FIFA have confirmed that chief operating officer Kevin Lamour has left the governing body, \u2060weeks after he publicly criticised President Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell a stake in its tournament business, including the World Cup.<\/p>\n
“FIFA can confirm that the working relationship between FIFA and Kevin Lamour as FIFA’s Chief Operating Officer has ended on 17 August 2026,” a FIFA spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
“FIFA thanks Kevin for his two years of service and wishes him the best of luck for the future. No further comment will be made on the matter,” the \u200cspokesperson added.<\/p>\n
FIFA Secretary General \u2060Mattias Grafstrom informed staff and Council members of Lamour’s departure in a letter on Monday, saying the two sides had “agreed to part ways” following recent discussions, Sky News reported.<\/p>\n
Lamour had publicly criticised the proposal last month, saying FIFA staff had been “deceived” over the plan \u200cand describing it as “the project of one person”.<\/p>\n
“Our mission… is to serve football. Not to serve the personal \u2060interests of a person who, unfortunately, believes he embodies FIFA when \u200che is supposed to be at its service,” Lamour said in \u2060a statement \u200cat the time.<\/p>\n
Lamour’s comments came hours after Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino, resigned in protest at the proposal, calling it “a bad deal for football”.<\/p>\n
Lamour joined FIFA in November \u20602024, having previously been part of Infantino’s inner circle that campaigned for his election \u2060as president in 2016.<\/p>\n
The internal dissent came as FIFA faced widespread opposition to its plan to create a $20 billion subsidiary to run its tournaments, including the World Cup, and sell up to a 20% stake to external investors. FIFA subsequently abandoned the proposal following the backlash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FIFA have confirmed that chief operating officer Kevin Lamour has left the governing body, \u2060weeks after he publicly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-596401","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\/596401","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=596401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}