Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin says Gianni Infantino needs to remember he is European after describing his Fifa counterpart’s plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup as “worse than the Super League”.
Earlier this month the world governing body abandoned Infantino’s proposal to create a new company – Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) – to manage the commercial and ticketing rights of all Fifa competitions, with 21% to be sold off to a private investment company.
Uefa led opposition to the plan, with its members voting to boycott World Cups unless it was scrapped.
European football’s governing body has since said it has lost confidence in Infantino, while the football associations of all the home nations have withdrawn support for the 56-year-old Swiss.
“I think this plan is even worse than the Super League plan,” Ceferin told the Rest is Politics podcast., external
“Super important clubs wanted to do their own league, which is wrong, and would destroy football. But in this case, football would be literally sold.
“I’m absolutely sure that the plan is dead. It’s hard to to imagine what kind of people would sell the sport that belongs to everyone. We will not allow that to happen.”
The European Super League was a proposed breakaway league of 20 top European clubs as a rival to Uefa’s Champions League, but the project fell apart days after its unveiling in April 2021 after widespread criticism.
Ceferin said that Uefa had no prior knowledge of Infantino’s plan, and that he found out through the media while on holiday with his family.
“He didn’t contact me since this happened,” Ceferin said.
“They [Fifa] play on, you know, ‘[how] arrogant Europe is against us: They have enough money, but I help the small and the poor’.
“But I think someone should remind him that he is a European, and that he was supported by Uefa, which he forgot.”
Infantino – who worked at Uefa for 16 years, and was general secretary for nine – has been flying around the world in the search of public support.
On Saturday, he met with Caribbean Football Union members in the Dominican Republic and on Sunday he was at the E-Sports World Cup in Paris, attended by the French President Emmanuel Macron, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Portugal forward Cristiano Ronaldo.
