“Please accept our sincere apology for these errors. We are committed to ensuring they are not repeated.”
That was the closing line of a joint letter Infantino and secretary-general Mattias Grafström sent to all 211 FIFA member associations on Wednesday, hours after the FIFA president had walked out of a meeting at the governing body’s regional office in Salé, near Rabat, with his job intact.
The management board reaffirmed its “full support” for Infantino after roughly seven hours of talks, and he in turn reaffirmed his support for Grafström. That is the internal outcome. The external one is that UEFA, Carney and one of the most decorated players in the game are refusing to accept an apology.
‘We should have acted differently’
The letter, addressed to member associations after the meeting, contained a rare admission from FIFA’s leadership.
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“We acknowledge that there were errors in the proposal to create the project. It was never our aim to exclude the FIFA Council,” Infantino and Grafström wrote.
“We should have acted differently. We also acknowledge that there were errors following the leak of the proposal to the media.”
The proposal, a project called FIFA Forward Enterprise or FFE, would have raised up to $4.2 billion by selling a roughly 20% stake in a new commercial subsidiary running the World Cup and the Club World Cup to outside investors, on a $20 billion valuation. Sky Sports reported FIFA had offered each of its 211 associations a payment of £30.1 million to approve the deal by a mid-September deadline. Infantino withdrew it on Saturday after the pushback.
UEFA has already declared no confidence
UEFA’s language when it declared its position had been anything but conciliatory. In a statement on 1 August, the European confederation said “the shabby, back room, opaque deal he hatched and tried to force through was anything but transparent.”
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It added that “the current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.”
Carney was blunter still. “I don’t have confidence in Mr. Infantino,” the Canadian prime minister said, adding that failing to inform senior executives “should be fatal” for any leader. Canada co-hosted the 2026 World Cup with the United States and Mexico.
Figo tells Infantino to leave ‘now’
The most personal broadside came from Luis Figo. In a post on X on the eve of the Rabat meeting, the former Real Madrid and Barcelona winger wrote that Infantino had “debased the office that he promised to elevate”, and had “lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game.”
“It is too late to save his dignity but it is not too late to save football. He should go. Now.”
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Carlos Cordeiro, one of Infantino’s advisers, had already resigned. Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s chief of global football development, called the withdrawal of the FFE plan “absolutely necessary and beyond question”.
The English FA has called for a full review of FIFA’s leadership, and the Welsh, Serbian and Swedish associations have withdrawn support for Infantino’s re-election.
March 2027 vote is Infantino’s next test
FIFA said the FFE proposal “is now off the table” and warned it “will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity”. A governance review will be presented at the next FIFA Council meeting.
Infantino’s re-election bid is on the agenda of the 77th FIFA Congress, scheduled for Rabat on 18 March 2027. Every one of the 211 member associations has one vote at that Congress, and confederations do not control how their members cast that vote; each association votes on its own.
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Whether Wednesday’s apology is enough to carry Infantino through seven more months of that arithmetic is now his own calculation.
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