The Football Association of Wales has withdrawn its support for FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s re-election bid over his bungled effort to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors.<\/p>\n
Infantino announced last week he was shelving the widely-denounced plan that was rejected by three confederations but his decade-long reign at the head of FIFA remains under intense scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Infantino is due to stand for re-election in March next year but the FAW has now become the first football association to officially pull the plug on its support for the Swiss.<\/p>\n
A FAW statement said: “The Football Association of Wales hereby confirms its withdrawal of support for the candidature of Mr Gianni Infantino, for re-election as FIFA president for the 2027\u20132031 term.<\/p>\n
“The recent failures in good governance, processes, leadership, values, stakeholder management, communications and sound judgement have led us to a position where Mr Infantino has lost the confidence of the FAW to remain at the helm of world football.<\/p>\n
“Failing to put the best interests of football first is a failure we cannot accept.”<\/p>\n
The English FA is also understood to have written to FIFA making it clear it no longer supports Infantino.<\/p>\n
The governing body issued a statement on Saturday saying it “fully supported” UEFA’s position that confidence had been lost in Infantino over the FFE proposal.<\/p>\n
UEFA\u2019s statement on Saturday said that “no option should be off the table”, with the possibility remaining that national associations could trigger a vote of no confidence in Infantino which would lead to the calling of an Extraordinary FIFA Congress.<\/p>\n
It would only require 43 associations to do that, but it is unlikely such a move would be made unless there was then a strong belief, if not certainty, that a majority among FIFA\u2019s 211 members existed to unseat Infantino at that Congress.<\/p>\n
CONCACAF, which represents the associations of North America, Central America and the Caribbean, also called for a “full review” of Infantino\u2019s leadership over the weekend, with the two confederations containing 96 associations combined.<\/p>\n
Sources have indicated that CONCACAF\u2019s president Victor Montagliani, a current FIFA vice-president, would be prepared to run for football\u2019s top position.<\/p>\n
A number of African and Asian associations issued statements supporting Infantino over the weekend, including those from Morocco, Egypt and Qatar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Football Association of Wales has withdrawn its support for FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s re-election bid over his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-581479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}