A signed letter from Gianni Infantino and FIFA secretary general Mattias Grafström was enough to talk UEFA down from its month-long boycott threat. It was not enough to end the campaign to remove the Swiss from the FIFA presidency.
UEFA’s executive committee, meeting in Monaco ahead of the Champions League draw, withdrew the threat on Thursday after receiving what the European body considered binding assurances that the scrapped plan to sell stakes in the World Cup would not be revived.
Earlier this month, Infantino and Grafström sent a joint letter to the FIFA Council and member associations.
“We sincerely apologise for these errors and commit to them not happening again,” they wrote.
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The letter, reported by ITV News on 6 August, acknowledged mistakes in how the FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal was handled and pledged a report to the next FIFA Council meeting.
Ceferin gives Infantino two paths
Ceferin’s public position on Infantino, set out before Thursday’s meeting, is that the apology settles the boycott and nothing else.
Speaking on the British podcast “The Rest Is Politics: Leading” earlier this week, the UEFA president laid out two paths for the FIFA president before next year’s congress.
“One option is that he realises that he does not have the support,” Ceferin said.
“The second option is to go to an election in March, but in that case I think he will have a candidate running against him.”
The 58-year-old Slovenian ruled himself out of any run for the FIFA job, arguing his credibility “is much, much higher if I’m not interested in the position.”
What Infantino tried to sell
Infantino announced the FIFA Forward Enterprise plan on 28 July, proposing to sell a 20 per cent stake in FIFA’s commercial rights, including the World Cup, to a $20bn private-investor vehicle led by Joshua Kushner’s New York-based fund.
The reaction from Europe was immediate. Within days, all 55 UEFA members had agreed to boycott every FIFA competition. Infantino withdrew the proposal on 31 July, but UEFA held its position, demanding written assurances that a similar plan would never return.
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Those assurances came in the joint letter this month. The boycott stayed in place until Thursday’s Monaco meeting confirmed the two conditions had been met.
The Under-20 tournament goes ahead in Poland
The most immediate consequence is that the FIFA Under-20 Women’s World Cup will go ahead as planned in Poland, running from 5 September across Łódź, Bielsko-Biała, Katowice and Sosnowiec. Six European nations, hosts Poland alongside England, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, will now travel to the tournament.
A UEFA source described the climbdown to Reuters as a decision about the players rather than the politics.
“It’s not a UEFA defeat, rather the reality of avoiding hurting young players once in a lifetime opportunity. The actions and insistence on change will continue,” the source told the agency.
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FIFA has set 18 November as the deadline for challengers to enter the presidential race, with the election due at the FIFA Congress in Rabat, Morocco, in March 2027. On the day UEFA lifted its boycott threat, the Italian Football Federation withdrew its endorsement of Infantino’s re-election bid.
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