Big Leagues Tell FIFA Its Governance Is 'Not Fit for Purpose'

Four of Europe's Big 5 leagues have signed a joint statement declaring FIFA's governance "not fit for purpose" and demanding reforms that go deeper than the "surface-level" review Gianni Infantino has offered. The statement, issued on Friday and signed by the Premier League's Richard Masters, the Bundesliga's Marc Lenz, LaLiga's Javier Tebas and Serie A's Luigi De Siervo, is the sharpest escalation yet in the standoff that began with Infantino's abandoned plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors.

What the statement says

The league bosses wrote that "football's longstanding foundations have, in recent years, been threatened by a fundamental governance problem", and accused the FIFA president of having "actively promoted abusive initiatives rather than protecting football from them". Inside World Football, which carried the statement in full, reported the leagues as saying that under Infantino's leadership "football has suffered one of the biggest abuses of power in FIFA's history".

The statement calls for "genuinely independent" ethics, financial oversight and electoral bodies at FIFA. It asks that whoever holds the presidency after the March 2027 election convene, within 100 days of taking office, "an independently chaired Governance Convention representing member associations and the wider football community, mandated to report publicly within six months".

The FFE plan that started the rift

The crisis dates to July 28, when details emerged of FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), a commercial vehicle that would have sold shares in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors. Opposition from UEFA — which threatened a boycott of FIFA tournaments — plus Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation forced Infantino to drop the plan. UEFA has since said it has lost confidence in the president, intends to help identify a credible alternative candidate for the March 2027 election, and, according to Deutsche Welle, is preparing a criminal complaint over the affair. Any challenger must register as a candidate by November 18.

Infantino responded this week with a letter to the six confederations, seen by The Associated Press, saying he would ask the FIFA Council — which next meets on October 15 — whether to commission "an external, independent assessment of FIFA's current governance framework for major strategic initiatives". The league statement's signatories appeared to dismiss that offer in advance, insisting reform must reach FIFA's decision-making structure itself, where they say "the stakeholders most affected are not meaningfully involved".

Why the leagues are angry

The four leagues point to FIFA's unfettered expansion of the International Match Calendar and the lengthening of windows in which domestic competitions must pause as "major unilateral decisions directly affecting us". Their statement also renews a long-running complaint: that FIFA gives no formal stakeholder role in its decision-making to the world's domestic leagues or to the European Leagues and World Leagues Associations, which filed a formal complaint over "abusive" FIFA governance standards with the European Commission in 2023.

Notably, the joint statement did not echo UEFA's explicit call for Infantino to resign — DW reported the leagues stopped short of that — but all four organisations have separately called for him to go, citing lost trust and his constant overstepping of his remit. The four leagues' collective commercial weight, spanning the biggest domestic club competitions in the world, makes the statement difficult for FIFA's leadership to dismiss as a fringe complaint.

What happens next runs through three dates: the FIFA Council meeting on October 15, the November 18 deadline for presidential candidates to register, and the March 2027 election itself. Ines Kovač covers football business and governance for OneLightScore. Sources: joint league statement (reported by Inside World Football, ESPN and the Associated Press, September 25, 2026); Deutsche Welle; Yahoo Sports/dpa. Cover image: Gianni Infantino via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.