Samuel Eto'o, the president of the Cameroonian Football Federation, has defended Gianni Infantino against the campaign to remove him from the FIFA presidency. "I don't think that President Gianni Infantino has done anything wrong," he told CNN on Monday, as reported by Al Jazeera.
He attributed the criticism to positioning ahead of next year's FIFA election.
We have run the other side twice, so here is this one
We reported six Nordic associations withdrawing confidence in Infantino and UEFA's president telling him to go. Eto'o's argument is the counterweight, and it deserves to be set out at its strongest rather than summarized as loyalty.
His case is that Infantino expanded the World Cup so that smaller nations can qualify, and directed development money to African federations. On that reading, the president is being attacked by the confederations that lost relative influence when the tournament grew, and defended by those that gained. "He has helped our continent," Eto'o said, urging African nations to acknowledge it.
That is not a trivial argument. Expansion genuinely changed who gets to compete, and the countries that benefited are not obliged to weigh it the same way as the countries that did not.
Where it is weaker
The objection Eto'o is answering is not primarily about World Cup expansion. It is about a proposal to bring private investment into FIFA tournaments, which collapsed after UEFA and other confederations withdrew support. Development funding and competition slots do not address what that money would have bought or who would have controlled it.
Reading the criticism as electioneering also works both ways. If opposition can be discounted as positioning before a vote, so can support.
The map of the dispute
The Confederation of African Football unanimously reaffirmed its backing for Infantino earlier this month. UEFA has moved the other way. A separate group of former players, including French World Cup winners and Didier Drogba, has called for a change of leadership, saying FIFA has drifted from its values.
Drogba's presence in that group matters to Eto'o's framing, because it shows the split is not cleanly continental.
What we could not establish
We could not establish the full text of Eto'o's interview, the identities of the other former players in the group he was answering, the terms of the private investment proposal, or whether Infantino will stand in March. We verified this account from a single publication.
