The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said on Wednesday that he had no confidence in Gianni Infantino’s leadership of Fifa after another bruising day for the beleaguered president during which the Portugal legend Luís Figo also called for him to resign.
Figo had described Infantino’s plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors as “the lowest, most deceitful and cravenly self-interested behaviour I have ever witnessed”. Although more measured, Carney’s intervention could be more significant, as the former governor of the Bank of England is close to the Concacaf president, Victor Montagliani, who is being urged to run against Infantino in next year’s Fifa presidential election.
Montagliani has yet to commit to standing, but Concacaf have called for a thorough review of Fifa’s governance with many of their members ready to withdraw their support for Infantino. “It should be fatal,” Carney said of the abortive sell-off scheme. “Certainly I don’t have confidence in Mr Infantino.”
Infantino was forced to scrap his controversial proposal after a fierce backlash that was led by Uefa, with the 56-year-old now battling for his future having called an emergency meeting of Fifa staff on Wednesday as pressure on him mounts.
On Tuesday the Jordan Football Association president, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, accused Fifa of blackmail by threatening to withhold financial assistance from his federation if it refused to back the president’s bid for re-election. That came after the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, who is Fifa’s chief of global football development, issued a statement distancing himself from the plan that said the decision to withdraw it was “absolutely necessary and beyond question”.
Figo, the former Barcelona and Real Madrid winger who won 127 caps for Portugal, joined the chorus of criticism and accused Infantino of having “debased the office of Fifa president that he promised to elevate” since taking over in 2016.
“I could write 10,000 words on the problems at Fifa. But the solution needs only three: Infantino must go,” he wrote in the Daily Mail.
“He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game he is supposed to serve. He has lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisers, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport and even, it would seem, the Fifa Peace Prize winner [Donald Trump]. It is too late to save his dignity but it is not too late to save football. He should go. Now.”
Figo, who has been a football adviser to Uefa since 2017, cited Infantino’s lack of transparency over his attempts to push through the private equity deal that would have reportedly led to an increase in his salary to $30m a year as more evidence he is unfit to govern world football.
“It’s not honest when you fail to mention that, after you have delivered the head of the World Cup on a platter to your mates in DC, they are going to give you a job worth five times your current salary,” he wrote.
“None of this comes as a surprise when you consider the litany of abuses he has inflicted on football’s reputation; from suspending and reversing disciplinary decisions to breaking the laws of the game over a half-time show, nothing gets in the way of pleasing his friends.”
