Is Gianni Infantino Finally Losing Control of FIFA?

Less than two weeks after standing alongside Donald Trump to present the 2026 World Cup trophy, looking about as secure in his job as any FIFA president ever has, Gianni Infantino found himself abandoning his own signature project and facing open calls from Europe's football body to consider his position.

The collapse happened in less than a week.

Understanding how says a lot about how fragile even the most powerful jobs in sport can be once the people underneath stop going along with them quietly.

A plan built in secret, unveiled to instant fury

Infantino's proposal, announced abruptly in late July, would have spun off FIFA's commercial operations, including the World Cup itself, into a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, selling roughly a 20 percent stake to outside investors and valuing the new entity at around $20 billion.

In exchange, FIFA's 211 member federations were promised one-off payments starting at $20 million each, with further instalments through 2038.

For smaller football nations, that kind of money was genuinely transformative. The problem was how it arrived.

UEFA said the plan had been "conceived in secret" with no meaningful consultation, and swiftly threatened to boycott FIFA competitions altogether if it went ahead. Concacaf's 41 members rejected the proposal outright at a meeting the same week.

Asia's football confederation joined the opposition shortly after, leaving Infantino facing resistance from three of football's six continental bodies within days of the announcement.

The resignation that actually broke it

The proposal survived the confederations' anger for a few days. But it didn't survive what happened inside FIFA itself.

Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker serving as Infantino's senior adviser, resigned in protest and publicly urged other senior staff to speak out.

Hours later, FIFA's own chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, a longtime Infantino colleague going back to their days together at UEFA, told the Associated Press that staff had been kept in the dark and that the plan needed to be stopped.

"It is the project of one person," Lamour wrote. Infantino withdrew the proposal within hours of Lamour's statement.

UEFA's response wasn't relief. It was an escalation, declaring it had lost confidence in FIFA's leadership entirely and stating that "no option should be off the table," a phrase widely read as an open invitation for a rival to challenge Infantino at FIFA's presidential election in March 2027.

An election that looked settled a month ago

Before this, Infantino's re-election looked close to a formality. He'd already served two terms unopposed, and the 2026 World Cup, expanded to 48 teams and generating an expected $15 billion in revenue, was supposed to be the crowning achievement heading into the vote.

Names now being floated as potential challengers include Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser al-Khelaïfi and Canadian FIFA vice president Victor Montagliani, speculation that would have seemed far-fetched before this month.

UEFA has since threatened legal action over the collapsed plan and warned that potential evidence shouldn't be destroyed, keeping the story very much alive even after the proposal itself is dead.

Whether Infantino survives to a third term may now depend less on what he does next and more on whether the confederations that turned on him this month decide they're finished waiting to see.

Does a single collapsed proposal, however badly handled, genuinely threaten a FIFA presidency this dominant, or does the backlash simply reflect years of accumulated frustration finally finding its moment?