The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has described Gianni Infantino’s doomed attempt to sell stakes in the World Cup as “even worse than the Super League plan” and warned his embattled Fifa counterpart that he will face an opponent if he runs for re-election next March.
Ceferin has led Uefa’s firm collective stance against the Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) scheme, which was shelved amid widespread opposition at the start of August. Uefa are pushing for Infantino to quit, also drawing on support from Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation, and are yet to drop a threat to boycott Fifa competitions while talks are under way with Concacaf to set up a combined Nations League tournament.
In an interview with the podcast The Rest is Politics: Leading, Ceferin denounced Infantino’s project as more damaging than the breakaway Super League that was shelved in 2021 after large-scale protests. “I think this plan is even worse than the Super League plan,” he said. “In the first case, super-important clubs wanted to do their own league, which is wrong and would destroy football. But in this case, football would be literally sold.
“I’m absolutely sure that the [FFE] plan is dead. For me, the most important thing is that we stopped another try to sell the sport. It’s hard to imagine what kind of people would sell the sport that belongs to everyone.”
Earlier this month it was reported that Infantino had held talks about running the Super League under Fifa branding. Ceferin is confident that any revival of that plan would be decades away. “It might happen in 20 years, you never know, but for now we cooperate with everyone in a great way. I’m sure it cannot happen in the next 10 years,” he said.
Infantino spent much of the weekend courting support from Concacaf members at a meeting in the Dominican Republic, infuriating many of those present. Ceferin, who revealed the pair had not been in contact since the FFE scandal broke, believes the Fifa president’s path to survival is narrowing.
“I didn’t speak with him, he didn’t contact me since this happened,” he said. “But there are two options. One option is that he realises that he doesn’t have the support, and that’s not only political support of the ones who vote, but the political support of the football community, the political support of fans, the political support of the players, former players, coaches.
“And the second option [is] that he goes to the elections in March, but in that case, I think he will have a candidate against him. I don’t know yet who.” The Concacaf president, Victor Montagliani, has been tipped as a potential opponent for Infantino if he chooses to run in Rabat.
Ceferin has proponents of his own but ruled out making his own bid for the Fifa presidency. “My credibility is much, much, much higher if I’m not interested in the position,” he said. The Slovenian is expected to run unopposed for a fourth term at the helm of Uefa, with the election due next April.
Asked whether Infantino had become too close to Donald Trump, with whom he forged a close relationship before the recent World Cup, Ceferin said: “To be honest, I think you are naive if you think that a politician like that, or any politician, is your good friend. The moment you are a problem, you stop being a friend of a politician.”
That friendship came under the spotlight last month when Trump said he had called Infantino to ask for a review of the red card given to the US striker Folarin Balogun, whose ban for the last-16 tie against Belgium was later suspended. “That was more than shocking,” Ceferin said. “We have rules and if you don’t respect your own rules, then the game doesn’t make any sense. That’s shocking and, trust me, almost everybody was shocked. Just not everybody dared to speak.”
Meanwhile, in a fresh show of European opposition to Infantino, the six Nordic football associations issued a statement saying they had “lost confidence in the Fifa president and have serious concerns about the governance and high-level decision making of the organisation”. They asked for binding assurances that Fifa will never again “open its governance or competitions to private ownership” and called for a full third-party review into the FFE scheme.
Earlier in August the Norwegian Football Federation was the first member association to call directly for Infantino to step down.
Infantino travelled straight from the Dominican Republic to Paris on Sunday, attending the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup. Television footage showed him exchanging greetings with the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
