President of Jordanian FA accuses FIFA of ‘blackmail’ over Infantino reelection
Former FIFA presidential candidate Prince Ali bin Al Hussein has accused world football’s governing body of trying to “blackmail” the Jordanian Football Association (JFA) into supporting Gianni Infantino’s bid for reelection as FIFA boss.
In a scathing post on his X feed on Tuesday, Prince Ali, the JFA president, wrote that his organisation has asked FIFA for its assistance with three separate issues this year but was told he needed to endorse Infantino first.
According to Prince Ali, the first of these issues was related to the difficulties Jordan, who qualified for their first ever World Cup this summer, had in securing visas for their fans, even those who had bought tickets “at exorbitant prices”.
The second request was for help with the American taxes that Jordan’s players and staff are liable for after their stay in the U.S., which the JFA had not budgeted for and would not have faced if they had been based in co-hosts Canada or Mexico.
Finally, Prince Ali claims that Jordan are still owed prize money from the December’s FIFA Arab Cup in Qatar, where they went unbeaten to the final before losing 3-2 to Morocco.
“It is clear the problem really is with (the) leadership,” continued Prince Ali, who ran unsuccessfully against Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency in 2015 and then against Infantino and Bahrain’s Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa in 2016.
“For months, FIFA has been refusing to help us on any of these or other matters until it was verbally communicated to me, during the World Cup, that if I endorsed Infantino it would go a long way to helping our FA out.
“We pride ourselves in Jordan in upholding ethical values. We did not endorse him before and certainly will not now. But the whole situation amounts to blackmail and we refuse to give in to that.”
FIFA has not responded to a request for comment.
- Who is Prince Ali and why is his intervention significant?
The third son of Jordan’s former king and half-brother of the current ruler, Prince Ali has a voice that carries a lot of weight in Asian football, where he is also the founder and president of the West Asian Football Federation that currently has 12 FIFA nations as members.
He was also a FIFA vice-president between 2011 and 2016 when he was ousted by Sheikh Salman, but not before he had championed the lifting of FIFA’s ban on the hijab in women’s football and creating a development programme to raise money for better football facilities in the Middle East.
He is a formidable opponent, then, at the worst possible time for Infantino, who is still fighting for his survival as FIFA boss after the implosion of his plan to create a subsidiary that owns the commercial rights to FIFA’s competitions and then sell a 20 per cent stake in the new business to private investors.
That project united the Asian, European and North and Central American confederations in opposition to Infantino last week, with UEFA, European football’s governing body, saying it had also lost confidence in his leadership.
The Asian Football Confederation and Concacaf, the confederation that hosted this summer’s World Cup, have not gone quite as far as Europe in calling for change at the top, but both are seeking urgent answers from Infantino as to why he developed this plan in secret, who appointed the various banks and funds involved and why he thinks FIFA needed to sell a stake to anyone, particularly as it is sitting on estimated reserves of $7billion.
Infantino is yet to respond to these questions but did withdraw his “FIFA Forward Enterprise” project in a public statement on Saturday.
Since then, various UEFA member associations have publicly withdrawn their support for him to stand for a fourth four-year term as FIFA boss next year, while several senior FIFA executives, including his number two Mattias Grafstrom and chief of global football development Arsene Wenger, have also issued statements to say they had been deceived by Infantino and knew nothing about the FFE project.