FIFA president Gianni Infantino is having the worst month of his decade in office.
An abandoned plan to sell a stake in the World Cup’s commercial future to private investors has triggered accusations of a “fundamental breach of trust” from UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation.
Norway’s federation has called for his resignation.
England’s FA has withdrawn its backing for his re-election. Lawyers for UEFA say they are weighing legal action.
And yet, in Africa and much of South America, Infantino’s position looks remarkably secure.
The Confederation of African Football — 54 member federations, more than a quarter of FIFA’s total membership — unanimously reaffirmed its support for him in early August.
Argentina’s federation publicly thanked him for a decade of service.
CONMEBOL has said it won’t back any accelerated push to remove him.
Mexico’s federation broke with the rest of CONCACAF to stand by him. Even Donald Trump weighed in, warning on social media that removing Infantino would be a “terrible mistake” for FIFA.
It would be easy for European commentators to read this split as opportunism, or as smaller federations falling in line behind a powerful patron. That reading misses something important: for large parts of the footballing world outside Europe, Infantino’s decade in charge has coincided with a real, measurable redistribution of attention and opportunity toward their region — and they are not eager to gamble that away on a leadership change engineered largely by European federations.
Consider what has actually changed since Infantino took over from Sepp Blatter in 2016.
The World Cup expanded from 32 to 48 teams for 2026, opening the tournament’s final stage to national teams that historically had almost no realistic path there.
FIFA has funneled greater investment into African, Asian and North and Central American federations.
Continental competitions outside Europe — the Africa Cup of Nations chief among them — have grown into commercial and broadcast properties in their own right, rather than feeder tournaments whose best players immediately depart for European leagues.
None of this erases the legitimate governance questions raised by UEFA and its allies about the abandoned FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, which would have handed private investors a stake in FIFA’s commercial operations without, critics say, adequate consultation of the federations that collectively own the sport.
Those are fair questions, and FIFA has itself acknowledged mistakes were made in how the plan was handled.
But it is worth asking why the loudest calls for Infantino’s head are coming overwhelmingly from the continent that has held the tightest grip on football’s institutions, revenues and prestige for the better part of a century — and why federations elsewhere, who have watched their own competitions and players gain unprecedented visibility over the past decade, are far less eager to see him go.
Former Moroccan international Houssine Kharja put it plainly in a recent interview, arguing that Europe’s opposition to Infantino should be understood in the context of football’s changing global balance rather than treated as a straightforward governance dispute.
He also pointed out that European football itself is saturated with private capital, questioning why FIFA should be held to a categorically different standard on new financing mechanisms.
Kharja’s central appeal — that Infantino and UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin sit down and resolve their dispute through dialogue rather than a boycott — deserves more attention than it has received.
Infantino has real questions to answer about how the FFE plan was designed and why it bypassed the consultation FIFA’s own members were entitled to.
But conflating those legitimate governance concerns with a verdict on his broader project — a more genuinely global football, with real institutional weight distributed beyond Europe — risks discarding a decade of progress that federations across Africa, Asia and the Americas are not, understandably, willing to give up without a fight.
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