FIFA: The Players Have Finally Spoken. Will the rest Follow?
25 August 2026
On 24 August, eleven footballers signed a statement saying FIFA has drifted from its values and that its leadership has been blinded by power. They called for structural change, and specifically for a real, direct say for players and fans in how the game is run. Those who step onto the pitch and those who sit in the stands, they said, deserve a genuine voice.
The list is impressive. Emmanuel Petit, Bixente Lizarazu and Robert Pirès, World Cup winners with France in 1998. Didier Drogba. Juan Sebastián Verón. Claudio Pizarro, Emmanuel Adebayor, Mikaël Silvestre, David James and Briana Scurry.
Ten of them retired years ago. The eleventh is Lucy Bronze, 34, who plays for Chelsea and England and is the third most-capped player in her country's history.
When the football governing body puts a $20bn price on the World Cup and tries to sell a fifth of it, the players who respond are the ones who can no longer be dropped, plus one woman who is still playing. Why aren't more current players on this list?
Now Is the Time to Join the Debate.
If you missed it, Martyn Ziegler in The Times broke the story in July that FIFA was creating a new subsidiary holding its commercial rights, valued at around $20bn on JPMorgan's advice, with up to 20% going to a group led by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump'son-in-law. Infantino would have held a stake in the business after the end of a fourth term as FIFA President. Since then, every confederation, association, league, politician, and football columnist has had their say, and the plan was abandoned within days. The valuation was not.
In August, UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC published a joint letter accusing FIFA of a breach of trust. There is talk of a no-confidence vote before the ballot in Rabat next March, but most of the pressure has been applied, and yet Infantino is still in office. If the pressure, led by UEFA, is to continue, they need a new voice to join the debate.
Most fans appear to want Infantino out, and players have every reason to agree, so why hasn't any active male international said anything of substance? Their silence is becoming deafening.
Speaking out looks risky. Clubs can fine and sanction their players. Federations cannot, because there is no contract between a player and his national association. The only thing a federation can do is stop picking him, and the player has the same option in reverse. He can make himself unavailable.
On this issue, though, the risk is small. Most European associations have already broken with Infantino, so a player speaking now is saying what his own FA has said. He is not defying anybody. The exception is South America and much of Africa, where the associations are still behind the president, which is why the first voices would have to come from Europe.
So the barrier is not really jeopardy. It is habit. Several of the signatories are FIFA Legends, paid to appear at ceremonies and events, and they may well lose that work. It will not bankrupt them. What the ten of them have in common is that they have finished playing.
Sponsorship pulls the other way. International football lifts a player's earning potential, and the boot manufacturers, drinks brands, and payment companies writing image-rights cheques want players who turn out for their country. But those same companies pay FIFA far more than they pay any individual, and sponsors are fickle about reputation. If the players and the fans made the leadership the story, the brands attached to the tournament would have to decide whether that association was still worth having. FIFA's commercial base is exposed, and nobody has tested it.
Qatar 2022 did show how thin player resistance can be. European captains had committed to the OneLove armband. FIFA signalled sporting sanctions, and the whole thing collapsed within a day. Germany's players covered their mouths for a team photograph and got on with the tournament. That is the men's games high-water mark for governance protest: a gesture, abandoned on first contact.
FIFA Can't Pay Off the Players
FIFA is extraordinarily profitable because, to quote Roger Mitchell, ‘it carries no cost of sales’.' It does not pay the players who play in its tournament. Clubs pay the wages, carry the injuries, run the academies and pay the transfer fees. National associations invite the players to represent their country. FIFA sells the tournament. The World Cup is a multibillion-dollar business with no cost line, which is exactly why investors want a piece of the pie.
For FIFA, every stakeholder in world football has a price it can meet. The only group it cannot pay off is the players, and if it did, the profits would plunge. Under FFE, FIFA proposed increasing payments to each federation from around $8m across a four-year cycle to $40m. That money goes toward player development and the infrastructure that supports football in those countries, or it should. None of it goes toward paying players for representing their country. There are bonus schemes for winning tournaments or reaching certain stages, but players earn no wage for participating in the World Cup. They are pawns in the structure, and yet they have more power and influence now than at any time previously.
How the Players Can Enforce Change
The statement from the eleven players required no press conference, no federation, no broadcaster and no friendly journalist. It went out, and it travelled. An international footballer publishes directly to an audience, and some of those audiences are larger than the broadcasters bidding for the rights and larger than FIFA's own platforms.
Their followers are their fans, and we have seen how football supporters used the same machinery to dismantle the European Super League in 48 hours: six English clubs signed on a Sunday night and were gone by Tuesday, before any lawyer or regulator got near it.
The players have a representative body in FIFPRO. Through it, they could unite behind a single statement, translated into each of their languages and posted that morning. It would reach billions of people and be front-page news everywhere. FIFPRO could handle the follow-up questions that would inevitably come, and if the players were uniting on a point of principle, the answers are simple enough. The principle is already written down. The memorandum of understanding FIFPRO signed with FIFA ahead of the World Cup described its competitions as built by generations of players and held in trust for football.
Against that storm of publicity and pressure, FIFA would have to react, and Infantino, one suspects, would find it very difficult to continue as president.
Women Have Succeeded
There are precedents for players taking action to enforce change, and, not surprisingly, women have been at the forefront. Even on this issue, Lucy Bronze has been prepared to sacrifice a final World Cup appearance, which at 34 could well be her last.
Asked whether she would be disappointed to miss major competitions because of a UEFA boycott, she backed it, saying the message players stand by is that it is for the good of the game. In October, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland play qualifying play-offs for the 2027 Women's World Cup.
In September 2022, fifteen Spanish players declared themselves unavailable over how their team was run and how they were treated. They were called disloyal and unprofessional. They held the line for a season, the federation changed, and they won the World Cup the following summer. Nigeria, Canada, Jamaica and the United States have all taken versions of the same route.
When the same men have threatened to withhold their labour, it has mostly been about pay. Cameroon held out over bonuses in 1994 and 2014. Ghana had cash flown to Brazil mid-tournament in 2014, and Nigeria refused to train. Every one of those actions worked, and every one was about the players' own money. This time the argument is about football itself, and this generation of players holds the game in trust for the next one.
International Squads Reconvene in September
International squads reconvene in September, FIFA nominations close on 18 November, and the secret ballot is held in Rabat on 18 March. It would be a surprise but not a shock if Infantino made it onto that ballot, and with a secret ballot he may well win.
Between now and then, the most valuable footballers on earth, with hundreds of millions of followers between them, will be together for the first time since the summer. They have watched the competition they all want to play in priced at $20bn by people who never thought to ask them. They know the vast majority of their followers agree that change is required. Now is the time to flex their collective muscle and make a stand.
