The FIFA president’s problem is no longer just that European federations are rebelling from the outside. One of the men who sits at UEFA’s top table has now told him, on paper, that Israel is out.

Zuares put his name to a letter seen by Sky Sports News on 18 August rescinding an earlier endorsement of Infantino for a fourth term at world football’s governing body. In it, he calls the rift between UEFA and FIFA over how the sport should be run “deep, substantial and rooted in principle,” and says the Israeli association is left with no realistic option but to pull its support.

Zuares does not just speak for a single member federation. He sits on the Executive Committee of the confederation that has been leading the revolt against Infantino, and he has now formalised his own opposition to a FIFA presidency he once backed. His letter closes with the hope that the game can “restore a shared and appropriate vision and direction for world football.”

The Thrive deal collapsed on 31 July

The trigger was Infantino’s now-abandoned plan to sell a stake in the commercial arm of the World Cup to private investors. FIFA had been in talks to hand about 20% of a new events unit, valued at around $20bn, to the private equity firm Thrive, in return for $4.2bn in fresh funding.

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The proposal, unveiled at the end of July, ran into an immediate wall of opposition. UEFA declared a formal loss of confidence in Infantino’s leadership, voted to boycott FIFA competitions in protest, and demanded a full review of FIFA governance, with the Asian Football Confederation demanding an urgent review of FIFA governance, and CONCACAF’s president Victor Montagliani openly weighing a run against Infantino. Infantino pulled the proposal late on 31 July, a matter of days after it had gone public.

Sweden and Wales were already gone

Israel is not the first federation to drop Infantino publicly. The Swedish and Welsh associations had earlier moved to withdraw their endorsements, and other European federations have flagged concerns about how the FIFA president has handled governance, transparency and the commercial direction of the game, as the Jerusalem Post reported alongside Zuares’s letter.

Confederations, though, do not deliver their members’ votes. Each of the 211 associations that make up FIFA’s Congress casts its own ballot when the presidency is on the agenda, and more than 200 of them had already signed a letter of support for Infantino before the Thrive proposal collapsed. UEFA’s opposition and CONCACAF’s misgivings put pressure on those signatures. They do not cancel them.

It is a single, named voice from inside UEFA’s ExCo aligning a specific FIFA member against the incumbent.

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The vote in Rabat is seven months away

The FIFA presidential election is set for the 77th FIFA Congress in Rabat on 18 March 2027, where Infantino is seeking a fourth term and no rival candidate has been declared. Israel’s withdrawal is one of the first public defections since the Thrive proposal fell, and the first that carries a UEFA Executive Committee signature at the bottom of the page.

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