PARIS – The battle to force Gianni Infantino out of FIFA may be nearly all over just a few weeks after his opponents thought they would dethrone the president of world soccer’s governing body, but the war over how much power he can exercise may only be beginning.
Senior figures in world football increasingly see the crisis triggered by Infantino’s abandoned private-investment plan shifting away from the question of succession and towards a struggle over the terms of his continued presidency.
One outcome could be a governance compromise under which Infantino remains in office but gives up some power.
The other possibility is a prolonged “hot-cold war” in which clubs, confederations, player representatives and national associations challenge FIFA repeatedly over competitions, money and control of the international calendar.
“What is clear now … is that he’s going nowhere,” a senior world football executive told Reuters. “A hot-cold war is a very real problem for FIFA and for world football.”
A veteran international sports executive, who has spent decades working with governing bodies, offered a similar assessment, saying Infantino was “hanging on” but questioning how FIFA could operate if many of the game’s most powerful countries and institutions remained opposed to him.
“You would have effectively a civil war within the governance which I cannot recall in a sports body before,” the executive said. “Unprecedented.”
That possible scenario of a prolonged and potentially damaging cold war within world football was independently corroborated to Reuters by two other senior football officials.
The prospect points to a potentially paradoxical outcome to a crisis that at its height threatened Infantino’s position: he could survive politically while presiding over a governing body in which some of football’s biggest stakeholders seek to constrain what he can actually do.
