UEFA refuses to lift its World Cup boycott threat as England's FA withdraws support for Infantino

FIFA spent Wednesday trying to draw a line under the worst week of Gianni Infantino's presidency. On Thursday Europe told it the line is not there. UEFA said the conditions it set have not been met, that a boycott of FIFA competitions — the World Cup included — could still go ahead, and that FIFA's statement of support for its own president "changes nothing". The English FA has written to FIFA withdrawing its support for Infantino.

The two conditions UEFA set are worth reading closely, because only one of them has been satisfied. The first was that the proposals to sell off the major competitions be withdrawn; they have been. The second was an assurance that "such attempts to disfigure the game in this way will never be made again" — and that is what UEFA says is still missing. An apology for how a plan was handled is not the same as a guarantee it will not return in another form.

An apology is not a governance change

UEFA was blunt about the value of Wednesday's show of unity, noting that the people who declared their confidence in Infantino are employed by him and "whose careers depend on his favour". Its own position, it said, is unchanged from the weekend: it has lost confidence in the presidency, and that stands.

The plan at the centre of this would have channelled private investment into FIFA competitions, including the men's and women's World Cups, through a subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, with $40 million offered to each of the 211 member associations for their backing. It is dead. The argument that followed it plainly is not.

What a boycott would actually mean

This is the part that matters to anyone who works on events rather than watches them. A confederation boycott is not a gesture: it is the withdrawal of the teams that fill the stadiums, sell the broadcast package and justify the ticket price. UEFA supplies a large share of the field at every World Cup and runs its own calendar of tournaments alongside it. A federation-by-federation drift, with England now added to the European associations that have already pulled their backing, changes the arithmetic of every commercial conversation FIFA has between now and the presidential vote in Morocco next March.

Nobody has cancelled anything. But the events industry has just been shown, in public and at the largest possible scale, that the people who own a tournament and the people who supply it are not the same, and that the second group can say no.