Infantino calls for investment to lift football’s smaller nations

FIFA president Gianni Infantino says football must attract greater investment and create more opportunities for less wealthy nations, arguing that the sport’s leading countries and federations do not always want their smaller counterparts to develop.

In a video shared by FIFA, Infantino said one of his priorities was to narrow the divide between the strongest football nations and the rest of the world. He said the game should be able to grow across all 211 FIFA member associations, rather than being concentrated among a small group of established powers.

“We want football to develop in our 211 countries across the world. Some do not need it and do not want others to develop, but we have to reduce the gap between the big countries and all the others,” Infantino said.

The FIFA president added that substantial financial and practical support would be required if that ambition was to be achieved.

“We have to find investments, opportunities and resources for all the others,” he said.

Infantino’s comments form part of what appears to be a renewed public case for FIFA’s role in expanding football globally. The organisation presented the message as evidence of its efforts to support countries with fewer resources and fewer opportunities than the game’s wealthiest nations.

His remarks also come after he recently indicated that he wanted to sell the World Cup to investors. That proposal attracted strong criticism, although the FIFA president has so far avoided the backlash surrounding the announcement.

The latest video did not set out precisely what Infantino meant by seeking “investments and opportunities”, but he said the approach was not new and had been central to FIFA’s work for a decade.

“This is what we have tried to do for the last 10 years, and also over the last 10 weeks, and what we will continue to do in the future,” he said.

Infantino’s argument is that the financial imbalance between football’s major nations and smaller countries cannot be addressed without new funding, access to opportunities and the resources needed for development. He also suggested that resistance from some of the game’s most powerful countries and federations had made that task more difficult.

The FIFA president therefore positioned the organisation as responsible for helping to close the divide. His message was that global football should not be shaped only by the countries that already possess the greatest wealth, infrastructure and sporting influence.

FIFA has 211 member associations, and Infantino said its objective was to ensure that football’s development extended across all of them. He acknowledged that some football nations were already well established and did not require the same level of assistance, while insisting that the rest should not be prevented from making progress.

The comments represent Infantino’s latest attempt to outline the purpose of his leadership at FIFA at a time when his plans for attracting investment into the World Cup have generated criticism. For now, he continues to argue that reducing the inequality between football’s biggest nations and the rest is an essential responsibility for the governing body.