Patrice Motsepe put his personal reputation on the line for the FIFA president on Thursday, in the same week UEFA and a growing list of European federations demanded accountability for the collapsed plan to sell part of the World Cup to private equity.
“I personally support Gianni Infantino. He’s not just a good friend. He’s a loyal friend. He’s loyal to Africa. I come from a background where when people have been loyal to you, you never stab them in the back,” the CAF president said after the confederation’s executive committee meeting.
The African body’s members unanimously reconfirmed their backing for Infantino’s re-election and pledged to “safeguard and adhere to governance, due process, and transparency” alongside FIFA, in a formal statement that also welcomed FIFA’s apology for the way the private equity plan had been handled.
UEFA’s terms still unmet
The endorsement lands in the middle of a fight that has been building since the last day of July, when Infantino was forced to scrap the FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, a $4.2bn scheme to sell a 20 per cent stake in a new commercial unit built around the World Cup at a $20bn valuation. Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital had been lined up to lead the deal.
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UEFA has not moved on. Its conditions for restoring confidence, it says, have not been met.
“First, the proposals to sell off the major competitions had to be withdrawn, and secondly, assurances have to be made that such attempts to disfigure the game in this way will never be made again. These conditions have not been met,” the European body said.
The English FA and the Albanian FA have withdrawn their earlier letters of support for Infantino’s re-election, and Jordan FA president Prince Ali bin Hussein has declined to endorse him. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s own senior adviser, resigned over the plan and called it “a bad deal for football”.
FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour told colleagues that staff had been “deceived”, while the global players’ union FIFPRO described the process as a “profound abuse of presidential power”.
CONMEBOL added its own protest, warning it would not support “any action or procedure that ignores or deviates from these institutional mechanisms”.
The vote on 18 March
FIFA’s presidential vote is scheduled for 18 March 2027 at the 77th FIFA Congress in Rabat, a venue selected long before this year’s crisis. Infantino, in office since 2016, is bidding for a fourth term that would take him through 2031.
CAF has 54 members, more than a quarter of FIFA’s 211 national associations, and the political weight of a unanimous continental endorsement is real. Confederations, though, do not control how their members vote in Rabat. Each association casts its own ballot under FIFA’s one member, one vote rule, and UEFA’s public opposition is a position rather than a bloc of votes.
The nomination deadline is 18 November, four months before the ballot in Rabat.
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