The stage was the point. With four of his fellow FIFA vice-presidents publicly against him and national federations peeling off week by week, the FIFA president chose to spend his weekend flanked by the French head of state and the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

The occasion was the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup at the Grand Palais on 23 August, the first time the Saudi-owned tournament was held outside the kingdom. Macron presented the club championship trophy to the Chinese team AG.AL, which took the $7m top prize; Ronaldo, the tournament’s global ambassador, walked the trophy on stage to mark the handover to the 2027 edition.

Mohammed bin Salman was in France for a two-day state visit built around defence, energy and a €6bn Saudi investment in three theme parks near Cergy-Pontoise. That FIFA’s embattled president was in the picture at all was a choice, not a formality.

$20bn plan pulled in three days

The revolt at home traces to a plan Infantino floated in late July: FIFA Forward Enterprise, a commercial subsidiary the president valued at about $20bn, with up to 20 per cent to be sold to outside investors. He pulled it on 31 July, three days after presenting it. The proposal is gone; the fallout is not.

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FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour, who had criticised the plan, was dismissed. On 19 August, FIFA vice-president Sandor Csanyi wrote to Infantino that Lamour’s exit had been the “final straw” and that his handling of the affair pointed to “serious shortcomings in professional judgement, ethical standards and leadership”. Csanyi joined UEFA’s Aleksander Ceferin, AFC’s Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa and CONCACAF’s Victor Montagliani among the vice-presidents who have publicly turned on him.

Wales, Finland, Israel and Montenegro have all withdrawn support for his 2027 re-election bid. Reuters reported on 20 August that UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF were weighing a formal no-confidence vote, something the news agency said had no precedent in FIFA’s 122-year history. Confederations, however, do not deliver their members’ votes; each of FIFA’s 211 national associations casts its own ballot.

“There is no way out. Either he goes the peaceful way and decides not to stand in March or he goes the hard way,” an unnamed senior football source told Reuters.

FIFA said on 8 August it will “not support, facilitate or tolerate” any presidential election process outside its own statutes, and that Infantino remained “democratically elected” with a member mandate. He still plans to stand in Zurich in March 2027.

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Ronaldo’s eye-roll

Even inside the show, the choreography frayed. A short clip from the ceremony, picked up widely on Monday, caught Infantino approaching Ronaldo and asking how close he was to 1,000 career goals.

“You have 23 goals left, is that right?” Infantino said, wishing him good luck.

Ronaldo thanked him and walked off rolling his eyes.

Convening an extraordinary FIFA congress to force the issue would require the written backing of at least 43 of the 211 member associations, and the statutes then require three months’ notice, pushing any such gathering into late November at the earliest. The next hard date on Infantino’s own calendar is 18 November, the deadline for candidates to file their nominations for the March 2027 election.

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