"You don't fight an election unless you can win that election." That's UEFA vice-president Laura McAllister, speaking in Madrid on Wednesday — and it's the clearest signal yet that European football's push to remove Gianni Infantino from FIFA's top job is more than noise.
Speaking at the World Football Summit a day after Greece became the latest national association to withdraw support for Infantino's re-election, McAllister was direct: UEFA is on track, the coalition is holding, and the search for a credible challenger to the Swiss-Italian president is very much alive ahead of the March election.
Not a European coup — a reform campaign
McAllister was careful to reframe what this is actually about. UEFA isn't trying to install a European puppet at the top of FIFA. The identity and nationality of the eventual candidate matter less than the platform they stand on.
"This is about the programme of change," she said. "We have to have a really clear template of what good governance looks like in global football, and it isn't what we've seen from FIFA over recent years."
That programme, as McAllister laid it out, includes:
- Greater accountability and transparency
- Proper recognition of conflicts of interest
- Stronger protection for whistleblowers
- More diverse leadership across the game
Infantino's authority took its biggest hit after his proposal to sell up to a 20% stake in FIFA competitions — including the World Cup — to private investors collapsed under fierce opposition from UEFA, the Asian Football Confederation, and CONCACAF. The fallout hasn't stopped him from announcing his intention to seek another term, but it has clearly shifted the political landscape.
The clock is ticking
McAllister acknowledged that Infantino still has the numbers to win — for now. She didn't pretend otherwise. "We always knew that things wouldn't just change overnight," she said. "We knew there would be a resistance to change as well, of course."
What she pushed back against was the suggestion that the opposition has run out of steam. UEFA nations, she said, remain "united and very concerted" — and the reform movement extends well beyond Europe's borders. The eventual candidate, whoever they are, will need to unite multiple confederations, not just carry the European vote.
Nominations haven't opened yet, which is why McAllister is focused on making the argument rather than naming names. The priority, she said, is "convincing the world of football that it belongs to them" — and that the game needs a cultural shift in how it's run at the top.
If Infantino does survive and win re-election, McAllister had a blunt message: "That's not our problem as much as it's his problem. One would hope that he would have learned the lessons of a period that the game has seen as a real existential crisis."
