RABAT — The letter from Buenos Aires arrived late Thursday, and its weight had nothing to do with its word count. The Argentine Football Association, governing body of the reigning world champions, told Gianni Infantino he had its backing to continue leading FIFA through the deepest governance crisis of his presidency. Coming 48 hours after an emergency meeting at which Infantino publicly apologized to his senior leadership for what he called mistakes, Argentina’s endorsement marked something his adversaries had not fully anticipated: a coalition forming around him.
The timing was precise. AFA’s statement dropped as the Mexican federation and the Confederation of African Football were already on record with their own letters of support. But Argentina carried a different kind of signal – the association whose national team won the last World Cup, whose commercial partner relationships with FIFA stretch across decades, declaring publicly that “the way forward is to continue working under your leadership to keep making football better and more inclusive.”
What started this? In July, FIFA announced a plan to raise $4.2 billion by selling roughly 20 percent of a new entity that would hold the organization’s media and commercial rights, including those attached to the World Cup. The structure was described internally as FIFA Forward Enterprise. The fund positioned to acquire the stake was run by Joshua Kushner, the New York entrepreneur and younger brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump. The political adjacency was unavoidable: the United States is co-hosting the 2026 World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, and the idea that a Trump family-connected investor stood to profit from the tournament’s commercial rights immediately reframed what Infantino presented as a financing mechanism, according to CBS Sports.
UEFA declared it had no confidence in Infantino’s leadership and called the plan selling the soul of the game. Its 55 member associations pledged to boycott FIFA tournaments until the proposal was fully withdrawn. CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation joined that position, assembling a bloc representing well over two-thirds of FIFA’s 211 member associations by some counts. Carlos Cordeiro, the former U.S. Soccer president who had served as a senior FIFA adviser, resigned in protest. Kevin Lamour, FIFA’s chief operating officer, told staff they had been “deceived” and described Forward Enterprise as “the project of one person.”
Infantino withdrew the proposal late last week, framing the retreat as a response to the divisions it had created rather than an acknowledgment of error. That framing did not hold. By Wednesday, he had convened an emergency session in Rabat, Morocco, gathering FIFA’s top leadership for what several observers described as a damage-assessment exercise. There, he apologized – directly and without caveats – for mistakes made in handling Forward Enterprise. FIFA’s leadership declared its support for him and the meeting continued, but the apology itself was the story.
Morocco is not a neutral venue. The kingdom is co-host of the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal, and its football officials have remained allied with Infantino throughout the revolt. Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia have pledged support. Sub-Saharan African associations have sent mixed signals. The geography of Infantino’s political survival is taking shape around nations whose relationship with FIFA’s financial pipelines is more dependent than UEFA’s member associations, and who calculate that publicly breaking with a sitting president carries institutional risk.
The letter from AFA added the Americas’ most visible football name to that geography. The association noted that FIFA’s main priorities had been “the development of football worldwide and institutional solidity based on a clear, stable and transparent governance model” – language that reads both as an endorsement and an implicit instruction to govern differently. AFA also welcomed FIFA’s decision to abandon Forward Enterprise, to acknowledge mistakes, and to issue an apology. The welcome, read carefully, is not unconditional.
What comes next is a FIFA Congress and, further out, a presidential election in March. Infantino has no declared challenger. UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin, PSG chairman Nasser al-Khelaifi, and Bahrain’s Sheikh Salman have all been discussed as potential candidates; none has filed registration papers. The deadline is November 18. The months between now and then are the window in which Infantino’s opponents must decide whether their stated positions become organizational action – petitioning for an Extraordinary Congress, recruiting a credible challenger, or finding an alternative mechanism to force accountability.
The number that matters most is 43. That is how many of FIFA’s 211 member associations must formally request a special session before FIFA’s rules require one to be convened. An alliance that claims two-thirds of membership on paper must translate paper solidarity into signed requests from associations that, in many cases, depend on FIFA disbursements to fund their own operations. Argentina’s endorsement complicates the calculation for associations in CONMEBOL who might have been undecided, without closing it.
What AFA’s letter does not resolve is whether the organizations around Infantino have genuinely shifted, or only signaled that they prefer stability over a contested election cycle. Forward Enterprise is abandoned. The apology was made in Rabat. Whether the project’s collapse was an error in execution or a symptom of something structural inside FIFA’s governance is not a question the letter from Buenos Aires settles.
