New Zealand Football has withdrawn its backing for Gianni Infantino ahead of next year’s vote on the FIFA presidency, putting the New Zealand game on the same side of a widening split in world football as most of Europe.
The national body said it had formally withdrawn its support for Infantino’s candidature at the 2027 FIFA Congress, which will decide who runs the sport’s world governing body for the following four years. In a statement reported by RNZ, New Zealand Football said it had reached the decision after weighing up the events of the past fortnight.
“After careful consideration, NZF has formed the view that decisions and actions within FIFA have contributed to a breakdown in trust and increased division within international football, and that an independent review is required to restore confidence and trust,” the organisation said.
New Zealand Football also said it wanted an independent review of the steps taken to develop the FIFA Forward Enterprise scheme, the plan that set off the crisis.
That scheme, announced on 28 July, would have created a commercial subsidiary holding the rights to FIFA’s tournaments, including the men’s and women’s World Cups. Private investors would have been offered a minority stake of about 20 percent in a company valued at roughly US$20 billion, raising something in the order of NZ$7 billion. FIFA said it would keep control of the game itself and of its competitions, and that member associations stood to receive up to US$40 million each.
The reaction was fast and hostile. UEFA voted to boycott FIFA competitions, and the confederations covering North and Central America and Asia both rejected the plan. Within three days Infantino pulled it. He said the proposal had “created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place”, according to Al Jazeera.
New Zealand Football did not join the early pile-on. Chief executive Andrew Pragnell said at the time that the organisation wanted to read the detail before taking a position, while making plain that the logic of the deal puzzled him. FIFA has been reporting record revenue, and Pragnell told Reuters it was “unusual to do a capital raise like that when capital is not your issue”.
He was careful to separate the proposal from FIFA’s record on distributing money to smaller federations. “If we park the proposal overall, what you’ve seen from FIFA is enormous commercial growth and increased focus on the redistribution of wealth across all member federations, including some great projects that we’ve benefited from,” Pragnell said.
That tension sits behind the decision. New Zealand is one of 11 members of the Oceania Football Confederation, the smallest of FIFA’s six regional bodies and the one most dependent on the development grants that flow out of Zurich. Oceania has not taken a collective position on Infantino’s leadership. Its executive committee welcomed the withdrawal of the investment plan and said it would keep working through the consultation process. Pragnell had earlier told Pacific Media Network there was “obviously more power in numbers” and that it helped when a confederation acted as one, while accepting that members are free to go their own way.
New Zealand has now gone its own way. Wales was the first national association to withdraw support, on 3 August, followed within days by Finland, Serbia, Sweden and England. Norway went further and called for Infantino to resign.
The pressure stepped up again on 10 August, when the presidents and general secretaries of UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation signed an open letter accusing FIFA of deception. The letter did not name Infantino. It said there was still no recognition that trying to sell an interest in the World Cup was “a profound failure of judgment”, and that FIFA’s response had treated the affair as a communications problem rather than a failure of judgement, CNN reported. The three confederations want any review carried out by a fully independent third party rather than by FIFA or anyone else inside the game.
The arithmetic still favours the incumbent. FIFA has 211 member associations, each with one vote, and a candidate needs 106 of them to win outright at the Congress in Rabat in March 2027. Africa’s 54 members have already lined up behind Infantino, and South America’s confederation has backed him as well. On raw numbers, New Zealand’s single vote changes nothing.
What it does is mark a shift in tone from a country that has usually kept its head down in FIFA politics. New Zealand has co-hosted a Women’s World Cup, has an All Whites squad building towards the expanded men’s tournament, and runs a domestic game that leans heavily on FIFA money. Breaking with a sitting president is not a costless gesture for a federation that size, which is part of why it registers.
It will also be someone else’s problem to manage by the time the vote is held. Pragnell announced this month that he is stepping down as chief executive in early 2027 after eight years in the job, leaving his successor to arrive in the middle of the most contested FIFA election since 2016.
Whether more associations follow will decide if this becomes a genuine contest or simply a noisy re-election. For now, three of the six confederations are openly at odds with the president, the two biggest voting blocs are still with him, and a country of five million at the bottom of the map has put its hand up on the other side.
What do you make of New Zealand Football’s call? Leave a comment below and tell us whether you think the national body was right to break ranks.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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