Uefa Calls Boycott and No Confidence in Infantino

The call requires that the accumulated habits of federations, associations, and confederations who have spent decades negotiating with FIFA be replaced by a single act of collective refusal - a boycott, a declaration of no confidence in Gianni Infantino himself. But those habits encode a great deal that a vote of no confidence does not: which associations depend on FIFA’s development funds and cannot afford solidarity, which federations have separate quarrels with Uefa that a common front would paper over rather than resolve, and what a boycott would actually withhold, given that football does not stop simply because its governing body is declared illegitimate by another governing body. Uefa knows this as well as anyone. The declaration is not naive; it is, I think, something more interesting than that.

The question of what to do about a FIFA presidency that has concentrated power in itself is not a technical question, of the kind that can be settled by a resolution correctly drafted and correctly passed. It is a question of practical judgement, of the sort that depends on knowing how football’s institutions actually function beneath their charters - which men trust which other men, which confederations owe favours, what the calendar of tournaments makes possible or impossible in the way of sanctions. Uefa’s declaration is a piece of rhetoric belonging to the register of enterprise association: it proposes that football’s governing bodies exist to pursue a common purpose, and that Infantino has betrayed that purpose, and that the remedy is to remove him and redirect the enterprise. This is exactly the vocabulary in which such things always are said, and it is exactly the vocabulary least suited to the institution being discussed.

For FIFA, whatever its constitution says, has never functioned as an enterprise in Uefa’s sense. It functions, when it functions well, as an arrangement that permits confederations with radically different interests - European, African, Asian, South American - to continue transacting with one another without agreeing on very much at all. This is civil association, however imperfectly realised, and its virtue is precisely that it does not require Infantino to be trusted, only to be constrained. A boycott is the wrong instrument for a constraint problem. It assumes that withdrawal expresses disapproval cleanly, when in practice what withdrawal expresses is that Uefa’s practical knowledge of how to work the institution from within has run out, or has been judged not worth the cost of continuing.

There is a further difficulty, one the declaration does not address because the register it is written in has no place for it. No confidence is a parliamentary form, borrowed by an organisation that is not a parliament and has no mechanism by which a vote of no confidence produces resignation. Infantino was elected by the FIFA Congress, in which Uefa’s members are a minority however influential. What Uefa has issued, then, is not a procedural instrument but a piece of theatre - and I do not use the word to disparage it. Theatre of this kind has its uses. It signals to the confederations who might otherwise assume unanimity that unanimity does not exist. It gives cover to national federations who share the grievance but lack Uefa’s standing to voice it. What it cannot do is substitute for the tedious, particular, relationship-by-relationship work of persuading enough of the Congress that the arrangement under which they currently prosper is worth risking for the sake of a principle Uefa has not, in this statement, troubled to specify.

What the tradition of football governance suggests, if I may call forty years of confederational manoeuvre a tradition, is that power in FIFA has always shifted through accumulation rather than declaration - through alliances built match by match, vote by vote, favour by favour, and never through a single body, however grand, announcing that it has withdrawn its confidence. Uefa’s statement may be the opening move in exactly that kind of accumulation. Or it may be what a great many votes of no confidence eventually turn out to be: a document that expresses, with considerable clarity, everything the author now refuses to do about the problem, and asks the world to mistake the refusal for the remedy.