By Joshua Robinson

When the embattled head of global soccer, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, convened more than a dozen members of his senior staff on Wednesday, he was widely understood to be clinging to his job.

By Wednesday evening, however, Infantino made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere for the moment. In a stunning reversal, FIFA announced that its top executives had fallen into line behind Infantino and "reaffirmed their full support" for him, just days after the organization's Secretary General and chief operating officer had personally criticized him in public.

"FIFA's top management is fully confident that the outcomes of today's meeting will strengthen FIFA's governance, help restore confidence in the organization and enable us to prepare for the major events and challenges ahead in a united and transparent manner," FIFA said after the crisis talks in Rabat, Morocco.

The Secretary General, Mattias Grafström, had been particularly cutting on Wednesday in alluding to Infantino's recent conduct as "a sad and reproachable series of events," which culminated in the FIFA Forward Enterprise plan, which proposed to spin off FIFA's commercial operations into a separate entity and sell off a stake to private investors.

On Thursday night, Grafström was pictured smiling alongside Infantino at a women's Africa Cup of Nations match in Rabat.

But if FIFA went to great lengths to show that it had quelled the rebellion from inside its own administration, Infantino's position isn't safe yet. What will actually decide his future are FIFA's 211 member associations, who have loudly criticized him ever since news of the FFE project leaked out.

Their chance to oust him will come at FIFA's next presidential election in March of 2027, when Infantino intends to run for a third full term -- although no opposition candidate has yet thrown their hat into the ring. A few weeks ago, Infantino boasted that he could count on the backing of at least 200 of the 211 nations under the FIFA umbrella in its one-country, one-vote system. But much of that support has since collapsed, particularly in Europe and North America.

Now, Infantino is trying to rescue as much of it as he can by first apologizing for keeping so much of the organization in the dark around the FFE proposal.

"The process should have been handled differently," FIFA said.

European soccer's governing body, which had threatened a World Cup boycott and seen several members formally withdraw their letters of endorsement for Infantino, didn't immediately comment on FIFA's announcement.

In a letter directly to the member associations, FIFA also vowed to conduct a review to ensure that these errors in communication and transparency "do not happen again."

"There are always lessons to be learned," it added, "and FIFA will continue to improve its processes in light of this experience."

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 05, 2026 19:08 ET (23:08 GMT)