The Missing £1.3m: FIFA Is Shooting Itself in the Foot With Its Own Article 43.13

Article 43.13 of FIFA's own statutes is written so plainly that it is hard to understand why nobody checks it more often: the president's compensation "shall be made public". Not "reported to a tax authority". Not "folded into some aggregate line". Made public. Yet the US tax filings reviewed by The Times show that £1.3 million was paid to Gianni Infantino in 2026 through FWC2026, the subsidiary running the 2026 World Cup, and that figure does not appear in the annual report. There is no rumour here. Only paperwork.

When I go back over files like this, I always do the same thing: mute the commentary and read only the numbers. Because the TV screen does not lie, only the person sitting behind it fools himself. Here, the numbers say one simple thing: FIFA declared the president's pay as £3.88m. Another £1.3m flowed through a different entity. Add them up and the real figure is close to £5.18m. The gap between those two numbers is the entire story.

To understand why this is not merely an accounting slip, look at the structure. FIFA is headquartered in Zurich, but its revenue ranks among the largest in sport. FWC2026 is a subsidiary created specifically for the 2026 World Cup in North America, an independent set of books. FIFA's Compensation Sub-Committee approves the pay; Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom and CONCACAF president Victor Montagliani, who also chairs the FWC2026 board, received no extra payment at all.

The crux is this: the £1.3m is recorded in the filings submitted to the US Internal Revenue Service, yet absent from the annual report FIFA publishes for the public. FIFA told Sky Sports that the benefits were "reported to the US authorities in line with reporting requirements". That is a correct answer, but to the wrong question. A tax authority and the public are two different audiences. Article 43.13 does not talk about a tax authority.

The political picture makes everything tenser. According to unspecified reports, Infantino is said to have lost the backing of UEFA, CONCACAF and Asia, while remaining confident of holding Africa and South America. The election is reportedly set for March. Former Tottenham and Switzerland defender Ramon Vega has emerged as a prospective candidate, but lacks the threshold of five confederations to stand. The declaration deadline is November 18. This is the terrain of a power struggle, not an accounting dispute.

Let me peel back each layer of evidence the way I still dissect a back four.

Layer one: the reporting perimeter. FIFA has run its own transparency system since 2026, when Infantino took office promising open finances. The annual report is the designated disclosure vehicle. When a payment is routed through FWC2026, a subsidiary, rather than from the parent entity, it technically stays inside the system, but outside the reader's line of sight. Anyone who has ever scrutinised a wage bill knows this: money does not vanish, money only changes position.

Layer two: currency. The payment is recorded in dollars in the IRS filings, while FIFA reports in pounds. That unit mismatch creates a genuine grey zone, enough for FIFA to build a technically plausible defence. Modern football loves data, but data does not know fear. Here, the number knows exactly where it sits; only the reader gets led astray between two currencies.

Layer three, and the sharpest: the question of "why only Infantino". Grafstrom did not receive it. Montagliani did not receive it. If this payment were a standard contractual benefit for senior leadership, why does only one man get it? That question turns a disclosure dispute into a fairness and conflict-of-interest matter. And it turns a dry technical subject into a story anyone grasps in three seconds.

Layer four: the vote structure. This is the most elegant part tactically, and it repeats in every FIFA election I have followed. Look at the map of support and you see a classic structure: the money-rich federations, UEFA and CONCACAF, stand in opposition, while Infantino leans on the vote-rich federations of Africa and South America. Money versus votes. UEFA is FIFA's single largest revenue contributor, but revenue does not cast a ballot; Africa has an overwhelming number of member federations, and numbers decide. This is a match where the audience watches the wrong pitch: they follow the drama, while the result sits in the membership register.

Layer five: the succession vacuum. I have watched enough World Cups to know: the champion is the team that corrects itself least. In FIFA politics, the survivor is whoever is hardest to replace. Vega lacks the five confederations. That threshold is not a procedural detail, it is Infantino's entire shield. With no eligible challenger, UEFA's fury is just noise. And seeing comes before believing: until a name crosses the November 18 threshold, every call for resignation remains pressure, not outcome.

Now the part where I might be wrong, which I always interrogate before concluding.

Possibility one: the £1.3m could be "other contractual benefits" such as pension, social charges and non-cash items that FIFA discloses in aggregate but does not itemise. If so, this is a dispute over granularity, not concealment. A reasonable reading, if a self-serving one.

Possibility two: routing remuneration through a subsidiary may be tax optimisation or jurisdictional structuring, not concealment. Global corporations do this daily. But an organisation that brands itself a transparency model after the 2026 scandal hardly deserves the immunity that corporations usually enjoy.

Possibility three, and the one I weigh most: the "lost backing" claim rests only on unspecified reports. The hard evidence is the money; the loss-of-office story is political inference. I must separate the two. If I merge them, I am selling a forecast as though it were a verified fact, exactly the error I scold others for.

And one more thing I learned over the years: VAR was born to fix human error, but in the end it created machine error. The Compensation Sub-Committee approved the payment. So does responsibility lie with the president as an individual, or with an entire decision-making machine? If it is the machine, then pinning it on one name is a convenient simplification, convenient for whom is another matter.

Based on my experience following elections and major matches, I do not predict Infantino will resign. I predict he will stay, and that is the problem. What matters is not how many signatures a petition gathers, but three verifiable milestones: first, whether a formal governance or ethics review is opened, or whether it ends at statements; second, whether any candidate crosses the five-confederation threshold before November 18, because if not, the March election is a formality; third, whether any image or conduct clause in FWC2026's sponsorship contracts is triggered.

If all three come up empty, this will be another scandal that drifts past, and FIFA will once again prove something familiar: its transparency system is tight enough to be written down, but loose enough to slip through. What is frightening is not the £1.3m. It is an organisation's capacity to redefine what "disclosed" means.