra, Montserrat or Papua New Guinea, that kind of money is transformational. For the giants – England, Spain, France – it is less compelling than the long-term control of the global calendar and the shape of the sport.

Infantino believed he had the numbers. He left New York last week carrying letters of support for his re-election from around 200 federations. On paper, that is a landslide.

On the ground, the mood has shifted.

“A bad deal” and a global backlash

The resistance did not creep up on him. It erupted.

The list of opponents reads like a roll call of world football: several FIFA vice presidents, senior executives at the organisation’s headquarters, every European federation under UEFA’s umbrella, national bodies in Asia and North America, Britain’s prime minister, the global association of domestic leagues, and a furious chorus of fans.

Essentially, the game turned on its own president.

The anger was not only about money. Private equity and petrostate wealth have become routine in European club football, but the World Cup still occupies a different emotional space. It is the ultimate prize, wrapped in notions of glory, national pride and shared heritage. Many supporters believe it belongs to them, not to investment funds hunting yield.

Europe, which routinely supplies the winners of the men’s World Cup and the Club World Cup – FIFA’s biggest earners – saw something else: risk. Private investors, they argued, would inevitably push for more games, bigger tournaments and constant expansion to squeeze out value. That, in turn, would threaten the balance of the global game, eat into club competitions and overload a calendar already stretched to breaking point.

The UEFA Champions League, the financial backbone of European club football, could be caught in the crossfire.

Players are already at their physical limits. Broadcasters and sponsors do not have bottomless budgets. The sense from Europe and beyond was that Infantino was gambling with assets that did not belong to him alone.

Then came the internal revolt.

Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s senior adviser and a former Goldman Sachs banker, resigned and publicly branded the plan “a bad deal”. FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, issued a blistering statement defending his colleagues and implicitly challenging his boss, in terms so stark they would normally make a presidency untenable.

The decisive blow landed from Nyon. On Thursday, UEFA announced that its members would boycott all FIFA competitions unless Infantino scrapped the project.

For a president whose power rests heavily on the prestige and revenue generated by European teams, that was not a threat he could ignore.

Infantino forced into retreat

On Friday, the man once hailed as football’s king was forced into retreat.

“Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place,” Infantino said in a statement, announcing that he was abandoning the FFE plan.

The pressure finally told. But the climbdown has not settled the question that now hangs over Zurich: can he survive this?

His traditional power base in Africa, 54 votes strong, had stayed largely neutral, weighing up the promise of “game-changing” money. In South America, CONMEBOL said on Friday it had only just received the proposal and would study it “with the rigour it demands”. Its president, Alejandro Dominguez of Paraguay, is also a FIFA vice president and has his own reasons to keep Infantino close.

Dominguez is counting on Infantino to deliver an expanded 64-team World Cup in 2030, a tournament split between Spain, Portugal, Morocco and three symbolic co-hosts in South America: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, the original 1930 hosts. Under current plans, those South American nations are each due just one of the 104 matches. Any change to that format would be politically explosive and commercially significant.

Yet even with Africa cautious and South America hedging, Infantino’s authority has rarely looked weaker.

Power, pay and a future beyond 2031

Behind the FFE proposal lurked another, more personal calculation.

FIFA’s statutes allow Infantino only one more four-year term after the current one, taking him to 2031. The FFE spin-off offered a way to create a powerful, commissioner-style role for him beyond that date, attached to the commercial arm of the game and likely carrying a salary far beyond his current package of more than $6m a year in pay and bonuses.

That vision now lies in ruins. What remains is a presidency under open question.

The electoral maths is simple enough. In a contested race, a candidate needs 106 votes to secure a majority. Confederations rarely vote as unified blocs, but if most of Europe’s 55 associations, CONCACAF’s 35 and Asia’s 46 were to coalesce around a rival, Infantino would face a serious challenge.

Names are already in circulation. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the Paris Saint-Germain president from Qatar, is a constant presence in the rumour mill. Victor Montagliani, the Canadian who serves as FIFA vice president and head of CONCACAF, is another. Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, long-time president of the Asian Football Confederation, lost narrowly to Infantino in the 2016 FIFA election and may be tempted to try again.

Until this week, such scenarios sounded fanciful. Infantino was re-elected unopposed in 2019 in Paris and again in 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda. Discontent with his style – the centralisation of power, the taste for grand projects pushed through with minimal consultation – simmered in the background but never coalesced into a credible threat.

Now, with the World Cup investment plan dead and his closest aides breaking ranks in public, the landscape has changed.

The deadline for presidential candidates to declare is November 18, exactly four months before the March 19 vote in Rabat, Morocco, where FIFA will convene at its African headquarters.

By then, the federations must decide what they want from the man at the top: a survivor who misjudged the limits of his mandate, or a new face to guard football’s most prized asset from the very forces he tried to invite in.

The coronation that once looked inevitable has turned into an open contest. The question now is not whether Infantino can raise billions, but whether he can still command the one currency he needs most – the trust of the game he claims to rule.