By Andrew Warshaw
March 10 – Gianni Infantino painted a picture of total harmony when the curtain came down this week on FIFA’s talk shops with member federations, dubbed “executive summits”, that have been held in six venues across the world over the past few months.
Some 40 association presidents attended the final two-day gathering in London, discussing everything from the FIFA reform programme to youth development.
Reflecting on the London sessions and the series as a whole, Infantino said: “It has been a very interesting platform where we have involved all the member associations in discussing the future of FIFA. This time, we focused in particular on football development matters: on the new Forward Programme, investments and how we want to take development to the next level. For me and, I think, everyone involved, it has been a really enriching experience. Together, we’ll now move forward and do some good things for football.”
But behind the scenes there are unresolved tensions, not least when it comes to FIFA and its Asian confederation.
Earlier this week, Asian Football Confederation chief Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa made it clear he wants a significant increase in its allocation of places when the World Cup is expanded to 48 teams in 2026 World Cup. Currently Asia has four guaranteed slots but some experts believe Salman will not settle for anything less than eight or nine – in other words around a third of the new berths.
“The Asian continent, given that it’s the biggest continent in the world, deserves a significant increase in its current World Cup slots, given its big economic power, and the immense popularity of the sport in Asia, and also the increasing development in the different aspects of the game,” Sheikh Salman told AFP adding that the distribution of slots must be based on “clear and transparent foundations”.
Infantino was very much hedging his bets when he addressed the subject at a press conference after the London summit, saying he hoped for a “good compromise and consensus”. Suggestions that agreement could be reached at the FIFA Congress in May appear somewhat optimistic given that each of the six Confederations are likely to have their own demands.
Like Asia, Africa want to double the number of slots they will have at the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, up from five to 10. What is clear is that someone will be left disappointed, however strong the gloss Infantino is trying to place on expansion.
“There are different ways of seeing this – some are saying it should be purely on sporting merits, others are saying it should be purely on participation and percentage of members and so on,” he said tellingly. “You can see it in many different ways, of course. It should be possible that everyone has a little more than they have now so at the end everyone should be happier than now.”
Maybe so but not, perhaps, happy to be treated less fairly than their Continental rivals which is surely the real sticking point.
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