Fifa president Gianni Infantino insists he has the backing of the “vast, vast majority” of world football, as he laughed off questions about whether he had considered resigning over the World Cup sell-off debacle.
In a rare interview, he struck a defiant tone to BBC Sport about his own position in the wake of the controversial Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal, and said it was not always easy to bring different points of view “under one roof”.
“There is nothing bad in disagreeing,” he said. “We see it every day in so many countries in the world. It’s OK to disagree. It’s OK to have different points of view, but then we need to be able to move on.”
Two months ago, Infantino was facing mounting calls to stand down as president of the organisation he has led since 2016.
The heads of European football’s governing body Uefa, the Asian Football Confederation and Concacaf, which runs the game in North and Central America, signed a letter accusing the Fifa president of breaking trust “through deception”.
Last week Uefa demanded that Fifa release all key documents relating to FFE by 2 November, with Uefa general secretary Theodore Theodoridis saying that the organisation had failed to address “a number of fundamental questions”.
Under FFE, which Infantino scrapped within days, a portion of the commercial rights of football’s world governing body would have been sold to a private investment firm.
Since the delivery of the letter, Infantino has been travelling the world, appearing in Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Cape Verde, and Japan, managing to shore up support to the point where his re-election as president for a fourth term next year now looks inevitable.
He has also proposed to increase the amount of money handed out for football development across the world by $3.4bn (£2.6bn).