Norwegian FA to ask Fifa president Infantino to resign after World Cup stake plan

Lise Klaveness, president of the Norwegian Football Federation, said the NFF will ask Fifa president Gianni Infantino to resign with immediate effect after his doomed attempt to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors, a decision taken at an NFF meeting on Thursday night.

Norway is the first federation to call directly for Infantino to step down amid the crisis surrounding his Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme and, Klaveness said, “There is no way back for him.” Infantino is still battling for support around the world; Norway was among a handful of countries not to back his re-election as president next March, and several European federations have withdrawn their endorsement in the past week. “We did not vote for him in 2023 but we hoped we would support him, he was elected and the reason why we were so clear in our statements was to really give the signal that we wanted him to implement the good reforms he was part of. But he didn’t, and now we will ask him to resign.”

“We decided that there is no trust in Infantino now,” Klaveness told the Guardian. “We have been worried consistently and there has been one more step in worrying direction every year, every part of the year. The trust is now gone for us, there is no way back for Infantino. We’re left in a very polarised cooperation globally and, I would say, chaos. So we will ask him to resign immediately so that the global football community can look ahead and cooperate going into the future.”

The NFF is expected to formally write a letter requesting Infantino’s resignation in the coming week.

Norway will also formalise a fresh complaint to Fifa’s ethics committee on three fronts, taking in the FFE scandal, the award of Fifa’s “peace prize” to Donald Trump and the Folarin Balogun affair of the recent World Cup, and it will attempt to bring a number of major federations onboard for its submission.

The immediate next steps are the formal letter to Fifa asking for Infantino’s resignation and the planned ethics complaint that the NFF will seek to expand by enlisting other major federations.