Prince Ali bin Al Hussein has taken the campaign against Gianni Infantino into new territory, accusing FIFA officials of blackmail over how they sought his endorsement of the FIFA president’s next term.
The Jordan Football Association president said the governing body verbally suggested that publicly backing Infantino “would go a long way to helping our FA out” of a string of unresolved disputes, from unpaid tournament money to a US tax bill.
“We pride ourselves in Jordan in upholding ethical values. We did not endorse him before and certainly will not now,” Prince Ali wrote in a post on X, reported by Al Jazeera.
“But the whole situation amounts to blackmail and we refuse to give in to that.”
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Prince Ali is a former FIFA vice president and one of the few senior figures inside the game still willing to name Infantino publicly.
Meeting under pressure in Morocco
Infantino has called senior FIFA staff to Rabat for talks, The National reported.
The meeting comes days after he was forced to abandon his signature commercial project under threat of a European boycott of the World Cup.
The plan was to spin off a subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), and sell a roughly 20 percent stake to private investors.
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The company was valued internally at around $20bn, with FIFA hoping to raise up to $4.2bn, ESPN reported.
UEFA’s 55 members voted on 30 July to boycott all FIFA competitions, including the 2030 World Cup, if the sale went through, a threat that would have kept reigning world champions Spain and other European sides out of the next edition. Infantino pulled the plan within days.
Unpaid money and taxed players
Prince Ali’s grievances are financial as much as political. He said Jordan’s players and staff have still not received the reward money owed for reaching the FIFA Arab Cup final in Qatar in December 2025.
“The money our team should receive for having reached the final has not been delivered yet, while at the same time FIFA brags about how many billions they have in reserve,” he said.
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He also accused FIFA of letting US tax obligations eat into Jordan’s earnings from the 2026 World Cup while teams based in Canada and Mexico avoided them.
“We are being taxed by the US government through FIFA for our participation,” Prince Ali said. “Money that should go to players and staff.”
Fans, he added, had paid high ticket prices only to be denied World Cup visas.
Support base narrows before March vote
Five European associations have formally withdrawn support for Infantino ahead of the FIFA Congress in Morocco in March 2027, led by England. Wales, Sweden, Finland and Serbia have made the same move.
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Denmark, Norway and Germany never signed the initial letter backing another term. Against that, Morocco, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Lebanon and Sri Lanka have publicly kept their support in place.
Infantino’s immediate task is avoiding an Extraordinary Congress. That mechanism is triggered if 43 member associations formally request one, and it would let his mandate be reopened before the scheduled election.
The mood inside FIFA has also turned. In a staff email leaked to Sky News, secretary general Mattias Grafstrom described the FFE episode as “a sad and reproachable series of events”, a striking rebuke of Infantino from his own top administrator.
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