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Over 100,000 people have signed a mass ethics complaint against FIFA President Gianni Infantino, making it one of the largest organized protests against a sitting leader of global sport’s most powerful governing body. The campaign, branded “Reboot FIFA,” accuses Infantino of breaching FIFA’s own political neutrality rules through a series of moves that read less like sports governance and more like a political operation.
The complaint, orchestrated by human rights NGO FairSquare, was originally filed with FIFA’s Ethics Committee back in December 2025. It went public in June 2026, timed to build maximum pressure ahead of the 2026 men’s World Cup.
The Trump connection
At the heart of the complaint is Infantino’s relationship with US President Donald Trump. The FIFA president lobbied for Trump to receive a Nobel Peace Prize in October 2025. Then came the FIFA Peace Prize. In December 2025, Infantino awarded the inaugural honor to Trump, a decision that critics say turned FIFA into a vehicle for political endorsement rather than an impartial steward of the world’s most popular sport.
FIFA’s own statutes require the organization to maintain political neutrality. The complaint argues that Infantino’s actions constituted a direct violation of the rules he’s supposed to uphold.
The FFE fiasco
Infantino compounded his problems with the FIFA Forward Enterprise, a proposal announced on July 28, 2026, that would have commercialized World Cup rights through a private stake sale. The price tag: approximately $4.2 billion for a 20% stake. UEFA, CONCACAF, and the AFC pushed back hard, forcing Infantino to withdraw the proposal entirely.
The fallout didn’t end with the retraction. On August 27, 2026, UEFA requested documents from FIFA entities to support a potential criminal complaint in Switzerland. The allegation: mismanagement.
Growing institutional support
The Norwegian Football Federation sent a formal letter on June 1, 2026, supporting the ethics complaint and urging accountability from within FIFA’s own membership structure. Then came the European Parliament. Fifty MEPs backed the complaint on June 29, 2026, adding political legitimacy from one of the world’s largest democratic institutions.
The complaint’s architects at FairSquare appear to be playing a long game. Their stated goal is to create enough pressure that FIFA’s Ethics Committee feels compelled to act after the World Cup concludes.
What comes next
The 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the US, Mexico, and Canada, arrives against a backdrop of six-figure protest signatures, confederations exploring criminal complaints, and parliamentarians questioning the organization’s ethical foundations.
The UEFA discovery request is arguably the more consequential development. Ethics complaints within FIFA can be slow-walked or quietly shelved. A Swiss criminal investigation, backed by documentary evidence extracted through US courts, is a different animal entirely. Switzerland is where FIFA is headquartered, and Swiss authorities have shown willingness to pursue FIFA-related cases in the past.
For Infantino, the convergence of the Reboot FIFA campaign, the FFE backlash, and UEFA’s legal escalation represents the most serious challenge to his presidency since he took office in 2016. He won re-election unopposed in 2023 — but that was before he handed a peace prize to a sitting US president and tried to sell a fifth of the World Cup to private investors in the same eighteen-month stretch.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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