Europe's Big Four Leagues Tell FIFA Its Governance Is 'Not Fit for Purpose' and Put a 100-Day Clock on Reform

The Premier League, Bundesliga, LaLiga and Serie A have published a rare joint statement branding FIFA's governance "not fit for purpose" and demanding fundamental reform of how world football is run, in the sharpest escalation yet of the standoff between Gianni Infantino and Europe's biggest domestic competitions.

The statement, headed "To Unify the Game, FIFA Must Reform", was issued on 25 September through the European Leagues and World Leagues Association and signed by Premier League chief executive Richard Masters, Bundesliga CEO Marc Lenz, LaLiga president Javier Tebas and Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo. It puts a 100-day clock on the demands: whoever wins the March 2027 FIFA presidency election must, within 100 days of taking office, convene an independently chaired Governance Convention representing member associations and the wider football community, mandated to report publicly within six months.

From Forward Enterprise to open revolt

The trigger for the revolt was FIFA's abandoned FIFA Forward Enterprise plan, announced in late July, under which the governing body proposed selling minority stakes in the commercial rights of the World Cup and the Club World Cup to private investors. UEFA's 55 member associations threatened an indefinite boycott of FIFA competitions before the proposal was withdrawn days later — but the leagues argue the damage to trust was done. The statement describes the episode as one of the biggest abuses of power in FIFA's history and criticises what it calls Infantino's "exploitative ideas" and openness to conflicts of interest.

The four leagues insist that reform must go deeper than the "surface-level" procedural changes Infantino has since floated. They are demanding genuinely independent ethics, financial oversight and electoral bodies, an end to the concentration of regulatory, commercial and political power in the president's office, and protection of individual disciplinary matters from political interference. They also call on candidates in next year's presidential election to publish their own reform programmes, telling them: "Now is the moment to decide not only who will lead FIFA, but also how FIFA should be led."

We are speaking up together, as founding members of European Leagues and the World Leagues Association, because we understand how FIFA's relentless expansionism affects everyone.— Joint statement of the Premier League, Bundesliga, LaLiga and Serie A, 25 September 2026

Infantino's counter-offer and a Zurich deadline

Infantino has written to FIFA's 211 member associations and the FIFA Council proposing an independent external review of the organisation's governance framework, a concession the leagues dismiss as insufficient after what they describe as the Forward Enterprise case. The pressure now converges on the FIFA Council meeting in Zurich on 15 October, with UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation having already criticised the FIFA president in a separate joint letter earlier in the summer.

For the clubs whose leagues have signed the statement, the stakes are commercial as much as constitutional. FIFA's competitions sit directly alongside the domestic calendar those leagues sell, and the collapse of the Forward Enterprise plan followed warnings that any external capital in FIFA's tournament rights would devalue the product everyone else sells. The leagues' message is that they intend to be participants in football's governance, not, as they put it, passive spectators.

Cover image: 'Gianni Infantino (2020)' via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC-BY 2.0. Reporting drawn from Sky Sports, Inside World Football, OneFootball and Yahoo Sports, quoting the leagues' joint statement of 25 September 2026. — Ines Kovač, football business and governance correspondent.