UEFA believes it can still land a credible candidate to challenge Gianni Infantino for the FIFA presidency next March, according to vice-president Laura McAllister, who insisted the confederation's push for change hasn't turned into wishful thinking.
Speaking to Reuters at the World Football Summit in Madrid, shortly after UEFA's Executive Committee met in Thessaloniki, McAllister said the challenger doesn't need to be European. What matters, she said, is finding someone capable of beating Infantino, uniting football's various confederations, and following through on lasting governance reform.
She pushed back on the idea that opposition to Infantino has lost steam, even though the FIFA president appears to still command enough support to win another term. "I don't think so," McAllister said when asked if his critics had overestimated the damage done to his authority. "We always knew that things wouldn't just change overnight. That would be naive. We knew that there would be a resistance to change as well, of course. We're taking things step by step, both legally in terms of the political context with an alternative candidate and in terms of the programme of governance reforms that we need to see."
Fallout From the Collapsed Investment Plan
Infantino, the 56-year-old Swiss-Italian who has led FIFA, faced his biggest challenge yet after his proposal to sell a stake of up to 20% in FIFA competitions, including the World Cup, to private investors collapsed. The plan drew fierce pushback, with UEFA, the Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF all calling for change at the top of the organisation.
Since then, several European national associations have pulled their backing for Infantino's re-election bid, with Greece becoming the latest to do so on Tuesday. McAllister described UEFA's members as "united and very concerted" in wanting a shift in how FIFA is run, though she stressed the issue runs deeper than one man. "This was always about more than one person," she said.
According to McAllister, UEFA has been working on multiple fronts and sees the reform agenda as more important than who ends up carrying it. "There's lots of prongs to any campaign to change something," she said. "There's tactics that you need to follow, but I feel very reassured that we're on track, that we will try to find a candidate that can unite all of the confederations, because it's not just UEFA; all of the confederations feel strongly about the need for change. And that candidate would then stand on a manifesto of reform and modernisation."
No Insistence on a European Candidate
Infantino has already confirmed he will seek another term at March's election. McAllister said that reality puts pressure on his opponents to find someone who can genuinely win, not just make a symbolic stand. "If you're in a position where you know the incumbent will be standing again, and Gianni Infantino has made it clear that he will be a candidate in the election unless something changes in the time before next March, then it's incumbent on those who oppose him to get the right candidate," she said. "You don't fight an election unless you can win that election."
UEFA isn't fixated on nationality, either. "This is about the programme of change, and I think we have to get that right first," McAllister said. "We have to have a really clear template of what good governance looks like in global football, and it isn't what we've seen from FIFA over recent years." She listed accountability, transparency, proper handling of conflicts of interest, stronger whistleblower protections and more diverse leadership as priorities for any reform package.
Asked whether UEFA could work with Infantino should he win re-election, McAllister turned the question back on him. "That's not our problem as much as it's his problem," she said, adding that "if he were to be elected, one would hope that he would have learned the lessons of a period that the game has seen as a real existential crisis." Neither FIFA nor Infantino responded immediately to Reuters' request for comment.
For now, McAllister said UEFA's focus is on making the case for reform rather than looking too far ahead before nominations open. "The priority for us now has to be about convincing the world of football that it belongs to them," she said, "but that we need cultural change in the way in which the game is governed."
