Infantino under fire as Fifa crisis meeting looms

Gianni Infantino has called senior Fifa officials to a crisis meeting in Morocco as the fallout from his abandoned Fifa Forward Enterprise plan keeps growing. The immediate issue is not just the failed investment idea, but the fact that close allies like Arsène Wenger and Mattias Grafström are now openly distancing themselves from how the project was handled.

Wenger said the plan’s withdrawal was “absolutely necessary and beyond question,” and stressed that he was not involved and only learned of it through media reports. Grafström, meanwhile, told staff the last week was “a sad and reproachable series of events” and said the organisation had been thrown into turmoil that was “difficult to comprehend and accept.”

Prince Ali’s accusation that Fifa was effectively using unpaid prize money as leverage to win support for Infantino has sharpened the row further. His claim that the situation amounts to “blackmail” turns this from a governance dispute into a broader question about how power is being exercised inside world football’s governing body.

The key point is that Infantino has already abandoned the private-investment plan, but the damage to trust remains. Fifa says it listened to member associations and concluded the proposal had created divisions that were no longer in the game’s interest, yet the need for a crisis meeting shows the political damage is still being managed.

So what happens now? The Rabat meeting is likely to be about damage control, not revival of the project. Infantino still has time and formal authority, but the scale of the backlash from inside Fifa, Uefa and other confederations means he now has to rebuild credibility rather than simply push policy through.