Gianni Infantino sits down with his fiercest critics on Thursday in Zurich, attending his first FIFA Council meeting since his scheme to sell a stake in the World Cup fell apart spectacularly in July. This isn't a routine gathering. It's a reckoning.
The heads of UEFA, AFC, and CONCACAF — Aleksander Ceferin, Salman Al Khalifa, and Victor Montagliani — have all publicly called for Infantino to resign. All three will be in the room. So will their counterparts from Africa, South America, and Oceania. The agenda is formal. The atmosphere will not be.
What killed the FFE plan
The FIFA Forward Enterprise scheme, which Infantino announced and then abandoned within days in July, is the wound that won't close. Under the proposal, FIFA would have sold a minority stake in a commercial subsidiary to private investors — with the lead investor identified as a company linked to Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner. It lasted barely a week before it collapsed under the weight of opposition from the very people now sitting across from Infantino in Zurich.
Beyond the obvious governance questions, the FFE plan revealed how isolated Infantino had become among the sport's power brokers. UEFA and CONCACAF responded by calling on FIFA to simply release $10 million directly to each of its 211 member associations — a pointed counter to Infantino's grander, more complicated vision of $20 million in development funding plus access to a further $20 million.
Thursday's agenda also covers FIFA's financial reserves, its disciplinary procedures, and the Peace Prize controversially handed to Donald Trump last year. That last item alone signals how far FIFA's credibility has slipped.
Can they actually remove him?
Probably not. People familiar with the situation told Reuters the chances of finding a viable replacement are remote. Former Switzerland and Tottenham defender Ramon Vega has declared his intention to run ahead of the March 2027 election, but hasn't confirmed whether he has the five national association nominations required to enter the race. That's a long way from a credible challenge.
Infantino has been working the phones and the rooms. He received a standing ovation from African leaders in Cape Verde last week. South America is expected to back him at next year's election in Rabat, Morocco. Much of Asia — including a bloc of Arab nations — has offered support despite the AFC's public criticism.
So his opponents' realistic goal isn't removal. It's containment — curbing his powers, tightening governance, making it harder for him to operate unilaterally. Whether that produces anything real is another question.
Miguel Maduro, who chaired FIFA's Governance Committee in 2016 before Infantino sacked him, is not optimistic: "They may announce the setting up of a Working Group or even an Independent Review of FIFA Governance but the credibility of either exercise will be very limited in the light of FIFA's track record." He called it "window dressing" designed to reduce pressure rather than solve problems.
Emanuel Medeiros of the Sport Integrity Global Alliance framed it more charitably, calling for "a genuinely independent, comprehensive and transparent governance review." But given FIFA's history, the gap between those two assessments is where the truth probably lives.
Infantino walks into Thursday's meeting having survived scandals before. The question is whether his opponents are finally organized enough to make survival cost him something.
