Lise Klaveness has turned the FIFA storm into something bigger than a failed investment scheme. This week, the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) president called on Gianni Infantino to resign and demanded a full audit of the decade he has spent in charge of world football.
“We decided that there is no trust in Infantino now,” Klaveness said after the NFF’s monthly board meeting.
“We have been worried consistently and there has been one more step in worrying direction every year, every part of the year. The trust is now gone for us, there is no way back for Infantino.”
Norway is the first national association whose president has publicly asked Infantino to go. UEFA’s executive committee had already declared a week earlier that it had lost confidence in the FIFA leadership, but stopped short of calling for a resignation.
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What Norway wants reviewed
The Norwegian demand is unusually broad. Klaveness is not only asking Infantino to leave; she wants an independent review of every governance reform introduced since Infantino was elected in 2016 on a manifesto called “Taking FIFA Forward”. The review, she said, should assess “what was implemented, what was not, and what should have been implemented”.
“Then things quickly deteriorated: from keeping a distance, we moved to giving up, and even backtracking, all against a backdrop of a lack of independence from heads of state and other influential figures, particularly from World Cup host countries,” Klaveness told AFP.
The trigger for Norway’s move is the collapse of the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), a proposed $20 billion commercial subsidiary that would have sold minority stakes in the World Cup and Club World Cup to private investors, with a firm founded by Joshua Kushner named as anchor investor. Infantino scrapped the plan at the end of July after UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC lined up against it and his senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned.
The ‘Game of Thrones’ line
“For us, it has never been a personal issue against Gianni Infantino. The problems go beyond the person of the president.”
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She has also rejected the idea that the crisis should be read as a succession battle, insisting it should not be reduced to a “Game of Thrones” power struggle. When Sepp Blatter, the man Infantino replaced, publicly backed her as a suitable successor on X on 4 August, Klaveness dismissed it.
“Sepp Blatter was president when I was a player. I remember that he wanted us to play in shorter shorts, and I commented on that at the time. But I have no comment on this.”
What her track record says
Klaveness, 45, is a lawyer and former Norway international with 73 caps. She became the first woman to lead the NFF in 2022 and was re-elected as chair in March 2026 for a further two-year term.
Her arrival on the international stage came weeks after taking office, when she stood at the FIFA Congress in Doha and said human rights, equality and democracy “were not in the starting 11” of the Qatar World Cup. Norway also declined to back Infantino’s re-election in 2023, and the NFF has now filed fresh ethics complaints over Donald Trump’s FIFA Peace Prize and the reversal of Folarin Balogun’s suspension.
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UEFA and CONCACAF have expressed no confidence in Infantino, but confederations do not deliver their members’ votes at FIFA. Each of the 211 national associations casts its own ballot, and it is that count, one federation at a time, that Klaveness is now trying to move.
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