Gianni Infantino spent his weekend in Punta Cana, not Zurich, and he wanted the world to know why.

In a video interview released by FIFA after a meeting with Caribbean Football Union members on Sunday, the FIFA president reframed the crisis engulfing his presidency as a fight between the game’s wealthy federations and its smaller ones.

“This is our task, this is our job. We want to grow football in every one of our 211 countries,” Infantino said.

“Some, unfortunately, don’t need and they don’t want that others grow, but we need to narrow this gap between the big, big countries and all the others,” he told the CFU meeting.

Read also: Fans storm pitch with chairs and sticks in Colombia

He added that FIFA had to “find investments for all the others, opportunities for all the others.”

The setting was the point. The CFU is a sub-region of CONCACAF, whose president Victor Montagliani had emailed Infantino on Friday asking him to stay away from the region’s Under-14 Challenge Series.

Montagliani, who is also a FIFA vice president, wrote that “considering the governance crisis surrounding FIFA as a result of your controversial FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, the media will focus on this situation”, and asked him not to undermine “the technical nature of this important youth development activity”.

Infantino went anyway.

Read also: Erling Haaland’s ridiculous Man City numbers after 200 games – and the records still in sight

The vote that could end his presidency

UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF are discussing whether to trigger a no-confidence vote before Infantino stands for re-election at the FIFA Congress in March 2027. Under FIFA statutes, roughly a fifth of the 211 member associations, about 42 federations, must submit a written request to force an Extraordinary Congress within three months.

Confederations do not deliver those votes. Each of FIFA’s 211 members casts its own ballot under a one-member, one-vote rule, and the public opposition of the three confederation leaderships is a position, not a bloc count. That is precisely the gap Infantino was trying to widen in Punta Cana. CAF, the African confederation, has already backed him, as have six Arab associations including Qatar and Morocco, according to the same Al Jazeera reporting.

Why he is on the defensive

The trigger for the crisis is the collapse of the FIFA Forward Enterprise project, a plan to sell a 20 per cent stake in a new commercial subsidiary to private investors. The vehicle was valued at roughly $20 billion and would have delivered up to $40 million to each member federation. Infantino withdrew the plan on 31 July after opposition from the three confederations, and FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, departed later in August after publicly criticising the project.

Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, has ruled out running for the FIFA presidency himself but expects a challenger to emerge.

Read also: Rahm faces LIV’s moment of truth

“One option is that he realises that he doesn’t have the support, the political support of football community, the political support of fans, the political support of the players,” Ceferin said.

The nomination deadline for the March 2027 ballot is 18 November. Between now and then Infantino has to convince enough of the smaller federations that he is worth keeping. The Punta Cana video was the opening pitch.

Read also: Ligue 1 prepares new TV rights gamble after years of chaos