Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he doesn’t have confidence in FIFA President Gianni Infantino to lead world soccer’s governing body, after a now-abandoned plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors.
Carney told reporters at an event in Toronto that keeping the sell-off plan a secret from senior FIFA staff was a “fatal” move on Infantino’s part and “not how you run any business … let alone something that is a global responsibility like football.”
“I’ve run a few organizations in my time,” the prime minister said. “The idea that proper governance is not to disclose to your closest advisers, your chief operating officer, your fellow board members, something of consequence that you’re even considering — let alone proposing — that’s fatal, should be fatal and you lose confidence in that individual.
“They (FIFA) have their own procedures for making those determinations, but certainly I don’t have confidence in Mr. Infantino after this point, given what transpired and given the nature of what transpired.”
Carney attended multiple matches and events with Infantino while Canada hosted this year’s recently-concluded World Cup along with the U.S. and Mexico.
His comments came as Infantino held a crisis meeting with senior FIFA officials in Morocco on Wednesday, widely seen as an effort to shore up support for his re-election bid next spring.
Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham also criticized Infantino’s move and questioned his leadership.
“I do not believe that he is the right man to lead football forward on the world stage,” Burnham said Sunday. “The plan that was put forward was offensive to many people, football people, around the world, and it can’t be the case that we just move on and forget that, it wasn’t acceptable.”
On Saturday, European soccer’s governing body UEFA said it had lost confidence in FIFA’s leadership — possibly paving the way for a challenge to Infantino’s presidency. The governing body for North and Central American and Caribbean soccer (CONCACAF) said FIFA leadership had “stopped putting football first.”
Infantino was forced into a backdown over his controversial plans to sell World Cup profits through a $20-billion commercial subsidiary that would run its top competitions.
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Infantino’s plans fell apart after UEFA’s 55-member nations agreed last Thursday to boycott the World Cup and all other FIFA competitions. CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation also said they opposed the plan.
Global News has reached out to Canada Soccer for comment.
The final straw came when Infantino’s senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker who represented the soccer body on the White House Task Force for the World Cup, resigned last Friday and urged other senior FIFA staff to speak out.
Carney praised Cordeiro as “a very high integrity individual” on Wednesday during his comments criticizing Infantino, adding he’s known him for over three decades.
Hours after Cordeiro’s resignation, FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour issued a statement to The Associated Press, saying FIFA staff were deceived by Infantino’s lack of openness in planning the sale over recent months and that the “project of one person” must not continue.
Infantino then issued a statement Friday evening saying he was abandoning the plan.
“This move pretty much offended just about every single possible group inside of the footballing circle,” said Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at Pacific University in Portland, Ore., and the author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine.
“All of a sudden, Gianni Infantino’s continuation as the president of FIFA is very much in jeopardy. You’ve seen cracks in the edifice of power here. … A lot of sharks inside FIFA right now, they smell blood.”
The next FIFA presidential election is in March in Rabat, Morocco. The deadline for candidates to enter the presidential contest is Nov. 18, exactly four months ahead of the vote.
An “Extraordinary Congress” could be called if 43 or more FIFA member associations make a formal written request for one.
Morocco, which will co-host the World Cup in 2030, has announced its continued support for Infantino along with Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Yet Alan McDougal, a professor of history at the University of Guelph, told Global News that Infantino’s once-solid chances for re-election have become much more uncertain.
“A week ago, he looked fairly impregnable — he had the support of most of the federations around the world, they’d promised to vote him back in,” he said.
“Now, in a week, it’s all just blown up. It’s a reminder to us all that politics can change pretty quickly.”
Both McDougal and Boykoff said Infantino’s relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump had already soured public and political opinion against the FIFA president, with many questioning his loyalties.
They pointed to giving Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize last December, as well as the overturning of a red card against U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during the World Cup — at Trump’s behest — as events that have put Infantino in a vulnerable position.
The proposed private company for the World Cup would have included investments from a fund run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared.
“Infantino’s relationship with President Trump has done significant damage to his reputation, even before he decided to float this idea of private equity,” Boykoff said. “Hes cozied up to Trump in numerous ways that many people inside of the football world have found suspect.”
McDougal agreed, calling the red card decision in particular “shameful” and the moment where FIFA’s reputation as a neutral arbiter of soccer “was really kicked into the gutter.”
“This private equity sale idea might really be the end of it,” he said.
“He’s certainly on very thin ice at the moment.”
—With files from Global’s Touria Izri, the Associated Press and Reuters