Three Confederations Want Infantino Gone. Africa Wants Him To Stay. The NFF Is Not Saying.
UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC have asked the FIFA president to step down over the collapsed plan to sell a fifth of the World Cup. CAF backed him unanimously. Nigeria's federation has denied one thing and confirmed nothing.
Three of world football's six confederations have now told Gianni Infantino to go. Africa has told him to stay. And the Nigeria Football Federation, which holds one of the 211 votes that will settle the matter in March 2027, is saying as little as it can get away with.
The letter
On Monday, 10 August, UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation published a joint open letter addressed to what they called the football family, urging Infantino to step down with dignity and not to stand for re-election. NotJustOk reported the letter as accusing FIFA of advancing a proposal "on a compressed timeline without meaningful consultation with its 211 Member Associations," and describing the attempt to sell an interest in the World Cup as "a fundamental breach of trust." Reuters, in coverage carried by US News, reported the confederations as saying Infantino had broken trust "through deception" and had "placed himself above the collective," and as demanding that any review be handled by a fully independent third party rather than by FIFA or anyone connected to it.
What FIFA tried to do
The proposal at the centre of this is FIFA Forward Enterprise. The Times broke the story on 28 July and FIFA confirmed it the same week. The plan was to spin FIFA's commercial and event operations — broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing rights across the men's and women's World Cups and Club World Cups — into a separate subsidiary valued at roughly $20 billion, and to sell a minority stake of about 20 per cent to private investors for the first time in the organisation's history. ESPN reported that the anchor investor was to be a New York firm founded by Joshua Kushner, younger brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law.
The pitch to the membership was money, and a great deal of it. Forbes reported that each of the 211 member associations was offered up to $20 million as a one-off "Fast-Forward" payment, with a deadline of 19 September 2026 to sign up. On top of that, FIFA proposed lifting regular FIFA Forward development funding to $20 million per association for the 2027-2030 cycle, then $22 million and $24 million for the two cycles after that, running to 2038. FIFA said it intended to expand development funding to more than $10 billion overall.
It collapsed in 72 hours. On 30 July, UEFA's 55 associations voted unanimously to reject the plan and threatened to boycott FIFA competitions, including the 2027 Women's World Cup and the 2030 World Cup. ESPN reported UEFA's position bluntly: "some things are simply too important to sell." CONCACAF, with 41 members, rejected the proposal on grounds of due process, transparency and governance. The AFC lined up behind them. On 31 July Infantino withdrew it.
Two senior figures went with it. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino's senior adviser and the former US Soccer president, resigned, saying he could not stand by while FIFA considered selling a stake in the World Cup. FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said publicly that FIFA staff had been deceived by the way the plan was developed.
Where Africa stood
CAF did not sign Monday's letter. On 6 August its Executive Committee unanimously endorsed a joint update from Infantino and secretary general Mattias Grafström, and reaffirmed its support for the FIFA president, thanking him and the FIFA administration for their backing of African football. CONMEBOL stayed largely silent throughout. Oceania referred the matter to its own executive.
That split is the whole story of the March 2027 vote. UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC together account for well over half of FIFA's membership on paper — but confederations do not cast bloc votes at a FIFA Congress. Each association votes on its own, in secret, and the arithmetic that has kept Infantino in office since 2016 has always run through the associations that need FIFA's money most.
What it means for the NFF
The numbers explain the politics. Soccernet reported that the NFF currently receives up to $1.05 million a year in FIFA Forward operational support, roughly N1.43 billion, plus $1 million a year from CAF — a figure Patrice Motsepe's reforms lifted from $200,000 — giving the federation access to something in the region of N2.8 billion annually. Under FIFA Forward Enterprise, Soccernet calculated, the NFF stood to receive up to $40 million: $20 million through the expanded Forward programme and $20 million through the one-off Fast-Forward payment. That is not an incremental improvement on N2.8 billion a year. It is a different universe.
The federation has been careful. On 8 August the NFF used its official X account to knock down reports that it had joined the calls for the FIFA president to go: "Contrary to reports, especially on social media, @thenff has never asked and is not asking for @FIFAcom President, Mr. Gianni Infantino to step down as FIFA PRESIDENT. This is outright falsehood. Kindly disregard." Soccernet reported that the NFF has not gone further and publicly declared support either, and that in February NFF president Ibrahim Gusau praised what he called a decade of transformative leadership and the federation submitted a letter nominating Infantino for re-election in 2027.
