UEFA welcomes end of 'shabby' investor deal but trust in FIFA gone
· Yahoo Sports
UEFA has welcomed that FIFA has abandoned its plan allowing investors to acquire stakes in the World Cup but hit out hard at the governing body and its president, Gianni Infantino, again.
"The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family," a strong-worded statement on Saturday said.
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"This is a victory for the whole game. But it must not be the end of the story. The proposal has gone. The task of rebuilding trust in FIFA has only just begun."
FIFA had announced on Tuesday that it wanted to sell minority stakes in a planned company overseeing its commercial rights and tournament operations to private investors. Members who endorsed this by September 19 would receive a $20 million bonus.
UUEFA said it would boycott FIFA events if the project became reality and the FIFA scheme was also rejected by Asia's AFC and the CONCACAF confederation for North and Central America and the Caribbean.
That meant that FIFA and Infantino would have no majority from the 211 members and Infantino said early Saturday that the plan - which also included a September 19 deadline for members to agree and be eligible for $20 million - was now scrapped.
Infantino, who has been in charge since 2016 and seeking re-election for a final term next year, is now under growing pressure to resign.
UEFA spoke of a "shabby, back room, opaque deal he hatched and tried to force through" without any transparency and also questioned why $5 billion of FIFA reserves were not used for the benefit of the game.
"We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game. We must identify those responsible and hold them to account," UEFA said.
"In the coming days and weeks, UEFA will work with its associations and in close cooperation with other confederations to reflect on how this happened and devise a plan to make sure that it cannot occur again. That review should be thorough and fundamental. No option should be off the table.
"UEFA will begin work immediately with partners and stakeholders all over the world and right across the game to propose a new way of distributing resources through the existing FIFA Forward programme.
"We must start to use some of that money that is sat idle in FIFA’s bank account to deliver the kick start that the grassroots and the wider game need in each of the 211 countries of FIFA. But we don’t need to sell off the family silver to pay for it."