"Infantino must resign now. There is no turning back." That's not a disgruntled delegate muttering in a corridor — that's the Norwegian Football Federation president, Lise Klaveness, at a press conference, on the record, with no visible intention of softening it.
Klaveness has been FIFA's most persistent institutional critic for some time now, but this is a new level of directness. She's not calling for reform committees or working groups. She wants the president gone.
The Rabat letter didn't move her
Following a meeting in Rabat, Morocco, Infantino sent out a letter that some interpreted as an olive branch. Klaveness wasn't buying it. "I don't place much importance on the letter sent after the Rabat meeting," she said. "I fully understand that he and others are under pressure to backtrack and apologize, but it was mainly a starting point to launch a counterattack."
That's a sharp read. FIFA's leadership has form for issuing diplomatic-sounding statements that don't actually concede anything. Klaveness clearly knows the difference between a genuine course correction and a PR manoeuvre.
Her broader argument is that FIFA has reached a point where incremental change is no longer enough. "Extraordinary measures are needed to create lasting change," she said. Whether that message lands inside FIFA's corridors of power is another question — the organisation has historically been very good at absorbing criticism and changing very little.
On Blatter's endorsement, she's got a memory
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter — who resigned in 2015 amid the corruption scandal that nearly tore the organisation apart — recently floated Klaveness as a potential alternative to Infantino. Her response was the sharpest moment of the presser.
"I'm not on X, but I saw it. I'll take a screenshot and send it to him," she said. Then came the kicker: "Blatter was president when I was a player. I remember he wanted us to play in shorter shorts than we were wearing."
She said she had nothing more to add about that. She didn't need to. The image does the work.
