The football world appears to have been split down the middle by the issue, with the confederations of Africa, South America and Oceania having backed Infantino.<\/p>\n
But even within confederations there is disagreement and it makes it very difficult to predict whether Infantino or his opponents have the upper hand in this battle.<\/p>\n
In Oceania, which has 11 member associations, New Zealand has said it will not follow the confederation and vote for him.<\/p>\n
Mexico, Grenada and St Kitts and Nevis have broken away from the other 32 Concacaf nations to support the Fifa president. <\/p>\n
Of the 46 Asian confederations members, so far eight countries have split to champion Infantino’s cause – the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Kuwait, Mongolia, the Philippines and Bhutan.<\/p>\n
The Fifa Council, on which there are 36 confederation and national association heads plus Infantino, seems similarly split.<\/p>\n
It raises questions about whether Infantino has the political power to govern Fifa, even if he wins an election of the 211 member associations.<\/p>\n
The first test of Uefa’s threat is just over three weeks away, when the Fifa Under-20 Women’s World Cup is set to kick off. It is being hosted by Poland and features five other European nations, including England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The football world appears to have been split down the middle by the issue, with the confederations of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":861436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49,48,82],"class_list":["post-861435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/861436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}