Crisis at Fifa: “I want to say that we apologize”, Gianni Infantino makes his mea culpa after the abandonment of his project

Apology time. Fifa President Gianni Infantino apologized Thursday to members of the body's executive council for the way in which his project to open the World Cup to private investors was carried out, an insufficient mea culpa according to some.

“First of all, I would like to say that we apologize for the errors made in the conduct and communication” of this project, “which had many consequences,” assured Gianni Infantino in a video relayed on the Fifa website after the Council held in Zurich. Italo-Switzerland spoke for the first time before the 37 members of this Council, the first to be held since the scandal which almost took over at the end of the summer.

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The revelation by the media in early August of his secret plan to open the World Cup to private investors triggered an unprecedented wave of criticism, with UEFA, Concacaf and the Asian Confederation subsequently calling for his departure. “We had a constructive discussion,” assured Gianni Infantino. “It is important to remember that this was a proposal, not a final decision. This proposal simply aimed to enable Fifa to invest more in its member associations, rather than replacing existing resources.

Written questions

“We are now prepared to receive all questions posed by members of the Fifa Council and to respond to them in writing, in due course,” he said.

His opponents deplored not having answers to these questions right now. “What is disappointing is that we have not received any response to our specific requests,” regretted Debbie Hewitt, the president of the English Federation and vice-president of Fifa. “What he really apologized for was not bringing the issue to the Council,” she said. As for the request to have to formulate questions in writing about his former project, Debbie Hewitt estimated that Infantino had to “answer these questions, and if he does not do it now, he is not fit to be president of Fifa”.

“We asked a lot of critical questions, there were no satisfactory answers from my point of view,” also regretted the president of the German Federation, Bernd Neuendorf.

$6.35 billion

“As I said, confidence in him is lost. New people must now develop new ideas and we must determine how to put this organization, which is extremely important for world football, back on a serious footing,” he stressed.

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But other members of the Council, like the president of the Mauritian Federation Ahmed Yahya, considered that Infantino's project was in the “interest of football”. It was only “the way that failed,” he stressed.

The Council also adopted the increase of a development plan to 6.35 billion dollars for the next four years. “This now means concretely that all 211 Fifa member associations, each of them, will receive 25 million dollars,” explained Gianni Infantino, specifying that this proposal had to be validated during the Fifa congress in December.

“So, let me say that in the ten years since I have been president of Fifa, we have gone from one million dollars per member association (...) to 25 million dollars per member association (...) all over the world,” insisted Infantino, who shook the hand of UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, despite being in open war against him, during this Council.