The man widely seen as European football’s most high-profile Infantino critic has a job title that may stop him from running against the FIFA president at all.

Luis Figo spent early August telling the football world that Gianni Infantino had to go. He now sits on UEFA’s shortlist of names being weighed up before the 18 November nomination deadline, according to reporting by GiveMeSport. The problem is that he has worked for UEFA since 2017.

That is the dilemma UEFA has not been able to solve. Any candidate it floats carries its fingerprints. Any candidate who carries its fingerprints becomes a hard sell in Africa, Asia, CONMEBOL and the Caribbean, where most of FIFA’s votes live.

The August statement

Figo released his call for Infantino’s resignation on 5 August 2026. The former Real Madrid winger has been a UEFA football adviser since the governing body announced his appointment in 2017, working alongside the Football Division on technical matters and leading UEFA’s ambassador programme.

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That connection did not stop him going public.

“Today I join others from across our game and call for Gianni Infantino to resign as FIFA President,” Figo wrote in a statement carried by ESPN.

“He has lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisers, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport and even, it would seem, the FIFA Peace Prize winner.”

The statement landed on the same day FIFA held a crisis meeting over the collapse of its FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, a plan to open up World Cup commercial rights to outside investors that European and other confederations had refused to back.

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UEFA’s quiet search

UEFA is working under the radar to settle on a single opposition candidate before 18 November, keeping negotiations confidential to limit the time Infantino’s team has to prepare a counter-campaign. The 2027 FIFA Congress will elect the next president in Rabat on 18 March 2027, and any challenger needs backing from at least five member associations and a verifiable football role in two of the past five years.

So far only Ramon Vega, the former Switzerland and Tottenham defender, has publicly declared.

Figo and Arsène Wenger are the two serious names in European circles, but both have the same CV problem: Wenger has been FIFA’s own Chief of Global Football Development since 2019, while Figo is on UEFA’s payroll. Goal reported that some senior figures “have expressed admiration for Portugal’s Luis Figo”, though the mystery candidate’s identity has not been confirmed.

The map that makes 55 a small number

FIFA has 211 member associations and runs its presidential election on one member, one vote. UEFA accounts for 55 of them. The other 156 sit in CAF, AFC, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and the OFC, where Infantino has spent years building loyalty.

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Confederations do not control how their members vote; each association casts its own ballot, and lines routinely crack along national rather than regional interests. Even so, a candidate who looks like a UEFA emissary enters the race with a credibility ceiling outside Europe.

Infantino is working the same map in reverse. He is offering member associations a hike in annual funding from $10m to $25m across the 2027 to 2031 cycle, a straightforward pitch to the smaller federations that make up most of the electorate.

Debbie Hewitt, the England FA chair, has said Infantino “has to answer those questions, and if he doesn’t… he’s not fit to be Fifa president.” Her German counterpart Bernd Neuendorf went further: “this is not possible with Gianni as the responsible person at FIFA.”

The nomination window closes on 18 November. Until then, UEFA has to decide whether to put Figo’s name forward and accept the structural weakness that comes with a candidate on its own payroll, or hold back for someone with no European institutional tie.

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