FairSquare has today launched a major public campaign aimed at serious reform of football’s world governing body, FIFA. The campaign, titled Reboot, begins by offering the general public the opportunity to add their names to an updated ethics complaint against the FIFA President, Gianni Infantino, for repeated and serious breaches of FIFA rules.
The campaign is being launched one week before the start of the 2026 men’s World Cup. A tournament which has once again exposed FIFA’s dysfunction and the consequences of its deeply flawed governance model. FairSquare has long argued that FIFA’s structural problems cannot be fixed from within and that external reform is critical.
“People are rightly angered and frustrated by a range of issues, from exorbitant World Cup ticket prices to FIFA’s offering of a Peace Prize to a man who then launched an illegal war on a World Cup participant” said FairSquare director Nick McGeehan.” This campaign is about harnessing that anger and redirecting it effectively to create the political pressure required to force meaningful change at FIFA.”
On 8 December 2025, FairSquare filed a complaint with the Investigatory Chamber to the FIFA Ethics Committee addressing four instances in which Gianni Infantino violated article 15 of the FIFA Code of Ethics, by his expressions of public support for the actions and policies of the US President, Donald Trump.
The Reboot campaign is encouraging people to add their name to an updated ethics complaint against the FIFA President, Gianni Infantino, for repeated and serious breaches of FIFA rules. We will submit the complaint after the 2026 men’s World Cup in what we hope will be the largest single complaint FIFA will ever have received about the conduct of its senior officials. The complaint has been backed by The Norwegian Football Federation and its president, Lisa Klaveness, who have written to FIFA and called on them to ensure the complaint is handled properly and that the Ethics Committee’s decision is made public.
This complaint will be the first intervention in a long-term campaign aimed at FIFA reform. ‘Reboot’ will avail of the the knowledge, experience and commitment of an Advisory Board whose members come from a diversity of backgrounds and will provide advice, support and guidance to FairSquare.
Reboot aims to: uncover hard evidence that links misgovernance to a wide range of serious issues, put that evidence in front of the policymakers who have the power to impose structural reforms on an organisation like FIFA; and put pressure on these policymakers by generating widespread support, including from the global football community, for reform.
A ‘rebooted’ FIFA would have a radically different structure and would operate under basic principles of good governance for the first time in its history:
- The billions of dollars it distributes would be properly audited, and development money would go to the member associations that need it the most.
- Its commercial operations would be entirely separate from its regulatory and governance functions to eliminate gross conflicts of interest.
- It would be open and transparent about its affairs, properly accountable to its members and the football community, and answerable to the figures in the media that have exposed wrongdoing over decades.
Reboot advisory board
The Reboot campaign will avail of the knowledge, experience and commitment of an Advisory Board whose members come from a diversity of backgrounds and will provide advice, support and guidance to FairSquare.
David Goldblatt is a sociologist, a prolific and award-winning football writer, and a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College, Los Angeles. In 2015 he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for “The Game of Our Lives:The Meaning and Making of English Football“, and the publication of his 2025 book “Injury Time: Football in a state of emergency” saw him described as “possibly the best football historian there has ever been”.
Jules Boykoff is a former professional and Olympic soccer player. He is a professor at Pacific University Oregon where he writes on a multitude of topics and teaches on politics and dissent. He is an international expert in sports politics and is the author of two books on the politics of soccer— “Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine” and his recent memoir “Kicking“.
Keith Look Loy is a former national youth footballer from Trinidad and Tobago. He served as the FIFA Development Officer for CONCACAF in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and in 2019 he was part of a team that took control of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association, when their efforts to rectify what they saw as financial mismanagement resulted in FIFA deposing them and replacing them with a FIFA-run “normalisation committee”. He is a regular commentator on football and politics.
Niamh O’Mahony served on the board of fan-owned Cork City between 2010 and 2014, helped establish the Irish Supporters Network (ISN), and was one of two supporter representatives to the Council of the Football Association of Ireland. Her professional career spans the NGO, ecommerce, tech, retail, and media sectors and has a strong background in organisational governance and the delivery of large-scale transformation projects. She is a registered Good Governance in Sport Expert with the European Commission.
