English and Welsh FAs Withdraw Support for FIFA President Infantino

Here we go again. And, no, we are not talking about the start of the new Scottish Premiership season or the preliminary round of the Carabao Cup – although that Tranmere v Rochdale shootout was a cracker. Yes, after a week of talk about money, greed and Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, the hot topic around the water cooler on Monday was again Gianni Infantino and, more specifically, the English and Welsh FAs’ decisions to row back on their support of a stalling ship. Along with Finland, they’re the first of Uefa’s 55 members to withdraw their letters of support for next year’s Fifa overlord elections.

By the time Football Daily hits your inboxes, there could be a flurry of other nations frantically clicking unsend on those endorsement emails – more than 200 had their flags planted on Terra Gianni just a matter of weeks ago. This U-turn has us harking back to the hazy days of the €uropean $uper £eague, when the Premier League’s super-elite turned their backs on the super-project one by one. Instead of a handful of club statements and Petr Cech trying to calm protestors on Kings Road, now we could be looking at hundreds of withdrawals from federations across the world. Who will go next? Norway? Japan? Would Gianni pick up the phone to the Oval Office if US Soccer decides enough is enough, maybe to try and get it to reverse the decision? Or at least suspend it until next year.

Either way, the threat of a World Cup boycott is over – for now – after Fifa scrapped its proposal to sell stakes in its tournaments to private investors in the early hours of Saturday morning. It was half past midnight in the UK when a statement “attributable to the Fifa president” appeared on its website. That followed a statement called “Clarifications on Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE)” at 4am the night before that doubled down on the plans. It’s not exactly reassuring that such major dealings and decisions are being pondered, seemingly by one man, in the dead of night – but then again, these could be learned behaviours after all.

Statement wars continued with Uefa’s response on Saturday morning, which read: “We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game.” That dubious is doing a lot of work there. Uefa added: “The current Fifa leadership has not only lost Uefa’s confidence, but also that of many other members of the football family.” The first member of the football family out of the traps on Monday morning – once it had given the Cymru Premier’s opening weekend time in the spotlight – was the Welsh FA. It withdrew that precious letter of support for Gianni and proclaimed: “Failing to put the best interests of football first is a failure we cannot accept.” Football Daily waits with bated breath to find out what the next statement will say. The Premier League, after all, is still three weeks away.