FIFA said on Sunday that Gianni Infantino will stand again and that “nothing has changed.” Almost everything has. But the fight to remove him is not a court case or a boycott. It is a count, and the count is uglier for his opponents than the headlines suggest. Angle prompted by BBC Sport’s map of where every member association stands.
The statement that came out of FIFA on Sunday was three sentences long and contained one claim that is true and one that is not. It is true that Gianni Infantino announced in April that he would seek a fourth term, and that he still intends to. It is not true that nothing has changed. In mid-July, on the morning of the World Cup final, he was considered a shoo-in, endorsed by all but a handful of FIFA’s members and facing no challenger from any quarter. Seven weeks later the Football Associations of England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland have publicly withdrawn their letters of support, UEFA has filed for discovery in three American courts and told them it is preparing a criminal complaint in Switzerland, and FIFA’s reply, lodged in Colorado on Thursday, calls all of that a “smear campaign.”
The thing that changed, of course, was FIFA Forward Enterprise: a plan, announced on July 28 and abandoned four days later, to spin the commercial rights to the World Cup into a new company valued at $20 billion and sell roughly a fifth of it, for around $4.2 billion, to an investor group led by Josh Kushner’s Thrive. It was a $20 billion idea and it lasted less time than the group stage. But the litigation and the press releases, however loud, are not what decides whether Infantino keeps his job. What decides that is a vote in Rabat next March, and the vote has a number attached to it. The number is 106.
The rule is simple. FIFA has 211 member associations, one vote each, and in a two-candidate election a simple majority, 106 votes, wins. Should three or more candidates stand, the first round needs two-thirds, and if nobody reaches it the second round drops back to a simple majority. That is the whole procedure. The alternative route, a vote of no confidence, would need three-quarters of the membership, 159 votes, and UEFA has already abandoned it as unrealistic. So has the idea of forcing him out through the FIFA Council, where Europe holds nine of thirty-seven seats and Africa, South America and Oceania between them hold fourteen. Everything that is happening in the courts is, in the end, an argument about how those 211 associations should feel by the morning of March 18. It is not a substitute for counting them.
So count them. Europe has 55 votes, Africa 54, Asia 46, North and Central America and the Caribbean 35, Oceania 11 and South America 10. The first thing that arithmetic tells you is that UEFA, which has led every phase of this revolt, cannot remove Infantino on its own, or with Europe’s friends, or with anything short of a coalition that reaches across at least two other continents. The 55 votes that make Europe the largest confederation in the room are also 51 votes short of a majority. This is why the joint letter of August 10, in which UEFA, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation accused Infantino of breaking their trust “through deception”, mattered so much more than any single national statement. On paper those three bodies represent 136 associations, which is a landslide.
The second thing the arithmetic tells you is that the paper is not the vote. Confederations write letters; associations cast ballots, and they do not always toe the line. Days before that letter was even signed Mexico had broken ranks with Concacaf to back Infantino, and Bhutan, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates did the same within Asia. Saudi Arabia, host of the 2034 World Cup and a member of that same Asian confederation, waited out its own federation election and then, on August 27, declared that it supports Infantino “at this time”, a phrase carrying enough conditions to fill a term sheet but a vote nonetheless. When BBC Sport tallied the map on August 11 it had 73 associations for Infantino, 124 against and 13 undecided, while cautioning that a good many of the 124 were assumed from their confederation’s position rather than stated. The undecided 13 are not the swing. The swing is how many of those assumed opponents behave like Mexico when the ballot is secret.
Now run it from Infantino’s side, because he plainly has. Africa’s 54 and South America’s 10 are, by every account, his base; both confederations have received unprecedented investment on his watch, and CONMEBOL unanimously endorsed his fourth term before he had even confirmed he wanted one. That is 64. He needs 42 more, from a pool of 92 votes in Asia, North America and Oceania, roughly 46 per cent of a pool made up of two confederations that have formally lost confidence in him and one, Oceania, whose executive committee praised a decade of progress under FIFA’s leadership on August 14 without quite saying the word support, on the same morning New Zealand withdrew its own. He has spent August flying to the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, and he has, according to Reuters, sought to sideline the confederations and appeal directly to individual members. You would too. The confederations are against him. The members are the ones who vote.
What he can offer them is the thing he has always offered them. The 48-team World Cup, which we argued before the tournament was a competitive gamble and which turned out, on the pitch, rather better than we feared, was in electoral terms never a gamble at all: of the sixteen new places it created, Europe received three, and Africa, Asia and Concacaf between them received the bulk of the rest. Then there is the FIFA Forward programme, billions of dollars in development money that has flowed disproportionately to the associations lowest down the food chain, which is to say the ones in Asia, Concacaf and Oceania he now needs. And there is the deal that sank him, which is worth re-reading with the electoral roll in one hand. Under the FFE proposal every member association would have been offered an optional one-off payment of $20 million and a rise in its four-year Forward grant from $8 million to $20 million. Twenty million dollars, 211 times over, is $4.22 billion, which is near enough exactly what the sale of the stake was meant to raise. The plan that endangered him was, in its plumbing, a cheque to each of the people who now decide whether he survives it. He withdrew the plan. The people did not go anywhere.
Against this the opposition has a coalition, a grievance and, as of today, no candidate. BBC Sport understands UEFA is confident one can be found, and the name that has been mooted most consistently is Victor Montagliani, the Concacaf president, who was at MetLife handing Argentina their runners-up medals on the afternoon Spain’s defence held out against Argentina. The logic is that a European challenger would inflame the resentment of European dominance that other confederations have felt for decades, and that Montagliani, a Canadian, does not. The counter-logic is that a North American candidate has 35 home votes and Mexico has already left the building. The other name in circulation is Sheikh Salman of the AFC, whose candidacy might pull back the Asian associations currently drifting towards Infantino but would ask Europe to vote for a man from the confederation that just embraced Saudi Arabia’s position. Whoever it is has until November 18 to declare, and then four months to do what Infantino has been doing since August: not litigating, but visiting.
The discovery motions and the criminal complaint will run their course, and if they turn up what UEFA says they will, they may yet change the mood of the room. But the room is in Rabat, in Morocco, in the heart of the confederation that remains his most reliable bloc, and the men who walk into it will not be asked whether they are appalled. They will be asked to write a name. One hundred and six of them writing his is the whole of the case for Gianni Infantino, and on the current numbers, with the current absence of an opponent, it is a case he can still make.
Sources: BBC Sport, Sky Sports, the Associated Press (via NBC), Reuters (via The Star), The Canadian Press (via TSN), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Variety, Inside World Football, and Flashscore.
