October 28 – The Welsh FA and its chief executive Noel Mooney say FIFA boss Gianni Infantino should resign after his plans to sell the World Cup.
“The governance of the global game needs to be reviewed – the system is not working for us,” Mooney said. “We were the first country in the world to say we would not support his (Infantino’s) re-election as president. Our position certainly hasn’t changed.”
“What you want in a FIFA president, for example, is that moral guardianship of the game. You want someone who has the best interests of the game in mind at all times.”
At the weekend, Infantino said he enjoyed the support of the “vast, vast majority” of FIFA’s electorate. Last week, he was endorsed by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) at the body’s extraordinary congress in Tokyo, Japan.
In August, Wales was one of the first football associations to withdraw support for Infantino after his plans to privatize the World Cup through the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) were reported.
Since then, FIFA has faced its biggest crisis since the FIFAGate scandal in 2015, but Infantino, instead of heeding calls to resign, has hit the campaign trail. He has traveled the world to support support in a private jet supplied as part of Qatar Airways’ sponsorship deal with his employer.
At a FIFA Council in Zurich last week, an increase in development funding to national associations from $10 million to $25 million was approved for the next four-year cycle.
UEFA has set Infantino a deadline of early November to release documents relating to the FFE and respond to a series of questions he dodged during the FIFA Council meeting.
“But for us, it’s not just about the FIFA president, it’s about the whole system,” Mooney said. “We would call for a change in the governance of football … to not have a person with so much power, for example, as the president of FIFA. It’s crazy.”
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