FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, told the Associated Press on Friday 31 July that staff had been deceived by Infantino’s plan to sell a stake in the World Cup’s commercial rights to private investors, and that they deserved “better than contempt and intimidation”.

Lamour, a long-time colleague of the president at both FIFA and UEFA, went further and put his own job in play.

“It is the project of one person. Not only must this project not go ahead … but the time has now come for football political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions.”

“And if that means I lose my job then so be it. I will understand and respect that decision. At least I’ll sleep well tonight.”

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The same day, Infantino’s senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro, the former US Soccer president who represented FIFA on the White House task force for the 2026 World Cup, resigned in protest.

“I cannot stand by while FIFA considers selling a stake in the World Cup,” Cordeiro wrote, adding that he had “no involvement in this proposal” and opposed it “unequivocally”.

The plan Infantino was forced to drop

The trigger was FIFA Forward Enterprise, a proposed subsidiary that would have housed the commercial and operational side of FIFA’s tournaments and sold a 20 percent stake to private investors. It was scrapped on the evening of Friday 31 July, hours after UEFA’s 55 member associations voted to boycott FIFA competitions if the plan went ahead. CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation had also come out against it.

UEFA’s statement did not stop at the plan.

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“The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members,” the confederation said, warning that “secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals” could no longer continue.

The Morocco meeting says one thing

Five days later, on Wednesday 5 August, Infantino gathered senior staff at FIFA’s Africa office in Rabat. FIFA said afterwards that it had apologised for errors made over the plan and that senior staff at the meeting had “reaffirmed their full support” for the president, according to NPR.

That version of events sits uneasily beside what Lamour and Cordeiro had said days earlier, and beside what has followed. The Norwegian federation’s president, Lise Klaveness, called on Infantino to resign on Friday 7 August.

“When trust is gone, leadership must also be assessed. We therefore believe that Gianni Infantino’s time as FIFA President should be over, and ask him to resign,” Klaveness said.

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The 43-federation route to a no-confidence vote

The English and Welsh football associations have withdrawn support for Infantino’s re-election, scheduled for next March, and UEFA has raised the prospect of triggering a vote of no confidence. Under FIFA’s statutes, an extraordinary congress can be called if 43 member associations, one fifth of the total of 211, submit a written request; a simple majority of the ballots cast would then be enough to remove the president. Confederations can lobby their members, but they do not control how each national association votes; every FIFA member casts its own ballot.

CNN reported on Saturday 8 August that Infantino has not signalled any intention to step down. He has now spent almost two weeks with his own chief operating officer publicly on the record accusing him of running the biggest project of the year as “the project of one person”, and with FIFA’s official communications insisting the senior staff are behind him.

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