Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, apologized to his harshest critics during a crucial meeting of the FIFA Council, but did not provide any new details or documents about the issues of greatest concern to them.
According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the FIFA Council held a meeting that lasted three and a half hours in the Swiss city of Zurich, which was the first since the unveiling of the “FIFA Forward Enterprise” project, which Infantino had prepared out of sight of the Council members, before he retracted it within days of its appearance in public.
The project aimed to grant a private investment company a share of the commercial rights of FIFA, in a move that raised widespread objections regarding governance, transparency and decision-making mechanisms within the institution responsible for managing global football.
The meeting witnessed Infantino being confronted with questions related to a number of controversial files, including stopping the implementation of the red card penalty against American striker Folarin Balogun, the “FIFA Peace Prize”, in addition to the funding allocated to national federations.
