Ian Maxwell did not soften the verdict when he set out the Scottish Football Association’s position on Monday.
“There needs to be change,” the SFA chief executive told reporters.
He added that Gianni Infantino would not get Scotland’s ballot when the FIFA president stands for re-election in early 2027.
Scotland’s move comes 16 days after UEFA’s executive formally declared it had lost confidence in Infantino, and only five weeks before a September 23 deadline that could turn this crisis into a formal vote on his presidency.
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Maxwell said the SFA was lining up with the wider European position.
“We have aligned ourselves with the Uefa position and 55 nations are stronger than one voice.”
He was equally direct on the logic of the withdrawal.
“We can’t say we’ve lost confidence in someone and then even consider re-electing them in due course.”
Maxwell targets the abandoned sell-off
The SFA chief tied Scotland’s decision to the handling of Infantino’s shelved plan to bring private investors into a new FIFA commercial company that would have controlled World Cup ticketing and rights.
“There’s obviously been a fall-down in governance, there’s been a lack of transparency, there’s been a lack of engagement,” Maxwell said.
The proposal, known as FIFA Forward Enterprise, would have carved off roughly 21% of a new commercial vehicle for sale to outside investors and was projected to raise as much as $4.2 billion. It collapsed in July under opposition from confederations and the players’ union FIFPRO, and UEFA’s executive committee issued its own statement on August 1 saying the FIFA leadership no longer commanded its confidence.
“The way that happened was just unacceptable. There’s been a fundamental breakdown in governance, procedure and protocol. And that needs to change.”
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Norway went further than Scotland
Scotland’s move follows public withdrawals by the Football Associations of England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Croatia has also broken with Infantino.
Norway went a step further this month, with Norwegian Football Federation president Lise Klaveness publicly calling on Infantino to resign and saying the sport had to move beyond “Game of Thrones” power struggles.
Confederations do not control how their member associations vote at FIFA. Each of the 211 members casts its own ballot, and Maxwell’s invocation of “55 nations” reflects a shared UEFA position rather than a guaranteed voting bloc. But the line-up of Europe’s biggest and best-organised federations behind the same statement is the sharpest institutional pressure Infantino has faced since he took office in 2016.
Elsewhere, the FIFA president still has significant backing. The Confederation of African Football, world football’s largest confederation with 54 members, has publicly stood by him, as have South America’s CONMEBOL and Oceania’s OFC. Argentina and Mexico have both said individually that they still support him.
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43 signatures by September 23
The immediate pressure point is September 23. That is the deadline for a formal request to add a vote of no confidence to the agenda of an extraordinary FIFA Congress. Such a request requires the signatures of 43 associations, or 20% of the membership, according to FIFA’s statutes.
If those signatures land, an extraordinary Congress is pencilled in for November 23, where removing a sitting president would require a simple majority of the 211 members: 106 votes.
The 2027 election Maxwell referenced is scheduled for March 18 at the 77th FIFA Congress in Rabat. Any challenger has to submit a candidacy by November 18, 2026, five days before the potential extraordinary Congress.
SFA president Mike Mulraney chairs FIFA’s finance committee.
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