FairSquare, a human rights group, said on 8 July it would refer FIFA president Gianni Infantino to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Ethics Commission, the disciplinary body of the Lausanne organisation that governs the Olympic movement, over what it calls a repeated breach of political-neutrality rules1.
The referral follows seven months of FIFA silence on the group's December complaint, which challenged the FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump on political-neutrality grounds, a complaint backed by Norway's football federation and around fifty members of the European Parliament.
The immediate trigger was FIFA's reversal of a disciplinary ban on Folarin Balogun, a United States international, after a reported Trump call to Infantino; FairSquare cites the reversal as political interference in a sporting decision and folded it into its case. IOC president Kirsty Coventry said a day earlier that the IOC had received nothing.
FIFA's own ethics process is internal and effectively unappealable, so a complaint filed there can sit unanswered, as this one has since December. The IOC route puts the question to a body that can discipline Infantino as one of its own members, which is why the pressure now turns on FIFA's non-response rather than the merits of the Peace Prize award.
