UEFA Says It Has 'Lost Confidence' in Infantino's FIFA Leadership Despite World Cup Plan U-Turn
Scrapping the $20 billion World Cup investment plan wasn't enough to draw a line under the crisis. UEFA says the episode has cost Gianni Infantino its confidence entirely, and is now pushing for accountability over who was behind the scheme in the first place.
UEFA's statement
Hours after Gianni Infantino abandoned his plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors, UEFA made clear the climbdown had not repaired the relationship. "The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA's confidence but also that of many other members of the football family," the European governing body said in a statement. "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. We must identify those responsible and hold them to account."
A pointed swipe at FIFA's finances
UEFA went further than simply objecting to the abandoned proposal, taking aim at how FIFA has used its existing resources. The confederation said that with reserves standing at over $5 billion, FIFA's leadership "has also failed to use associations' money for the benefit of the game," and pledged to work with confederations worldwide "to propose a new way of distributing resources through the existing FIFA Forward programme" — a direct challenge to how Infantino's FIFA allocates funding to member associations going forward.
How we got here
The proposal — first revealed on Tuesday and known internally as FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) — would have bundled the World Cup and Club World Cup's commercial rights into a new subsidiary valued at roughly $20 billion, with a 20% stake sold to outside investors to raise up to $4.2 billion. FIFA said the money would unlock more than $10 billion in football development funding over four years, and gave member associations until September 19 to back it, with a £30.1 million incentive attached. UEFA's 55 members voted unanimously on Thursday to boycott every FIFA competition, including the World Cup, if the plan wasn't dropped; CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation rejected it too. By Friday, Infantino's senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro had resigned in protest, and FIFA's own chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, told staff they had been "deceived" and "deserve better than contempt and intimidation." Infantino scrapped the plan in the early hours of Saturday, saying the project had "created divisions" that were "no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place."
Why the statement matters
FIFA's climbdown statement was notably attributed to "the FIFA president" rather than issued in FIFA's institutional name — read by several outlets as a sign Infantino no longer has the organisation fully behind him. UEFA's response confirms that reading: rather than accepting the reversal as the end of the matter, it has opened a formal question over his leadership and demanded to know who inside FIFA designed and pushed the plan.
What could happen to Infantino
UEFA's statement stops short of calling for Infantino's removal, but it raises the stakes ahead of FIFA's next presidential election. Under FIFA's statutes, an emergency congress can be triggered if 20% of the 211 member associations request one, potentially opening the door to a vote of no confidence. Separately, candidates have until November 18 to declare for the presidential election itself, held next March in Rabat, Morocco — Infantino is entitled to seek one further term, and had commanded support from more than 200 associations before this episode. Names floated as potential challengers include AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, CONCACAF president Victor Montagliani and PSG chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi, though none has declared any intention to run.
What's next
UEFA says it will begin working "immediately" with confederations and member associations on an alternative plan to distribute FIFA's existing development funding, putting pressure on Infantino to show the current system can deliver what FFE promised without a private-investor sale. The English FA has backed UEFA's position. Attention now turns to whether other confederations — CAF, CONMEBOL and the OFC, who never formally voted on the original plan — follow UEFA's lead in questioning Infantino's leadership directly.
Sources: Sky Sports, Bloomberg, Associated Press (via ABC News, CBS News, Washington Post), Al Jazeera, August 1, 2026.