‘The emperor is naked’: UEFA’s Ceferin takes aim at FIFA boss Infantino

UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin said “the emperor is naked” in a blistering attack on FIFA President Gianni Infantino and his failed plan to sell a stake ⁠in the governing body’s commercial rights to private investors.

Addressing the European Football Clubs General Assembly in Copenhagen on Tuesday, Ceferin invoked Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes as he criticised the language FIFA had used to defend Infantino’s ⁠shelved FIFA Forward Enterprise project.

“Almost 200 years ago, he [Andersen] wrote The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Ceferin said.

“We all know the story. An emperor is persuaded that he is wearing magnificent clothes, clothes which he is told only the foolish or unfit cannot see.

“His court goes along with it until a child simply says aloud what everybody can see. The ‌emperor is naked.”

Infantino’s FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal would have created a FIFA-controlled commercial subsidiary holding rights to competitions including the men’s and women’s World Cups and Club World Cup and allowed private investors to acquire up to 20 percent of the entity.

Infantino had promoted the proposal as a way to generate more money for “football development” and said it was subject to “democratic consultation” with FIFA’s 211 member associations before it was abandoned following widespread opposition.

Ceferin directly challenged that language.

“Perhaps the moral of ⁠the story is convenient words cannot change uncomfortable realities,” he said.

“Now world football ⁠has heard some very convenient words recently. ‘Development’, ‘democratisation’, ‘consultation’, words used in fact to describe the opposite.

“Selling part of football’s future does not become development because you say it’s ‘development’.

“Putting a fait accompli in front of national associations does not mean democratisation, even ⁠if you call it ‘democratisation’. However big the cheque is.

“And secrecy does not become consultation because you call it ‘consultation’.”

Ceferin then asked club executives to imagine one ⁠of their senior officials secretly negotiating away control of their “crown jewels” without ⁠the knowledge of their board, players or supporters, with the deal almost completed by the time they learned of it.

“What would your board do?” he asked.

He went on to refer to a hypothetical situation in which the same person created an award for a politician and, ‌soon afterwards, the politician made a phone call after which “the rules are not the same any more.”

“How many times would this have to happen at your clubs before the world says ‘enough’?” Ceferin said.

“Well, my friends, I think ‌it’s ‌time to say enough.”

He ended the passage by accusing unnamed decision-makers of bending rules when they became inconvenient, excluding those who were supposed to have a say and treating football’s future as “just another bargaining chip.”