Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa was one of the loudest voices demanding accountability from Gianni Infantino. Now, with the FIFA Council meeting in Zurich just over a week away, he appears to be changing his tune.
In a letter sent to Infantino on Tuesday — shared with fellow confederation presidents including UEFA's Aleksander Ceferin and Concacaf's Victor Montagliani — the AFC president stepped back from his earlier push for sweeping structural overhaul. Instead of demanding Infantino's resignation or calling for an independent external review, Salman is now proposing an internal working group to examine FIFA's existing governance arrangements.
That's a significant U-turn. Salman had previously co-signed a letter with UEFA and Concacaf explicitly stating that any review of FIFA's governance should be conducted by a "fully independent third party." Now he's arguing the opposite — that the process should be "driven by the football institutions themselves, rather than being outsourced to an external party."
What this actually signals
Read between the lines and this looks less like a principled position shift and more like a realignment of political allegiances ahead of next year's presidential election. Infantino remains the sole declared candidate. Salman knows where the power is settling.
The AFC has never been a unified bloc on this. The Jordanian FA accused FIFA of trying to "blackmail" them into supporting Infantino's reelection — a serious allegation that hasn't exactly faded from memory. The Morocco Football Federation, meanwhile, was among the first to publicly back Infantino when the FFE storm broke. The Asian confederation is fractured, and Salman's letter reads like an attempt to find ground everyone can stand on — ground that happens to leave Infantino still standing too.
FIFA's FFE plan — which would have opened up a 20% stake in its commercial and event operations to private investment — triggered the global backlash that put Infantino under the kind of scrutiny he hadn't faced since taking office in 2016. UEFA led the charge demanding his resignation. That pressure hasn't gone away, but it's losing allies.
October 15 is the real test
The FIFA Council meeting in Zurich on October 15 will be the first major gathering since the FFE fallout. Whether Salman's softened letter represents a broader mood shift among confederation presidents — or just his own repositioning — will become clearer when those men sit down in the same room.
If the appetite for meaningful reform was already fragile, an internal working group run by football's own institutions is unlikely to put serious pressure on anything. FIFA investigating FIFA's governance is not exactly a track record that inspires confidence.
Infantino, who has never publicly flinched throughout this saga, now has at least one fewer major opponent in the room. The Jordanian FA's "blackmail" accusations still hang in the air, unanswered.
