Gianni Infantino faces grilling at potentially ‘explosive’ Fifa council meeting

Gianni Infantino will be questioned by Fifa council members over his involvement in the aborted World Cup sell-off plan, the Folarin Balogun affair and the decision to award Donald Trump the inaugural Fifa peace prize at what is expected to be a heated meeting at the world governing body’s headquarters on Thursday.

The Fifa president rejected repeated calls for an extraordinary general meeting of council in the summer after the emergence of the Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposals, but will meet his critics for the first time since then in Zurich, with one attender predicting that the talks could be “explosive”.

Aleksander Ceferin, Victor Montagliani and Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, the presidents of Uefa, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation respectively, all of whom have called for Infantino to resign, will be present to press home demands for an independent review of Fifa’s governance.

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In response to letters from Ceferin, Montagliani and Salman sent last month Infantino pledged to commission an external review of Fifa’s future governance, but no details have been forthcoming, and there is scepticism over whether it will be truly independent.

In addition to FFE, Balogun and the peace prize, which featured on an agenda circulated by Fifa last month, Infantino is also likely to face questions about a report in the Times this week that he received a “second salary” of about £1.3m in 2024, on top of the £3.9m declared in Fifa’s accounts.

US Internal Revenue Service filings show a Fifa subsidiary in charge of running last summer’s World Cup paid Infantino $1.76m, that was not mentioned in Fifa’s annual report, in which his salary is recorded as 4.27m Swiss francs (£3.86m).

Fifa statutes state that “the individual compensation of the Fifa president … shall be made public”. The governing body has denied wrongdoing.

“Fifa does not pay a second salary to the Fifa president and complies with all reporting requirements in relation to compensation,” it said. “The Fifa president’s annual compensation, as well as other contractual benefits, are decided by the independent compensation subcommittee.

“Fifa strongly rejects any claims that it has failed to disclose any financial information and has violated Fifa’s statutes. Fifa accounts are independently audited, and all declarations are in line with tax regulations in Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere.”

Despite these controversies, and the public opposition of the European, Asian and North and Central American and Caribbean confederations, Infantino is on course to be re-elected unopposed in March’s election.

Montagliani has rejected calls to stand against Infantino to focus on being re-elected as Concacaf’s president and Uefa has yet to find an alternative candidate despite tentatively sounding out high-profile footballing figures including Arsène Wenger and Michele Kang, who owns clubs including London City Lionesses.

The deadline for candidates to declare their intention to stand is 18 November, with the election due to be held at Fifa congress in Rabat on 18 March.

Infantino is expected to put forward a £2.6bn increase in the amount of money Fifa hands out for global football development at the meeting in Zurich, using cash from the governing body’s reserves to do so. The hike, covering funding from 2027 to 2030, would take the total Fifa spend on football development for the period to £4.83bn.