GENEVA (AP) — European soccer leader Aleksander Ceferin said Wednesday it is “our work” to repair the unity and trust broken by FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s failed World Cup sell-off plan.
The UEFA president, in rare public comments two months into the divisive global rift in soccer, did not cite Infantino by name but said “not everyone places the game above their own ambitions.”
“The project that shattered the unity of world football may be abolished,
but the trust it broke has not returned, and repairing it is our work now,” Ceferin said in a video message to an audience of soccer and business executives in Lisbon.
Ceferin led UEFA’s backlash in July that helped stop Infantino’s plan to sell at least 20% of FIFA’s future commercial rights for $4.2 billion to investors led by Josh Kushner, the brother of U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Though Infantino dropped the plan within days, UEFA said it would work toward removing him from office — before or at the FIFA presidential election in March — and preparing a criminal complaint against him in Switzerland for alleged financial mismanagement.
“Trust in our sport rests on three pillars: unity, transparency, and governance that serves the many, not the few,” Ceferin, a Slovenian lawyer, said Wednesday.
“In recent times, all three were disregarded by people who had sworn to protect them,” he said.
FIFA and Infantino have said the plan to create a FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) commercial spinoff was to accelerate development of soccer worldwide, outside the wealthy power base of Europe.
Ceferin has ruled out being a candidate in the FIFA election, where Infantino seeks a fourth and final term in office through 2031 to complete a 15-year presidency.
There were “many, many” potential candidates capable of challenging Infantino, Ceferin told reporters last week in Greece, after a UEFA executive committee meeting in Thessaloniki.
FIFA has a Nov. 18 deadline to enter the election contest, four months before the vote by 211 member federations in Morocco — a key ally of Infantino, where the governing body has its African headquarters near Rabat.
FIFA’s 211 members effectively already own the Zurich-based not-for-profit soccer body which has at least $5 billion in cash reserves after the 2026 World Cup in North America.
Infantino planned to offer the 211 members $20 million each this year to approve the FFE project. It would have been a subsidiary controlling tens of billions of dollars of commercial rights for all future World Cups, Club World Cups and other tournaments.
UEFA and its continental allies, the North American soccer body CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation, have said FIFA can afford to spend $2.1 billion giving each member a $10 million one-off payment from the reserves without involving investors.
Infantino moved this week to calm critics of his hands-on executive presidency by offering to open an independent review of FIFA’s governance standards and decision-making. He is scheduled to chair a meeting of his 37-member FIFA Council, that includes Ceferin, on Oct. 15 in Zurich.
UEFA asked last month for an independent review of the FFE project that was secretly developed over the past year without some FIFA senior management knowing.
Infantino has a checkered history with independent oversight of FIFA. In 2017, one year before the men's World Cup in Russia, FIFA removed its most senior governance official who had enforced conflict-of-interest rules to stop Vitaly Mutko, who was a Russian deputy prime minister, from standing as an election candidate to retain his seat on FIFA's ruling committee.
That removal of Portuguese academic Miguel Maduro prompted three of his independent colleagues on the FIFA governance panel — including former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, a South African judge — to resign in protest.
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