Ceferin and the Trust That Has Not Returned: When World Football's Dressing Room Stays Silent

In São Paulo, I once stood outside a youth team's dressing room on the morning they were cut from a tournament. Nobody spoke. One player tied his laces, untied them, tied them again. The only sound in the room was athletic tape being torn. When the dressing room goes quiet, I hear the board turning.

On Wednesday morning, at the Portugal Football Summit, I heard that same silence again — except this time it came from a forum with cameras, interpreters and rows of seats labelled with the names of member associations. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin stepped to the podium and repeated the line he has carried for years: "Football is not for sale." The part worth underlining came afterwards, when he spoke of the three pillars of trust: unity, transparency, and governance that serves the many.

"Not everyone places the game above their own ambitions," Ceferin said. He did not name FIFA. He did not name Gianni Infantino. But everyone in the hall understood who and what he meant.

Context: twenty percent, fifty-five associations, and a line drawn in public

After the 2026 World Cup, FIFA proposed selling a 20% stake in its commercial rights — a package covering the World Cup itself — to private investors. In the logic of sports business, the idea has precedent: cash first, shared control later. But it touched the one thing European football treats as untouchable: the right of member associations to decide the fate of the biggest asset they built together over nearly a century.

The response came fast and in formation. UEFA led. The Asian Football Confederation and Concacaf followed. UEFA's 55 member associations — a bloc capable of paralysing any vote inside the FIFA system — warned they would not take part in FIFA competitions if the plan went ahead. It was a line rarely drawn in public.

In July, FIFA withdrew the proposal. The opposition recorded a victory on paper.

Ceferin does not read it that way. "The project that shattered the unity of world football may be abolished, but the trust it broke has not returned, and repairing it is our work now."

The story has since shifted to a harder question: how FIFA makes its biggest decisions.

The core: the fight has moved inside the procedure

On Monday, Infantino wrote to FIFA's 211 member associations and to members of its Council, setting out possible changes in response to the criticism — including how major projects are handled. He said he would put the idea to the FIFA Council rather than announcing a review himself. The Council meets again on October 15.

The detail worth studying is structural, not rhetorical. Previously, a project worth billions could travel from idea to negotiating table to public announcement without a single mandatory consultation step. After July, every next step must pass through the Council — where every vote leaves a trace, and where a member in the back row can still ask for a dissent to be minuted.

Based on my experience covering matches and training sessions across South America over many years, this is the kind of change only insiders feel. On the pitch, you see goals. In the meeting room, you see a line in the minutes. But that line decides who sits at the next table.

Alongside this, a concrete demand has surfaced in recent weeks: UEFA and Concacaf have called on Infantino to make $10 million payments to every FIFA member association. Read quickly, it is a financial proposal. Read closely, it is a test of legitimacy — if football's money belongs to the associations, then distributing it must be their decision, not that of a small group in Zurich.

In Brazil, where I live and work, this question is anything but abstract. Brazilian clubs build their budgets on broadcast rights and distributions from continental confederations. If 20% of World Cup commercial rights belong to an investment fund, that percentage must be paid out as dividends — and the dividends have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the share of the member associations themselves. It is a subtraction nobody wants to say out loud.

Ceferin compressed it into one sentence: "The game will remain safe if those who govern it remember whom they govern it for."

The counterintuitive angle: withdrawing a proposal is the easiest act of all

In many newsrooms, July's story was closed with a tidy headline: FIFA lost, Europe won.

I do not read it that way.

Withdrawing a proposal is the cheapest decision an organisation can make when it is cornered. It requires no structural change, no amendment to the statutes, no resignation, no one accepting responsibility. It requires only an announcement. Meanwhile the most expensive thing — the decision-making process — stays exactly where it was.

The blind spot sits here: outside observers measure power by which proposals are alive and which are dead. Insiders measure power with a different question — once the proposal is dead, who gets to redefine the rules.

The Council meeting on October 15 will answer part of it. If a procedural review starts there, with mandatory consultation steps attached, then July was a genuine turning point. If it ends with opinions noted and filed away, then July was merely half-time.

I once wrote about a striker cut at the last moment before the 2026 World Cup. He packed his bags in silence and complained to no one. I kept that detail in a private notebook for weeks, waiting for the team's wound to settle before publishing. Summer makes no promises; it only leaves suitcases lined up by the dressing-room door. And a suitcase packed and taken away never means anyone has forgotten why it was there.

The best servant is the forgotten one — but players never forget. In this story, that servant is the hundreds of small member associations, the ones with no seat in closed meetings yet whose signatures decide the final ballot.

What to watch

In my trade, the biggest changes rarely arrive with the sound of a gavel. They arrive with a light knock on a door, a question asked at the right moment, a name written into the minutes that no one later erases. For three months without the sound of studs, I practise listening to a team's heartbeat with a different ear.

On October 15, when the FIFA Council sits, what I want to know is not how many proposals pass. I want to know who gets to put the first item on the table — and whether, this time, the person in the back row will be heard.