Bonita Mersiades is a lifelong football fan, former amateur player, and longstanding grassroots volunteer in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane and Townsville. She is one of the most well-known and significant FIFA whistleblowers. As detailed in her book “Whatever It Takes”, she lifted the lid on corruption and governance issues and mismanagement within world football administration years before the arrests of senior FIFA officials in Switzerland in May 2015. She has worked professionally in football with a domestic league club, state federation, as team manager of the Socceroos and as a senior executive with Football Australia, prior to which she was a senior executive in government in Canberra.
Steff Ndei is a writer and analyst from Kenya, whose work sits at the intersection of sport and geopolitics in Africa. She is a phd candidate at Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh, where her thesis examines how journalistic research is conducted in Kenya. Her analysis of the governance problems afflicting African football has appeared in Play the Game, Nairobi Law Monthly, and Debunk, and Medium. Her essay, “Football Bloody Hell“, was published in the Hear Us Roar anthology of emerging women football writers.
Musa Okwonga is an award-winning author, broadcaster, poet, musician, and a co-host of the Stadio football podcast. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Oxford, he has written eight books. His first book, “A Cultured Left Foot”, was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and his most recent book, “Striking Out” – co-authored with the English football legend Ian Wright – won the 2022 Sunday Times Children’s Sports Book of the Year Award.
FairSquare’s work on sport
We have published extensive research on human rights and sports governance, alongside analysis on how sports governance institutions can better mitigate rights risks. These include the following.
Our June 2023 report “Easy Cities to Buy” analysed and documented harms linked to state ownership of football clubs. The report details how political leaders in Manchester and Newcastle have not only declined multiple opportunities to use their positions of influence to express criticism of the authoritarian states owning clubs in their respective cities, but helped them build ‘soft power enclaves’.
In September 2024, we co-published a policy brief with Dr Jan Zglinski making the case for an enhanced role for the European Union in the reform of sports governance. The brief, “Laws for the Games”, starts from the position that greater public control of sport is needed, with serious and systematic misgovernance at FIFA providing a particular case in point.
In October 2024, we led efforts that challenged a flawed human rights assessment of Saudi Arabia’s FIFA 2034 World Cup bid by AS&H Clifford Chance – part of the global partnership of London-based law firm Clifford Chance, for their production of an independent human rights context assessment which contained no substantive discussion of extensive and relevant abuses in Saudi Arabia. In May 2025 our report “Underlying Causes” concluded that the surge of construction associated with projects such as NEOM and the 2034 men’s World Cup will in all likelihood lead to thousands of unexplained deaths of low-paid foreign workers in the country.
Our 2024 report “Substitute” explained how serious structural flaws within FIFA preclude it from fulfilling its stated objectives of developing the game and have resulted in the organisation contributing to a wide range of social harms, not least very serious and systematic human rights abuses.
In June 2025, we coordinated a letter from a group of leading scholars to FIFA’s Governance Audit and Compliance Committee, in relation to the committee’s examination of a complaint relating to the holding of matches in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We wrote a report in July 2024 detailing the Israel Football Association’s multiple violations of FIFA’s statutory rules.
In July 2025, we coordinated a letter from 90 US-based civil society organisations, including the ACLU, to FIFA expressing “deep concern” to FIFA about immigration policies ahead of the 2026 World Cup. The letter warned FIFA that it risks becoming a “public relations tool to whitewash the reputation of an increasingly authoritarian government”.
In April 2026, made a formal submission to the UK government requesting that they investigate the links between Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, in a complaint that details the central role of United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in fuelling the Sudanese civil war, and the evidence that points to Sheikh Mansour having played a central role in the UAE’s dealings with the RSF.
In May 2026, our report ‘Football Ignites the World’ co-published with climate justice organisations, argued that FIFA’s commercial deal with Saudi Aramco constitutes arguably the most dangerous example of fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship the world has ever seen. We coordinate letters from a coalition of climate and human rights organisations, supported by professional athletes, expressing “grave concerns” that Aramco’s sponsorships risk undermining human rights law, global climate goals and the sports’ own sustainability commitments.
