October 16 – Perhaps the only significant win for Infantino’s confederation opponents yesterday at the FIFA Council meeting was that they forced FIFA’s hand into more than doubling grants for the 211 member associations.
At the FIFA Congress in April, FIFA president Gianni Infantino proudly trumpeted an increase in budget for FIFA Forward 4.0 funding for national associations to $10 million of available grants for the 2027-30 cycle. It was a $2 million increase on the FIFA Forward 3.0 grants of $8 million.
Infantino said that only under his leadership have federations been so well rewarded.
But with the World Cup topping $15 billion in revenue and FIFA’s reserves expected to hit $6 billion, FIFA made no move share its new-found wealth with its members until forced into re-evaluating following a joint letter to Infantino from UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin and Concacaf president Victor Montagliani.
They proposed that development funding should be doubled to $20 million per federation and that if the reserves topped $6 billion, then that extra money should also be distributed to members.
Caught napping and suddenly looking parsimonious – and in the wake of Infantino’s FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) World Cup rights sell-off furore – FIFA quickly scrambled to get a last-minute proposal together for approval at the Council meeting. Their proposal – dubbed the FIFA Surplus Soldarity Programme – raised the development funding available to each federation by $15 million, making a total of $25 million over the four-year cycle.
That funding came with conditions over how it could be spent on. In the past those conditions have made it difficult for a large number of FAs to receive their full grant allocations. That meant a number of more appropriate development programmes were shelved in favour of meeting the rules rather than local football needs.
The Council argued that the criteria to access the money had to eased to enable projects to progress, and that the too often political strings attached to release of money had to be cut once and for all.
It was a major win for Montagliani in particular. Concacaf has a number of small federations who feel that they have to pay undue patronage to FIFA to release their funding. At a Concacaf presidents meeting prior to the Council meeting, Montagliani and Concacaf’s other council members were unequivocally mandated by the MA presidents to get FIFA to release more funding.
Infantino had been politicking hard in the Caribbean with FIFA’s member association staff. Many of the Caribbean presidents had felt obliged, because of Infantino’s control of the grant money, to show him their support. With Montagliani having delivered more money for those MAs, many will now be in a position to be more independent over their support for the next FIFA president. For Infantino it is a blow. Not only has he been caught out by holding back grant money, but he has also lost control of the powerful money belt he wields over the federations to guarantee their support.
Infantino has a different view and PR spin on the grants (see video). But for the national associations that most need the grant funding, it should now come without the threats around returning political patronage.
The increase in development grant funding FIFA proposed for the confederations was, in proportion, was considerably less generous long term. For the 2027-30 cycle the six confederations will receive an additional $33 million on top of the $66 million already budgeted through FIFA Forward 4.0. For the 2031-34 cycle they will receive a further $33 million, making $32 million for the eight-year period. $33 million in 2027 is a lot less in real world terms that $33 million in 2034.
Zonal and regional associations will receive Surplus Solidarity funding of a further $2.75 million each on top of the $5.5 million budgeted via FIFA Forward 4.0.
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