Trump intervenes
Then the US president weighed in. ESPN and Reuters reported Trump's statement on Monday: "FIFA would be making a terrible mistake if, for any reason, they even considered replacing President Gianni Infantino." ESPN noted the closeness of the relationship — Infantino awarded Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize in December 2025 — and the awkwardness of the Kushner connection to the investment vehicle at the heart of the row.
That intervention landed in Nigeria on the same day as an unrelated but rhyming story. Punch reported that Davido, who has spent the week appealing to Trump to pay attention to Saturday's Osun governorship election, was challenged on X by a user who posted a photograph of him seated with President Bola Tinubu and asked who that was, if Trump was his president. Punch quoted the singer's reply: "He's my president too i get dual citizenship..any problem?"
Two very different arguments, one week, one common assumption: that the man in the White House is a court of appeal. In Zurich, the confederations pushing Infantino out will now have to reckon with the fact that he is not a neutral one.
Before anyone lectures African football about integrity, put the numbers side by side. Soccernet reported that the NFF currently draws about $1.05 million a year from FIFA Forward and $1 million from CAF — roughly N2.8 billion in total. Under FIFA Forward Enterprise, the same federation stood to receive up to $40 million.
Now ask an official in Abuja, Lusaka or Bamako to reject that on principle.
CAF's Executive Committee backed Infantino unanimously on 6 August. In Europe that was read as capture. Read it instead as arithmetic. UEFA's associations can afford to say that some things are too important to sell, because Europe already owns the things worth selling — the Champions League, the broadcast markets, the clubs that pay the transfer fees, the leagues where African players go to earn. Continental solidarity is cheap when your revenue base does not depend on the body you are lecturing.
None of that makes the FFE proposal good. Selling a permanent claim on World Cup profits to private capital would have handed investors a standing interest in scheduling, format and expansion decisions, and no development payment offsets that. UEFA was right on the substance and right that a $20 billion restructuring rushed past 211 members without consultation is a governance failure whoever proposed it.
But two things are true at once. The proposal was bad, and the reason it nearly passed is that FIFA's development funding model has left more than half the world's federations financially dependent on the office of one man. Infantino did not invent that dependency; he inherited it and industrialised it. Getting rid of him changes the occupant, not the structure.
The real reform African federations should be demanding is not Infantino's head. It is that FIFA Forward money be rule-based, published, audited and immune to who anybody votes for. Until development funding stops functioning as patronage, every FIFA presidential election will be decided the same way, and Europe will keep being surprised that Africa votes with its budget.
The most alarming sentence of this whole affair was not written by UEFA. It was posted by the President of the United States, telling a private international sports body that removing its own chief executive would be "a terrible mistake."
Sit with the sequence. FIFA proposes selling a fifth of its commercial arm. The lead investor, per ESPN, is a firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of the president's son-in-law. The proposal collapses. Three confederations demand the president's resignation. The president of the country that has just co-hosted the World Cup publicly warns them off. And the FIFA president in question handed that same head of state an inaugural Peace Prize in December 2025.
You do not have to believe anything improper occurred to see that this is exactly the entanglement football's own statutes were written to prevent. FIFA rules bar governments from interfering in football administration, and FIFA has enforced that rule ruthlessly against smaller nations — suspensions, bans, funding freezes. Nigerian fans have watched it happen to their own federation. The threat of a FIFA ban over government meddling has been part of NFF politics for years.
So what is the standard now? If a sports ministry in Abuja publicly demands that the NFF keep or remove its president, that is interference and FIFA will say so. If the White House does it about FIFA's own presidency, it is Monday.
There is a reason this should bother Nigerians specifically rather than generally. Every argument our fans make about the NFF — that it is run for the benefit of the people inside it, that money flows to loyalty rather than performance, that leadership is chosen by a small electorate insulated from the game's actual stakeholders — is the same argument now being made about Zurich, at scale.
If world football's own house cannot answer that charge, the NFF has an easy defence for the next decade: we are just doing what the top does. That is the cost of Monday's statement, and no amount of development funding covers it.
