Blatter’s post, uploaded during Tuesday afternoon in Europe, ran to fewer than 300 characters and named the person he wants to see run world football.
“Lise Klaveness deserves the utmost respect. She was the only one who always took a clear stand and did not go along with the mainstream. And at FIFA, the time is right for a woman to take the lead,” he wrote on X.
The intervention is the first public endorsement of a named successor from a former FIFA president while Infantino is still in the job.
It lands in the middle of the most serious governance crisis of his presidency, with Sky Sports reporting that 91 national federations have joined calls for him to step down. That is short of the 106 required to force a vote, but far larger than the number that were publicly critical of him weeks earlier.
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Who Klaveness is
Klaveness is a lawyer, a former Norway international, and the first woman to lead the Norwegian Football Federation since its founding in 1902.
Her reputation for confrontation was built at the FIFA Congress in Doha in March 2022, weeks before the Qatar World Cup.
Standing at the lectern with the host federation in the room, she said the tournament had been awarded “in unacceptable ways, with unacceptable consequences”, and turned on FIFA’s leadership over migrant-worker deaths, LGBTQ+ rights and the organisation’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“There is no room for employers who do not secure the freedom and safety of World Cup workers,” she told the hall.
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“No room for leaders that cannot host the women’s game. No room for hosts that cannot legally guarantee the safety and respect of LGBTQ+ people coming to this theater of dreams.”
That is the stand Blatter appears to be pointing to.
What Infantino is facing
The trigger for the current crisis was Infantino’s proposal for a new company called FIFA Forward Enterprise, which would have sold a 20% stake in FIFA’s commercial and operational business to private investors and handed them a slice of World Cup operations.
He was forced to withdraw it after UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation each threatened to boycott, and after internal criticism from within FIFA itself.
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Confederations do not control how their member associations vote in a FIFA presidential election, where each of the 211 members casts its own ballot. Even so, the scale of the pushback was enough to bury the plan within days.
Prince Ali bin Hussein, the Jordan FA president and a former FIFA vice-president, went further at the weekend.
He accused Infantino of tying FIFA support for his federation to a public endorsement of the president’s re-election bid, calling the arrangement “blackmail”. Jordan became the first Asian nation to demand Infantino’s resignation.
FIFA secretary general Mattias Grafström described the episode as a “sad and reproachable series of events”.
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Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s chief of global football development, called the withdrawal of the plan “absolutely necessary and beyond question”. Carlos Cordeiro, FIFA’s representative on the White House task force for the 2026 World Cup, has resigned.
Rabat on Wednesday
Infantino has called senior FIFA staff to a meeting in the Moroccan capital on Wednesday, which Sky Sports correspondent Kaveh Solhekol described as “a very, very tense” gathering.
Klaveness has not said she is a candidate. Blatter has now placed her name in the middle of the succession debate anyway.
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