Gianni Infantino’s campaign for re-election as FIFA president is set to move this week to Japan and a meeting scheduled for Wednesday with the Asian Football Confederation. The council is the main decision-making body at FIFA with a global spread of officials. The planned meeting with Asian soccer leaders is to be held in a five-star hotel in Tokyo with the media largely excluded.
This comes after Infantino apologized last week in Zurich, Switzerland, to FIFA’s 37-member ruling council — which he chairs — for “mistakes” he made in assembling a now-scrapped $4.2 billion sell-off plan for the World Cup.
Gianni Infantino’s campaign for re-election as FIFA president is set to move this week to Japan and a meeting scheduled for Wednesday with the Asian Football Confederation.
Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, the president of the AFC, expressed early opposition to Infantino and his plan to create a subsidiary to run the World Cup, but may have moved closer to Infantino, The Athletic has reported. The AFC had joined the criticism of Infantino in the wake of the proposed World Cup sell-off, but its members appear far from united. The FIFA Council is scheduled to meet next on Dec. FIFA rules state candidates must have “played an active role in association football (e.g. as a player or an official within FIFA, a confederation or an association, etc.) for two of the last five years before being proposed.
Qatar, the 2022 World Cup host, has expressed support for the FIFA leader while Jordan has declared its opposition. 16 in Doha, Qatar.
They must have “declarations of support” from at least five of the 211 members. “FIFA is a massive patronage network,” Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University and a former professional soccer player, told The Associated Press. “It brings in billions from the men’s World Cup and distributes it to football associations around the world in exchange for loyalty.”
