Mattias Grafström’s name at the bottom of the letter is what makes it unusual. FIFA presidents send letters to member federations all the time; a joint, personal apology from the president and his own secretary general is not something the governing body’s members can recall receiving.

The correspondence went out on Wednesday night from Rabat, where Gianni Infantino had spent the day with Grafström and members of FIFA’s management board trying to contain the fallout from the collapsed FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal.

“We sincerely apologize for these errors and commit to them not happening again,” the two wrote.

The Council was left out

The abandoned plan would have sold a 20% stake in a new commercial subsidiary managing FIFA’s events, including the World Cup, to private investors for roughly $4.2bn, al-Monitor reports.

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Criticism intensified because a company with family ties to US President Donald Trump was tied to the proposal.

The letter is candid about how the plan was put together, according to Spanish daily AS via Goal.

“It was never our aim to exclude the FIFA Council and the member federations from this process,” the pair wrote.

“We should have acted differently. We also acknowledge that there were errors following the leak of the proposal to the media.”

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The same letter also carries a warning that “FIFA will not tolerate any attacks on its integrity, its good governance and its procedures”, an unusual mix of contrition and defensiveness in a single document.

Signing what he had criticised days earlier

Grafström’s inclusion is the sharpest detail. Just a day before the letter, an internal memo from him to FIFA staff had leaked, describing “a sad and reproachable series of events”.

“Individuals, unstable moments and unfortunate episodes come and go. The institution, its mission and its responsibility towards world football continue,” the memo added, without naming Infantino.

Reporting from the same period indicated the Swedish secretary general had not been briefed on the details of the FFE proposal before it became public.

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Between that memo and Wednesday’s letter, Grafström moved from publicly distancing himself from the plan to publicly co-owning the apology for it.

Cordeiro and Lamour did not stay

Two senior figures chose the other exit. Senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned last Friday, calling the plan “a bad deal for football.”

Chief operating officer Kevin Lamour told colleagues that staff had been “deceived” and described the initiative as “the project of one person.”

UEFA and CONCACAF have called on Infantino to step down, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he has lost confidence in the FIFA president.

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Confederations do not control how their member associations vote, though, and each of FIFA’s 211 members casts its own ballot; on that arithmetic Infantino remains in place, confirmed by the Rabat meeting as still enjoying the “full support” of the management board.

That included the support, in writing, of a secretary general who had spent the previous week telling his own staff how sorry he was that any of this had happened.

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