UEFA Holds Firm on FIFA Boycott Despite Apology
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- UEFA maintained its threat that member nations could boycott all FIFA competitions, including the World Cup, after a senior FIFA leadership meeting in Rabat, Morocco failed to satisfy its demands.
- UEFA set two conditions for ending the boycott: the World Cup privatization proposals must be formally withdrawn and binding assurances given that such attempts will never be repeated — neither has been met.
- UEFA declared it has "lost confidence in Gianni Infantino's presidency" and said "that position holds," rejecting FIFA's attempt to project unity.
- UEFA dismissed the show of support for Infantino as meaningless, noting that staff whose careers depend on the FIFA president "agree with him changes nothing."
- FIFA acknowledged "mistakes were made" over its plan to sell profits from the World Cup through a commercial subsidiary and committed to "ensure they do not happen again," while hoping the meeting would "help restore confidence."
- Concacaf and the AFC also rejected the privatization proposal before FIFA scrapped it, joining UEFA in the widespread condemnation of Infantino's now-abandoned project.
- Arsène Wenger and secretary general Mattias Grafström publicly distanced themselves from the plan, though Grafström was nonetheless among the FIFA officials who threw their support behind Infantino.
Why it matters: Three of FIFA's major regional confederations — UEFA, Concacaf, and the AFC — publicly opposed the privatization plan, and UEFA has now explicitly declared it has lost confidence in Infantino's presidency. With Europe's governing body refusing to accept the apology tour as sufficient, the institutional rift between FIFA and its largest bloc of members deepens and keeps the threat of a formal challenge to Infantino's leadership on the table.
