There will be more surprises during the World Cup, which begins in Qatar on Sunday, than at the next FIFA Congress. Gianni Infantino, at the head of the body since 2016, will be alone in the running in March 2023 to run for a third term, announced Thursday the organization which manages football on a planetary scale.
“No other candidacies have been submitted” by the member federations before the Elective Congress scheduled for Kigali, Rwanda, on March 16, FIFA said in a statement, three days before the opening of the Qatari World Cup.
This expected renewal is not a surprise, the electoral mode of FIFA – one federation, one vote – having allowed its ex-presidents to chain the mandates by ensuring the support of a majority of voters: the Brazilian Joao Havelange led the football world from 1974 to 1998, and the Swiss Sepp Blatter from 1998 to 2015. Elected in 2016 with the promise of “restoring the image of FIFA”, then mired in a global corruption scandal, the The 52-year-old Italian-Swiss leader formalized his candidacy on March 31 in Doha, without any opponent having declared himself since.
The German Federation will not support it
The German Football Federation (DFB) nevertheless announced on Wednesday that it would not support him, and that it would have liked on his part “a greater consideration for human rights as well as a greater commitment to humanitarian issues”. , according to its president Bernd Neuendorf, who is also calling for a compensation fund for workers involved in the construction sites of the 2022 World Cup.
To his credit, Infantino can point to the constant swelling of FIFA’s revenue, which forecasts a record turnover of 7 billion dollars (6.3 billion euros) over the four-year cycle ending in 2022. On the other hand, it is struggling to carry out the many projects announced to reform football, from the ephemeral idea of a biennial World Cup – abandoned in March – to its Club World Cup expanded to 24 clubs, which has still not seen the day.