Claudius Schafer told the Swiss Sunday paper SonntagsZeitung that Gianni Infantino’s leadership had reached a point where, in any organisation, the outcome would be obvious.
“When I saw how this whole thing unfolded and that FIFA’s key bodies weren’t involved, then there’s essentially only one consequence in any company or association,” said the president of European Leagues, who is also chief executive of the Swiss Football League.
His intervention on Sunday, 2 August, carries the weight of 53 professional men’s and women’s competitions across Europe.
It arrives two days after Infantino abandoned a plan to sell a stake of about 20 percent in a new commercial vehicle, FIFA Forward Enterprise, at an equity valuation of roughly $20bn, a deal that would have raised around $4.2bn from private investors led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital.
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‘Nobody knew about the plans’
Schafer’s sharpest line targeted the way the project had been pushed through inside FIFA.
“Nobody knew about the plans, not even the FIFA Council, the governing body of FIFA,” he told SonntagsZeitung.
“I was very surprised that the president was acting completely alone in this matter.”
Asked whether that made Infantino unacceptable in the role, Schafer did not name him.
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“This is usually the consequence when someone in a company pushes such a business deal forward without anyone knowing about it,” he said.
He also rejected the commercial premise.
“It’s solely about the financial advantages; everything else is completely ignored,”
Schafer said, arguing that the model would have pushed FIFA towards more matches and bigger competitions, squeezing domestic leagues in an already congested calendar.
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An institutional pile-on
Schafer’s stance is not an isolated one. UEFA’s 55 member associations pledged earlier in the week to boycott FIFA competitions if the sale went ahead, and on Saturday the confederation went further, saying in a public statement that
“the current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.” UEFA described the arrangement as a “shabby, back-room, opaque deal.”
CONCACAF, the confederation covering North and Central America and the Caribbean, joined in the same day.
The proposal, it said, “does not reach that stage by accident. It is a symptom of leadership that has stopped putting football first,” and demanded “a comprehensive reckoning with this presidency.”
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Not every corner of the game turned on Infantino: Qatar backed the proposal, and the Moroccan federation’s president Fouzi Lekjaa reiterated his support for the FIFA chief even after the U-turn.
The Asian Football Confederation’s president, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa, welcomed the reversal on Saturday but stopped short of criticising Infantino personally. In announcing the U-turn on Friday, 1 August, Infantino said the project had “created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.”
Schafer’s contribution shifts the pressure downwards. UEFA and CONCACAF speak for national federations.
The European Leagues body speaks for the clubs and competitions where players are paid and calendars are set. Adding its president to the list of senior figures publicly questioning Infantino’s tenure takes the crisis inside the domestic game.
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