Aleksander Ceferin has all but confirmed that Gianni Infantino will face a challenger for the FIFA presidency next March, but not from him.
The 58-year-old UEFA president used an appearance on The Rest is Politics: Leading podcast to shut down speculation that he might stand.
“I’m not interested because of two reasons. One reason is that I love UEFA and I love working here, and I think that at a certain point … it’s time to also enjoy life a bit,” Ceferin told the podcast.
“And the second point is, my credibility is much, much higher if I’m not interested in the position.”
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Nominations for the 77th FIFA Congress must be submitted by 23:59 CET on 18 November 2026, backed by at least five member associations. The election will be held in Rabat, Morocco, on 18 March 2027, with each of FIFA’s 211 member associations holding one vote.
Ceferin expects that vote to happen. “I think he will have a candidate against him. I don’t know yet who,” he said of Infantino.
Montagliani, already inside the tent
Victor Montagliani is the name most often floated as a consensus challenger. The Canadian has led CONCACAF since 2016 and sits as a FIFA vice-president, having steered his confederation through the joint US, Canada and Mexico staging of the 2026 World Cup.
His strength is institutional. CONCACAF’s 41 member associations rejected Infantino’s FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup and other FIFA events to private investors, but Montagliani stopped short of joining UEFA’s threatened boycott, a positioning that has left him with credibility on both sides of the argument.
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Sheikh Salman, back for a second attempt
Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa lost the 2016 FIFA presidential election to Infantino and has run the AFC since 2013. The Bahraini administrator is a FIFA senior vice-president.
He was one of Infantino’s sharpest critics over the investment plan, describing it as “totally unacceptable” in a formal letter to the FIFA president on 30 July.
Whether he stands again is not yet clear. Confederation leaders can lobby and criticise, but neither the AFC nor UEFA can bind their member associations’ votes. Each of the 211 members casts its own ballot, and a Sheikh Salman challenge would rest on individual federations across Asia and beyond, not on an AFC line.
Al-Khelaifi, wanted but unwilling
Nasser Al-Khelaifi is the outlier of the three. The PSG president and beIN Media Group chairman also chairs the European Football Clubs association and sits on both UEFA’s executive committee and the FIFA Council, and several UEFA federations including Belgium and Poland were reported by talkSPORT in July to be prepared to back him.
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The 52-year-old Qatari has repeatedly declined. A spokesperson told talkSPORT that Al-Khelaifi has “absolutely no ambition, no intention, no interest” in the FIFA role, and after PSG’s UEFA Super Cup win over Aston Villa on 12 August he told reporters himself.
“I’m very, very happy to be president of Paris Saint-Germain. Happy to continue. Trust me.”
Unless that position changes before 18 November, the federations pushing him will need another name on the ballot.
Infantino, meanwhile, is under pressure from inside FIFA as well as from the confederations. Senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned over the Forward Enterprise plan, and chief operating officer Kevin Lamour accused the president of having deceived staff about it. Whether he steps aside before the ballot, as Ceferin publicly wondered, or fights for a fourth term in Rabat, is the question the autumn will answer.
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