Separating the rule-maker from the business it supervises is basic institutional hygiene, not an optional refinement. Fifa should receive no special exemption because its product is sport.
By Miguel Poiares Maduro, former chairman of Fifa’s governance committee and Dean of the Catolica Global School of Law.
Football moves billions, shapes identities across borders and gives communities a rare language of belonging, while its decisions touch livelihoods, local institutions and public life far beyond Zurich. An organisation with that reach cannot be run as though it were a private club. Fifa’s next presidential election ought not to be a simple power struggle for control of football’s huge financial resources. It ought to be an opportunity to start a genuine reform of football governance. For that to happen, much more than simply replacing Infantino’s leadership is required.
In fact, a first test of a true commitment to reform lies in how Infantino should be replaced. That test regards whether the institution that governs the world’s most powerful game can obey limits of its own making. Gianni Infantino’s bid for another term highlights the extent to which Fifa’s post-scandal reforms are not real constraints, meant to bind the office and have become mostly window dressing, language to be reinterpreted when inconvenient to the incumbent. A fourth term for Infantino would make that even harder to ignore, but the silence of those opposing Infantino on that issue also raises doubts on the extent of their commitment to genuine reform.
Article 33(2) of the Fifa Statutes appears to provide a clear answer to the possibility of a fourth Infantino term: no Fifa president may hold office for more than three terms, consecutive or otherwise. Infantino first won the presidency at an Extraordinary Congress in February 2016 and was reelected in 2019 and 2023; on that chronology, the mandate that began in 2023 is his third. Yet at the 2026 Congress in Vancouver he signaled that he intended to seek the presidency again in 2027. The proposed route around the ceiling was prepared in December 2022, when the Fifa Council issued a statement communicating that it had endorsed the view of its Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee that the 2016–19 period should not count, without publishing the reasoning or legal basis for such “decision”. The dispute is therefore about whether a plain limit can disappear through a decision interpreting a rule adopted by the Congress (and that can only be amended by this) and whose interpretation is entrusted by the Statute to the Review Sub-committee (who decides on the eligibility of the candidates) and not the Council. This is about the rule of law, not about a calendar detail.
Neither the Statutes nor the Governance Regulations says that a term disappears because it lasted less than four years or began at an Extraordinary Congress, rather than through the ordinary election cycle. The 2016 Reform Committee proposed a maximum of three mandates – mentioning a maximum of twelve years – to curb corruption, self-dealing and impunity and to make leadership more transparent and answerable. Infantino even participated in that process as Uefa’s representative. A fifteen-year tenure would go well beyond what the reform committee intended and would be only two years short of Sepp Blatter’s seventeen-year rule, making the stakes of the interpretation difficult to ignore. Moreover, the interpretation adopted by the Council will allow Infantino, or any future President, to circumvent term limits forever. It would be enough for a President to get the Council to call elections a few months ahead of his full term of four years for that term not to count, allowing him to stay in power virtually forever…
The process undertaken to “reinterpret” or “remake” the term limits rule highlights a separate “constitutional” problem. The Council is not the body charged with deciding presidential eligibility or issuing a binding interpretation of the Statutes. The Review Sub-Committee is in this case. If Fifa wants to change the three-term ceiling, the change should go to Congress through an open amendment process because Congress – not the Council – represents the membership for this purpose. Congress should be able to debate the rule, hear competing interpretations and proposals and approve or reject any change in public, rather than receive an administrative announcement whose reasoning is withheld. On paper, Fifa has independent committees, ethics bodies and review mechanisms, but a review committee cannot credibly police the leadership when the leadership can pre-empt or ratify its work. The eligibility dispute is therefore not only about one candidate; it shows that a rule is a restraint only when an institution with real independence and authority can apply it to the most powerful office-holder.
We are still to hear from the Review Committee, and I hope that the three members composing it may surprise the establishment and that the current political context at Fifa (with a weaker President) may facilitate their task. If we will hear and they will indeed declare him not eligible it will tell us more about those members than about the strength of the existing institutional safeguards on their independence. That is the case when, as in Fifa, those independent members serve, de facto, at the will of those whom they are supposed to control.
This issue, and how it’s been ignored even by those contesting Infantino’s leadership, is one more example of how deep governance problems run at Fifa. Term limits were inserted into football governance, but they are contrary to its governance culture. They are either circumvented or eliminated when they become inconvenient in the light of the imperial presidencies that dominate the world of sport. The “tragic story” of term limits in football is therefore just one more piece of evidence of how much reform is necessary and cannot be confused with a simple change of leadership.
At the heart of Fifa’s governance problems is the circumstance that Fifa writes the rules of global football, decides who may enter its competitions, polices conduct and sanctions participants, while also selling commercial rights and benefiting from the markets it shapes. It is referee, gatekeeper and rights-holder at once, a combination that creates a conflict even when no individual decision is corrupt. Fifa should receive no special exemption because its product is sport; separating the rule-maker from the business it supervises is basic institutional hygiene, not an optional refinement.
Money is important at Fifa as a means of political empowerment and survival. The president’s office controls significant resources distributed to national associations, while those associations form the electorate that decides who remains in office and may depend on that funding for their own programmes. That circular dependency makes dissent costly and incumbency valuable: leadership can distribute benefits, appointments and opportunities, then receive electoral loyalty from the recipients who depend on them. The problem is structural, not personal.
The electoral design reinforces this system. The presidential vote is decided by a small electoral universe of national associations, many marked by long-serving leaders, limited succession, weak accountability to members and almost no other stakeholders at the table, from players and clubs to women. Fifa invokes grassroots legitimacy while preserving a hierarchy that gives the grassroots little power or accountability.
Reform should begin with a separation of functions, not another promise of better behaviour. Fifa’s different functions should be separated and insulated from each other, subject to different decision making bodies and procedures and accountable to different stakeholders. Elections could depend on the vote of different communities. While it will be difficult to replace the principle of one vote per FA, it may be viable (even if not easy) to subject certain decisions to different electoral communities (some with representatives of fans or clubs and with much stronger requirements on female representation). Decisions on eligibility, integrity, discipline and access to competitions should be reasoned, published promptly and subject to truly independent review, so that rules cannot be tailored to commercial or political interests. Independent oversight is not an attack on sporting autonomy; it is the condition under which autonomy can earn public trust.
Fifa’s history shows why voluntary promises are not enough. The shock of the 2015 corruption scandals created moments for a new settlement, but personnel changed more readily than the architecture managed to change the governance culture and the old incentives survived. There are certainly some within the organization that support genuine reform and recent calls by different stakeholders and even FAs are a positive sign. But the set of incentives I described makes clear how hard it will be for them to succeed without external pressure imposing such reform.
Josimar regularly opens its columns to independent guest contributors who wish to comment on the most pressing issues in world football. These columns solely reflect the opinion of their authors. Their publication does not constitute an endorsement on Josimar’s behalf, but a way to encourage and promote debate within the football community.
