Victor Montagliani to seek Concacaf re-election, ruling out challenge to Gianni Infantino

Victor Montagliani told a town hall of Concacaf staff late last month that he intends to stand for re-election as the confederation’s president next year, a decision that would rule him out of mounting a challenge to Gianni Infantino for the Fifa presidency. He is understood to have relayed the message to most of Concacaf’s 41 member associations.

Montagliani has been widely touted as a potential Fifa contender, particularly among Uefa member associations concerned that a European candidate would struggle to defeat Infantino in a ballot of Fifa’s 211 members. The 61-year-old was elected Concacaf president 10 years ago on a reforming mandate after the corruption scandal that culminated in the arrest of then-president Jeffrey Webb following an FBI investigation; Webb admitted he had taken "bribes and kickbacks".

At the town hall, Montagliani said that despite the Fifa governance crisis and calls for him to stand for the world body’s top job, he wants to continue serving members in the region.

Aleksander Ceferin has confirmed his intention to stand in Uefa’s presidential election next year at a meeting of Uefa’s 55 member associations in Berlin on Thursday. Montagliani and Ceferin are expected to continue working together on governance reform at Fifa after the World Cup sell-off scandal, an issue slated for discussion at the Fifa Council meeting in Zurich next Thursday.

Fifa’s council has not met since Infantino’s Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan was exposed in July, despite repeated calls from members for an extraordinary general meeting, and the Zurich summit will be the council’s first meeting since the Fifa congress in Vancouver last March. Montagliani, Ceferin and the Asian Football Confederation president, Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, are expected to press for an independent review of FFE and broader governance changes to give stakeholders a greater voice and formalise the council’s role in decision-making.

Letters sent by the trio to Infantino last month, which called for Fifa to allocate a portion of its $6bn (£4.5bn) cash reserves to member associations, are also due to be discussed at the council meeting.

Concacaf’s presidential election is scheduled for the first quarter of next year and will take place before the Fifa presidential vote on 18 March in Rabat, a timeline that Montagliani cited when clarifying his intentions to staff.