FA Withdraws Support for Infantino Amid UEFA Legal Threat
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- The English FA is set to write to Infantino withdrawing its support, following Wales's public withdrawal of backing for his bid to continue as FIFA president.
- UEFA has threatened legal action over the FFE plan and sent Infantino a letter demanding he preserve all documents — emails, WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, and meeting notes — relating to the investment proposal and the $20m payment structure.
- The FFE plan would have created a commercial subsidiary running FIFA's main events with external minority investors; Thrive Eternal, a venture firm founded by Joshua Kushner (brother of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner), was expected to lead the investor group.
- Infantino offered all 211 FIFA member associations $40m (£30m) total to back the proposal, with a September 19 deadline to access an initial $20m — a deadline UEFA explicitly wants document preservation linked to.
- The opposition bloc (UEFA's 55 votes plus Concacaf's 35) falls short of the 106 votes needed to block Infantino's re-election, prompting behind-the-scenes efforts to recruit members from Africa (54), Conmebol (10) and Oceania (11).
- The FIFA Council could force Infantino's resignation through an emergency meeting if 19 of 37 members call for one — UEFA (9), the AFC (7) and Concacaf (5) together hold 21 council seats, putting the threshold within reach.
- Qatar, Lebanon, Kuwait and Sri Lanka have publicly pledged their support for Infantino to remain FIFA president.
Why it matters: Infantino needs 106 of 211 member votes to win a fourth term in March, but the UEFA–Concacaf opposition bloc already controls 90 and is now actively recruiting African, South American and Oceanian federations; the document-preservation order turns the feud into a litigation track, and either the September 19 deadline or the 19-of-37 FIFA Council emergency-meeting threshold could become the mechanism that ends his presidency early.
