"Infantino must resign now. There is no turning back." Norwegian Football Federation president Lise Klaveness didn't ease into that one. She said it directly, in public, with no diplomatic cushioning — and it's the clearest sign yet that the pressure on FIFA's leadership is no longer just background noise.
Klaveness has become the sharpest thorn in FIFA's side, and at her latest press conference she went after both the current president and his predecessor in the same breath. She dismissed a letter Infantino sent following a meeting in Rabat, Morocco as little more than a PR manoeuvre: "I fully understand that he and others are under pressure to backtrack and apologize, but it was mainly a starting point to launch a counterattack." The letter, in her view, means nothing.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement from Blatter either
The press conference took a sharper turn when Klaveness was asked about Sepp Blatter — who recently floated her name as a potential alternative to Infantino. She wasn't flattered.
"Blatter was president when I was a player. I remember he wanted us to play in shorter shorts than we were wearing."
That one sentence does more damage than a full paragraph of political critique. Blatter ran FIFA from 1998 to 2015, when he resigned amid one of the sport's largest corruption scandals. His endorsement, unsurprisingly, landed with about as much weight as a pre-season friendly.
Klaveness's broader argument is structural: FIFA doesn't need a different face, it needs different foundations. "We have reached a situation where extraordinary measures are needed to create lasting change," she said. "We did not have that before, and we do not have it now."
Whether calls like this translate into actual institutional pressure depends on how many other federations are willing to stand behind them publicly. Right now, Klaveness is the loudest voice in the room — but she's still largely alone in using her full volume.
