Gianni Infantino Urged to Skip Youth Tournament Amid Governance Crisis

Gianni Infantino has been urged to stay away from a youth tournament in the Dominican Republic this weekend, as the political storm around his leadership of Fifa spills onto the touchline.

Concacaf president Victor Montagliani, who also serves as a Fifa vice-president, has written to Infantino asking him to reconsider attending the CFU Under-14 Series, warning that the visit would drag a development event for children into the heart of a governance crisis.

‘In the name of football’

In a letter seen by the BBC, Montagliani directly referenced the “governance crisis surrounding Fifa” and made it clear he believes Infantino’s presence would distort the occasion.

He told the Fifa president that the media spotlight on the controversy around him would “unfortunately significantly take away from the technical nature of the CFU youth competition” and said his attendance would “unfortunately undermine the technical nature of this important youth development activity”.

Montagliani closed his appeal with a pointed line: he was asking, “in the name of football”, for Infantino not to come.

The Canadian’s intervention underlines how far the fallout from Infantino’s Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal has spread, and how it now threatens to overshadow even the most basic development tournaments the organisation helps fund.

Welcome on the ground, pressure at the top

Infantino had been invited to the Dominican Republic as a guest of the host nation, with the invitation understood to have been issued before the FFE plan exploded into public view and placed his position under serious pressure.

On arrival in the Caribbean, he was warmly received. Locally, the optics were very different to the global political picture.

“We deeply appreciate your visit to the Dominican Republic, without doubt that your presence in our country puts us on the international football radar and opens us great prospects for growth and development of Dominican football,” said the country’s minister of sports and recreation, Kelvin Cruz, in a statement.

The CFU Under-14 Series is one of several projects bankrolled by Fifa’s Forward programme, money that has become central to development work across smaller associations. That financial pipeline has long been one of Infantino’s strongest arguments for his leadership.

Yet the same president now stands accused by parts of the game of endangering trust at the very top.

FFE backlash and a fractured alliance

Infantino’s now-abandoned Fifa Forward Enterprise proposal, which sought to sell off stakes in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors, has triggered a wave of anger across the sport’s political landscape.

The plan has been scrapped, but the damage lingers.

A number of national associations have withdrawn their backing for the Swiss-Italian administrator. In a stinging open letter, Uefa, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation accused him of breaking trust “through deception”, a phrase that cut through years of carefully managed diplomacy.

The dismissal of senior Fifa executive Kevin Lamour, after he criticised Infantino, has only sharpened concerns over how dissent is handled within the organisation. That decision has been widely criticised and folded into a broader debate about governance, transparency and power at Fifa headquarters.

Support that still matters

For all the backlash, Infantino is far from isolated.

He retains the crucial support of Conmebol, South America’s governing body, and Caf, which represents African football. Several Concacaf nations have also publicly backed him to continue into a fourth term as Fifa president, highlighting a deep split between confederations and even within them.

So a youth tournament in the Caribbean, designed to showcase emerging talent and funded by Fifa’s development arm, now sits at the intersection of that divide.

Montagliani wants the focus to stay on the children and the football. Infantino, still welcomed by some and rejected by others, must decide whether stepping back from one small stage might help him hold on to the biggest one of all.