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≡ FIFPRO vs. FIFA HEATS UP ≡
It’s nasty now. The player union FIFPRO, working with 72 players unions worldwide, and the worldwide governing body FIFA are now in an open fight, hurling insults in competing interviews and news releases.
● On Wednesday, FIFPRO head Sergio Marchi (ARG) told The Athletic in a striking interview:
“The biggest obstacle to FIFPro today is the autocracy of FIFA’s president. [Gianni] Infantino lives in his own world, the only thing that matters to him are these grand spectacles.”
Marchi has been campaigning for better defined player rest periods between club play, national team matches and exhibitions and most recently, the expanded FIFA Club World Cup. Multiple matches were played in hot conditions in outdoor stadiums, with Marchi complaining:
“It’s perverse to schedule matches at noon in that kind of heat. What are they waiting for? A tragedy? A collapse on the field?”
In a FIFPRO statement, Marchi added:
“We’re in the 21st century and thousands of players still go unpaid. Meanwhile, FIFA celebrates record ticket sales. Let them have their party, but the people who built the game should be paid too.
“Football is deeply inequitable. It’s unjust. And we’re in a profession that ends at 35, with a whole life still ahead.
“It was announced that tickets for the World Cup are now going on sale, millions will surely be sold, according to the [FIFA] president, who says it will generate over three billion dollars in revenue. And it’s incredible. Yet I’ll say it again: There are still footballers who haven’t been paid their salaries for two, three, even four years.
“Most of the time players are afraid speaking up could hurt their careers. But it’s up to us, their representatives, to speak for them.”
● On Friday, FIFPRO held a meeting with 58 player unions in Amsterdam (NED) and added a statement that included:
“FIFPRO expressed its deepening concern over the way FIFA is currently managing global football.
“At the same time, FIFPRO reaffirmed its unwavering commitment to protecting the rights of men and women players – rights which are being seriously undermined by commercial policies imposed by its autocratic system of governance.
“The overloaded match calendar, the lack of adequate physical and mental recovery periods, extreme playing conditions, the absence of meaningful dialogue, and the ongoing disregard for players’ social rights have regrettably become pillars of FIFA’s business model; this is a model that puts the health of players at risk and sidelines those at the heart of the game.”
FIFA was hardly silent, responding with an exceedingly blunt statement, that included:
● “FIFA is extremely disappointed by the increasingly divisive and contradictory tone adopted by FIFPRO leadership as this approach clearly shows that rather than engaging in constructive dialogue, FIFPRO has chosen to pursue a path of public confrontation driven by artificial PR battles – which have nothing to do with protecting the welfare of professional players but rather aim to preserve their own personal positions and interests.”
● “On Saturday, 12 July 2025, following a protracted period of unsuccessful efforts to bring FIFPRO to the table in an environment of non-hostility and respectful, progressive dialogue, FIFA convened with multiple player unions in New York, United States, to announce and reaffirm concrete, progressive measures designed specifically to protect the physical and mental wellbeing of players worldwide.”
Among the announced changes are to be a minimum of 72 hours between matches and a minimum, 21-day rest period between seasons.
● “These concrete measures go beyond what FIFPRO has been pretending to be asking for, and FIFA is extremely surprised by their leadership’s reaction.
“Instead of welcoming these unprecedented announcements that benefit players all around the world, FIFPRO has responded with a series of personal and disrespectful attacks.
“This approach reveals a lot about FIFPRO priorities. It suggests that their leadership does not really care about the players, but rather about internal political fights and their image. FIFA’s proposed reforms are about impacting genuine change to support players and are far more important than preserving FIFPRO’s perceived image.”
At the end, the statement challenged FIFPRO:
“FIFA invites FIFPRO to return to the negotiating table, once they have stopped their blackmail and withdrawn their complaints, and once they have published their statutes, their full financial reports (including all their sources of income, the detailed intellectual property rights of the players they claim to own, and the funding one of their regional divisions receives from some football organisations), and the full list of individual members they claim to represent.”
Observed: Both sides are dug in and frustrated, with the conditions at the Club World Cup a flash point for multiple players, clubs and leagues which had issues with FIFA’s expansion of the tournament.
FIFPRO filed a claim against FIFA related to the expanded Club World Cup in June 2024, “asking the Brussels Court of Commerce to refer the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) with four questions for a preliminary ruling.”
That filing, based on the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, is still pending and there might not be any movement until that case moves forward or is stopped.
FIFA’s meeting with other player groups outside of FIFPRO and the criticism of the conditions of the Club World Cup in the U.S. are pressure points for the federation, which weathered the human-rights angst with the Qatar World Cup in 2022, but has since handed the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, reigniting the debate.
No calm seas in sight.
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