The plan collapsed in four days
On July 28, 2026, FIFA announced the establishment of an independent commercial entity that would manage the broadcast rights, sponsorship, and tickets for its tournaments, with up to 20% of its shares being offered to private investors, with a valuation of nearly $20 billion, with the help of JP Morgan. The idea, on paper, was additional funding for the development of football around the world. Press reports revealed that Infantino himself would have received a salary exceeding 30 million euros and bonuses related to the project, at a time when he was already receiving about 3 million euros annually as head of a non-profit organization. This was seen as evidence that privatization was not to develop the game as much as it was to establish personal influence within a new financial structure that partly escaped the traditional control of the federations.
The response came quickly and harshly: UEFA threatened to boycott all FIFA competitions, prominent officials within the organization threatened to resign, and there were reports of a European move to request an extraordinary conference with the support of 43 federations to withdraw confidence directly from Infantino. On the evening of July 31, that is, just three days after the announcement, Infantino acknowledged that the project “will not continue.” The story didn’t end there; Subsequent reports indicate that UEFA is considering opening a criminal case in Switzerland, where FIFA’s legal headquarters is located, regarding the way in which the plan was managed.
This episode revealed something important: when Europe moves as a unified bloc and is threatened with an actual boycott, it is still able to restrain Infantino within days. But the most important question is: Why does this ability to curb one project not translate into the ability to remove the man himself from his position? The answer lies in the electoral structure of FIFA itself.
One vote per country
The system governing the FIFA presidential elections is simple on its surface and highly influential in its essence. Each member national federation, regardless of its population size, football weight, or financial contribution, has one equal vote in the General Conference. The voice of the Faroe Islands, American Samoa, or San Marino is exactly the same as the voice of Germany, Brazil, or England. Out of 211 member federations, any candidate to win needs approximately half of the votes, or about 106 votes, and even to officially run in the race, he needs the declared support of 106 federations before closing the nomination window.
This system, which was originally designed with a democratic logic to prevent the major continents from dominating the game’s governance, has turned over time into an instrument of power in the hands of a president who knows how to distribute resources. Since taking office in 2016, Infantino has doubled the “FIFA Forward” program, which distributes direct financial aid to national federations, especially small ones in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean, under the heading “Football Development.” These federations, which often suffer from limited budgets and fragile infrastructure, find in these grants a vital and irreplaceable resource, which makes their loyalty to the FIFA President a matter of direct interest rather than a political position. When Infantino goes on his foreign tours to highlight to these federations the amount of money collected by the International Federation and the investments he has pumped into them, he is actually reminding them of the one who holds the keys to their future financing.
The result is that the continent that has the largest number of clubs and leagues with commercial and popular value, Europe, has only a relatively limited share of votes in the General Conference compared to its football and economic weight. Fifty-five European federations, compared to more than fifty African federations and more than forty-six Asian federations, excluding Oceania, CONCACAF and CONMEBOL. Even if all of Europe were to unite behind a single candidate, it would need a transcontinental coalition to cross the threshold of victory, an alliance that would be difficult to build in the face of a president who controls the funding taps on which the rest of the continents depend.
Why doesn’t anyone dare to run?
Here lies the deepest irony. According to what was reported by international media, any official competition against Infantino carries in itself a strategic risk: If a European or UEFA-backed candidate runs in the elections and loses, this will give Infantino a popular mandate documented by numbers, and weaken any future attempt to reduce his powers or pressure him from within. In other words, challenging Infantino and losing to him might tighten his grip rather than shake it. This account partly explains why all the names put forward as potential alternatives, from Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi to CONCACAF president Victor Montagliani and African Confederation president Patrice Motsepe, either denied their intention to run or were hesitant to make an official announcement, despite the fact that nominations close on November 18, 2026.
On the other hand, Infantino himself announced that he would run in the next elections for a fourth term extending until 2031, based on a controversial legal interpretation that his first term between 2016 and 2019 was not “complete” because it came to complete the term of his predecessor Sepp Blatter, and therefore is not counted within the maximum stipulated in the statute, which is three terms of four years each. This interpretation, which has not yet faced a decisive legal challenge to stop it, gives it a formal cover to continue in addition to the actual cover provided by the majority of small federations.
The summary of the scene is that FIFA today is managed with a double logic: on the one hand, a strong central executive authority in the hands of the president, capable of launching huge financial projects worth billions of dollars on an almost individual initiative; On the other hand, a fully decentralized voting structure gives each country, no matter how small its football size, equal weight in determining who occupies this position. When these two facts intersect, an equation arises in which the president can lose a particular political battle, as happened with the privatization plan, without losing power itself, because the battle for electoral legitimacy is decided in another place entirely, far from Europe’s major stadiums and their boardrooms, and closer to federations that sometimes do not have more than one national stadium and a modest annual budget, but they have what England, Germany, or France do not have: a voice that balances everything.
