Gianni Infantino’s campaign for re-election as FIFA president is set to move this week to Japan and a meeting scheduled for Wednesday with the Asian Football Confederation. The council is the main decision-making body at FIFA with a global spread of officials. The planned meeting with Asian soccer leaders is to be held in a five-star hotel in Tokyo with the media largely excluded.
This comes after Infantino apologized last week in Zurich, Switzerland, to FIFA’s 37-member ruling council — which he chairs — for “mistakes” he made in assembling a now-scrapped $4.2 billion sell-off plan for the World Cup.
FIFA rules state candidates must have “played an active role in association football (e.g. as a player or an official within FIFA, a confederation or an association, etc.) for two of the last five years before being proposed.
They must have “declarations of support” from at least five of the 211 members. “FIFA is a massive patronage network,” Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University and a former professional soccer player, told The Associated Press. “It brings in billions from the men’s World Cup and distributes it to football associations around the world in exchange for loyalty.”
