On 8 September, the human rights organisation FairSquare delivered a complaint to FIFA’s Ethics Committee with more than 100,000 names behind it.
It asks the committee to investigate Gianni Infantino for alleged breaches of FIFA’s ethics code and to ban him for two years.
Full disclosure: I signed it. I support it. I doubt it will change anything.
Two days before the complaint arrived, FIFA had confirmed that Infantino would stand for re-election at the FIFA Congress in Rabat in March 2027. “Of course, nothing has changed,” a spokesperson said.
The petition serves as yet another public rejection of Infantino, all of which may eventually topple him.
But for the moment, FIFA has already explained its stance on this pressure. “Those who do not have the support of FIFA’s Member Associations should not seek to achieve through allegation, insinuation or misinformation what they cannot achieve through FIFA’s established democratic processes,” it wrote in an August 8 statement.
The organisation’s position is straightforward: Infantino’s authority comes from its 211 member associations, and any attempt to remove him must ultimately pass through them.
Infantino is comfortable meeting his critics on that specific battlefield. The doomed FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) collapsed, but was intended to put millions in member associations’ pockets.
His relationships with individual members are what Infantino is banking on to save his job.
When the leaders of UEFA, the AFC and Concacaf turned against him, he specifically did not treat the confederations as unified electoral blocs. Their presidents can challenge him, but they cannot cast the ballots of the national associations beneath them.
And his moves over the last month show exactly that.
