Three of football’s six continental confederations put their names to the same open letter on Monday.
UEFA acting alone could be read as European unease with the man in the FIFA chair. UEFA together with the Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF is something harder to write off: their member associations, taken together, number 143 of FIFA’s 211.
The open letter, addressed to the “football family”, accuses Gianni Infantino of placing himself “above the collective that entrusted him with authority” over the scrapped plan to sell commercial stakes in the World Cup.
“When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”
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The letter was signed by the presidents of the three confederations, UEFA’s Aleksander Ceferin, AFC’s Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa and CONCACAF’s Victor Montagliani, and by their general secretaries.
Judgement, not communication
The central line in the letter is a rejection of FIFA’s own account of the episode. FIFA has said “mistakes were made” and framed the problem as one of process. The three confederations disagree at the level of the idea itself.
They call the affair a “profound failure of judgement,” pushing back explicitly against any suggestion it was merely a failure of communication. In their reading, FIFA is apologising for how the plan was handled; they are saying the plan should never have been on the table.
“Leadership in football is not a possession. It is not about holding, or demanding, power to be held.”
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An investigation FIFA does not run
The letter demands that the review of the proposal be carried out by an independent third party with no FIFA staff involved. That is a pointed request: it removes any option for FIFA to investigate itself and hand back a report on process failings.
The proposal in question would have created a $20bn commercial venture running the World Cup and other FIFA events. FIFA planned to sell up to a 20 percent stake for around $4.2bn, with Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital lined up to lead the investor group through a new fund called Thrive Eternal.
Infantino scrapped the project on 31 July, less than a week after unveiling it, after European associations threatened a World Cup boycott. FIFA’s own chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said staff inside the governing body had been “deceived” by the way the plan was drawn up, and senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned, calling it “a bad deal for football”.
“There is silence where there should be accountability, distance where there should be openness.”
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March 2027 in Rabat
The timing sharpens the letter. FIFA’s 77th Congress is set for 18 March 2027 in Rabat, Morocco, and Infantino has already told member associations he intends to stand again.
An independent inquiry that reports before then, and lands on “failure of judgement” rather than “failure of communication”, would put that candidacy under a very different light. Confederations do not control how their member associations vote; each of FIFA’s 211 associations casts its own ballot.
But three continental leaderships have now put their names to the accusation that the sitting president broke trust “through deception”. That is not the campaign backdrop Infantino wanted seven months out from a vote he has already declared he wants to win.
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