The Fifa presidency has never felt more powerful or more precarious, and Gianni Infantino has largely himself to blame for both realities.
Infantino’s attempt to open the World Cup to private investment has produced the biggest crisis of his increasingly controversial tenure at the top of world football.
The plan was designed to raise around $4.2bn but collapsed within days after furious opposition from Uefa, the Asian Football Confederation, and Concacaf, alongside a growing revolt from national associations and clubs.
The fallout was swift and damaging, costing Infantino some of his most senior colleagues and exposing deep fault lines within the organisation he has led for a decade.
Fifa’s chief operating officer Kevin Lamour publicly attacked the proposal before his employment was terminated, while senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro also resigned over the controversy.
The episode has intensified scrutiny of what critics describe as an increasingly autocratic pattern of behaviour at the top of the world governing body.
Warning signs were already visible when Infantino stated his intention to run for a fourth term, arguing his first should not count because he was completing Sepp Blatter’s interrupted mandate.
Matt Readman, chief strategy officer at sports creative agency Dark Horses, describes that move as “the sort of re-engineering of the rules that we’ve come to expect from political dictators, not administrators.”
Infantino would point to a substantial record of achievement, having expanded the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams and channelled billions into football development through Fifa’s Forward programme.
He has also spent years insisting that his mission is to “serve” football, a word he has returned to repeatedly throughout his presidency as a cornerstone of his public identity.
Yet he operates within a system that allows a president to accumulate enormous personal authority while facing remarkably few meaningful checks on that power.
In 2023, he was re-elected unopposed, with Fifa’s 211 member associations holding all the votes while ordinary supporters around the world held none whatsoever.
There is a sharp irony in the position Infantino now finds himself in, having spent years making himself and the Fifa presidency more recognisable than any of his predecessors managed.
Fans now understand that the Fifa president can put his name on a Club World Cup trophy, launch a Fifa Peace Prize, and personally present the inaugural award to a national president.
They know he can introduce hydration breaks at a World Cup, expand tournaments, create new competitions, and restructure the entire global football calendar according to his vision.
And now they know, with uncomfortable clarity, that the Fifa president can attempt to sell a slice of the commercial future of the World Cup to private investors.
Readman draws a parallel with modernisation theory in political science, which suggests that once a population becomes more educated and politically engaged, it begins to question the authority that delivered earlier success.
The same dynamic may now apply to football, where a more connected and informed global fanbase is increasingly asking why they have no say over who wields such significant power.
Technically, Fifa’s presidential election is democratic, but in practice it functions as a democracy of football associations rather than football supporters, with not a single female candidate having ever stood for the presidency.
Readman argues the solution is straightforward: give fans a vote, publish the results, make national associations explain their decisions, and let candidates campaign in front of the people who actually watch the sport.
A Fifa president who understood they were accountable to millions of supporters worldwide might, as Readman suggests, think very differently about what success actually means for the game.
Infantino has inadvertently demonstrated just how serious a job the Fifa presidency truly is, which means it may finally be time for the sport to start treating it that way.