Gianni Infantino Re-Elected FIFA President Without Contest

Incumbent FIFA President Gianni Infantino, head of the World Football Governing Body since 2016, will be a lone runner in March 2023 – to run for a third and final four-year term, the organization announced on Thursday.

“No other candidacy has been submitted” by the member federations before the Elective Congress scheduled for Kigali on March 16, Fifa said in a statement, three days before the opening of the Qatar World Cup (November 20-December 18) .

The renewal is not a surprise. The electoral college of FIFA allows its ex-presidents to chain mandates by ensuring the support of a majority of voters: Brazilian Joao Havelange led the football world from 1974 to 1998, and Sepp Blatter from 1998 to 2015.

Elected in 2016 with the promise of “restoring the image of Fifa”, by then, cooked in a planetary of corruption scandals, the 52-year-old Italian-Swiss leader formalized his candidacy last March 31 in Doha, without any opponent declaring intentions to run.

The German football federation (DFB) nevertheless announced on Wednesday that it would not support him, and that it would have liked on his part “a greater consideration for human rights as well as a greater commitment to humanitarian issues” , according to its president Bernd Neuendorf, who is also calling for a compensation fund for workers involved in the construction sites of the World Cup-2022.

To his credit, Infantino has done some work swelling of Fifa’s revenue, which forecasts a record increase of 7 billion dollars (6.3 billion euros) over the four-year cycle ending in 2022.

FIFA under Infantino has many projects it is struggling to carry out to reform football, from the idea of ​​a biennial World Cup – abandoned in March – to its Club World Cup expanded to 24 clubs, which has still not seen the light of the day.