Uefa Challenges Infantino's Leadership with Call for Change

Uefa has delivered its most direct challenge yet to Gianni Infantino’s authority, warning that his leadership style is no longer acceptable and demanding a “thorough and fundamental” review of how Fifa is run.

In a blistering statement that read more like an indictment than a press release, Uefa condemned “secret schemes”, “shabby backroom deals” and “faceless individuals”, making clear that the governing body of European football wants sweeping change at the top of the global game.

This came less than 24 hours after Fifa abruptly abandoned Infantino’s controversial plan to sell off stakes in a new commercial vehicle tied to the World Cup and other flagship competitions. The U-turn has not cooled tempers in Europe. If anything, it has hardened them.

Uefa turns on its former insider

Under president Aleksander Ceferin, Uefa has moved from private concern to open confrontation. The Slovenian lawyer, who last week persuaded all 55 of Uefa’s member associations to back a World Cup boycott over the proposal, is now driving a coordinated push to reshape Fifa’s leadership.

While Uefa stopped short of explicitly calling for Infantino’s resignation, senior figures across Europe are understood to be adamant that he should not emerge intact from what they regard as a crisis of his own making. Several of the game’s most powerful national associations and confederation leaders around the world are believed to share that view.

Behind the scenes, leading European officials have already begun sounding out potential challengers for next year’s Fifa presidential election. Those conversations, described as exploratory but serious, are expected to intensify in the coming days.

“The current Fifa leadership has not only lost Uefa’s confidence, but also that of many other members of the football family,” the statement declared, leaving little doubt about where Europe now stands.

Infantino’s promises thrown back at him

Uefa’s broadside did not stop at process and governance. It turned the clock back to 2016 and used Infantino’s own campaign rhetoric against him.

Back then, as he sought to move from Uefa’s general secretary to Fifa president in the post‑Blatter clean‑up era, Infantino vowed to usher in a new age of transparency and accountability. Uefa quoted him word for word: “Of course we have to be transparent. I have been this in the last 15 years of my life in Uefa. You will have to play a part every day in the life of Fifa.”

He also told member associations: “The money of Fifa is your money. It’s not the money of the Fifa president. It’s your money. You are the national associations, and the money of Fifa has to serve for the development of football and not for anything else.”

Uefa’s verdict on those pledges was damning. “On both these promises, he has failed to deliver,” the statement said. The “shabby, back room, opaque deal he hatched and tried to force through” was held up as the very opposite of transparency. With Fifa’s reserves now standing at more than $5bn, Uefa argued that Infantino has also failed to use that money properly “for the benefit of the game”.

Power, money and the Fifa Forward fight

At the heart of the row lies Fifa’s distribution model. Under the Fifa Forward programme, each of the 211 member associations receives the same central payment from Fifa over a four-year cycle. It is a system that has long drawn criticism as a vehicle for patronage, strengthening the grip of the incumbent president by funnelling money into smaller associations whose votes can decide elections.

Infantino’s latest proposal would have taken that further. By selling 20% of a new commercial company, Fifa Forward Enterprise, to private investors, he claimed Fifa could boost Forward payments from $8m to $20m per association in the next four-year cycle, plus a one-off $20m signing bonus for those who joined the scheme.

The offer of a $20m bonus, tied to a sign-up deadline of 19 September, infuriated many inside Uefa and beyond. To them, it looked less like development support and more like a cash‑for‑loyalty mechanism.

The backlash proved decisive. Fifa scrapped the plan. But Uefa insists the damage to trust has already been done.

“Uefa will begin work immediately with partners and stakeholders all over the world and right across the game to propose a new way of distributing resources through the existing Fifa Forward programme,” the confederation said. The message was clear: the money already sitting “idle in Fifa’s bank account” must be redirected to provide “the kick start that the grassroots and the wider game need in each of the 211 countries of Fifa” — without “selling off the family silver” to achieve it.

A presidency suddenly in play

Until this week, Infantino’s grip on the Fifa presidency looked unshakeable. The 56-year-old was expected to be re-elected unopposed for a third full term at next March’s Fifa Congress in Rabat. He has already secured more than 200 letters of support from member associations endorsing his re-election bid.

Those letters, though, can be withdrawn. And the deadline for rival candidates to declare is not until 18 November.

Names are already circulating. The Paris Saint‑Germain president Nasser Al‑Khelaifi is favoured by many influential figures in Europe, but he is thought to be reluctant to run and remains deeply embedded in club politics as chairman of European Football Clubs, a powerful lobby group.

Other potential contenders include Victor Montagliani, the Canadian president of the North and Central American confederation Concacaf, and Asian Football Confederation president Salman al‑Khalifa, who lost narrowly to Infantino in the 2016 Fifa election. None has yet stepped formally into the ring, but the very fact that such manoeuvring is under way marks a sharp shift from the air of inevitability that once surrounded Infantino’s third term.

A victory – and the start of a bigger fight

For Uefa, the collapse of the Fifa Forward Enterprise plan is being framed as a win for the sport as a whole. “This is a victory for the whole game,” the statement said. The governing body is adamant, though, that this cannot be the final act.

“We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game,” it warned. “We must identify those responsible and hold them to account.”

Uefa has pledged to work with its own associations and “in close cooperation with other confederations” to examine how the episode unfolded and to draw up safeguards to prevent any repeat. That review, it insists, must be “thorough and fundamental”, with “no option off the table”.

The proposal has gone. The money remains. The trust does not.

The real contest now is not just for the Fifa presidency in Rabat next March, but for control of how the world’s most powerful sports body is run – and who, in the end, gets to decide what football’s future is worth.