Alderweireld Supports Kompany for Future FIFA President

Toby Alderweireld has made a striking choice for the future of football’s most powerful office – and it is not a career administrator.

If the former Belgium and Tottenham defender had his way, Bayern Munich boss Vincent Kompany would one day be sitting in the president’s chair at FIFA.

The 40-year-old Kompany is only at the start of his elite coaching journey with Die Roten, already boasting back-to-back Bundesliga titles in Germany after a glittering playing career that brought trophy after trophy in England and Belgium. Yet for Alderweireld, his old international captain is already thinking on a much bigger scale.

“Who would be my pick to be the next president of FIFA? Vincent Kompany,” Alderweireld told Hajper. “I never thought before that he wanted to become a manager. He always talked about going on a mission to change football but maybe it’s his mission to protect football. He would be my president, always.”

The pair shared Belgium’s back line 47 times, anchoring a golden generation that mixed defensive grit with composure on the ball. Those years together clearly left a mark. Alderweireld paints a picture of a leader who was never content just to play the game, but wanted to shape it.

Kompany’s long-held ambition, Alderweireld revealed, stretched beyond tactics and touchlines. Even when a move into management was not obvious, the centre-back could sense a man obsessed with the direction of the sport itself and how it should be governed.

That endorsement lands at a time when current FIFA president Gianni Infantino faces persistent criticism over the organisation’s priorities and the expanding calendar. Infantino rose through the ranks at UEFA as a lawyer and administrator rather than as a professional player, a background Alderweireld views as part of the problem.

“It’s very important that the FIFA president is someone who played the game and knows the game,” he said. “We've all been a fan. Then we've become a football player. We know both sides. When I was a child, I went to all the away games on the bus. We're not just people who made good money out of playing in the Premier League and Champions League.

“We’re football fans too. We played the game. We know how it is. What it is to be a player and a fan.”

That distinction matters to him. In his eyes, the sport is drifting towards spectacle at the expense of substance, decisions taken by people who do not feel the rhythm of a matchday or the weight of a tradition.

“The one thing that's very important is that the person who's doing the talking should be a football guy because look at the World Cup. A 20-minute show at half-time? That’s where you need someone who knows football to say no.”

It is a pointed example. For Alderweireld, this is where a “football person” in power draws the line, pushes back against commercial ideas that threaten to turn the game into something unrecognisable.

“The most beautiful thing about the sport is its traditions,” he said. “New things have their place too but we need to protect the traditions as well and that’s why you need football players, football people who have been around the game, to keep the businessmen in check.”

Kompany, already tasked with restoring and redefining Bayern, may one day face a far bigger question: stay on the touchline, or step into the corridors of power and try to guard the game from within?