28JUL

Tebas: FIFA rotten from the root

2 min read

09:39UTC

Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his judgement, concluded. Barely a word of it crossed into English.

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Key takeaway

Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so he used the only instrument left to him.

Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, said on 21 July that FIFA's system "está podrido desde la raíz" (rotten from the root) and that Gianni Infantino's time, in his judgement, "se ha acabado" (has concluded) ¹. Tebas has run Spain's top division since 2013 and has spent much of that time in open conflict with FIFA over the international calendar, club competition scheduling and the expansion of FIFA's own tournaments, so the hostility is not new. The bluntness of the second remark is.

The quotes were reported in matching wording by Proceso, Clarosports, LatinUS and El Tiempo on the same day, which makes them a real, corroborated, on-the-record set of remarks rather than one outlet's paraphrase. They have barely crossed into English-language coverage at all.

The timing places them inside an institutional sequence rather than outside one. Three days earlier the International Olympic Committee declined jurisdiction over FairSquare's ethics complaint against Infantino , leaving the complaint without an external forum and returning the question to FIFA's own Ethics Committee, a body Infantino's administration appoints. Tebas holds no vote in FIFA's congress and no standing in its ethics process. A league president criticising the world governing body has exactly one instrument available, which is a microphone.

That is why the remarks are worth logging even though they change nothing procedurally. The formal routes for challenging a FIFA president have now been tried and closed within a single week. What is left is the president of one of the two richest leagues in Europe saying the quiet part in Spanish, to an audience that will hear it, in a language the English-speaking football press mostly did not translate.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Javier Tebas runs La Liga, Spain's top football league. On 21 July he said FIFA, football's global governing body, is 'rotten from the root' and that its president, Gianni Infantino, should now step aside. This is not a new fight. Domestic leagues like La Liga have clashed with FIFA before over FIFA expanding its own tournaments and calendar, which squeezes the time and revenue available to national leagues. Tebas's comments are the latest, sharper round of that same long-running argument about who controls football's calendar and money.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

FIFA occupies a dual role that domestic leagues have repeatedly flagged as a structural conflict: it is simultaneously the regulator that sets the international match calendar member federations must follow, and the commercial operator that profits from expanding its own tournaments, the World Cup and an enlarged Club World Cup among them, at the direct expense of the league calendar space Tebas's La Liga depends on.

Tebas's remarks also follow closely on the IOC Ethics Commission's rejection, on jurisdictional grounds, of a separate ethics complaint against Infantino , a decision that left no external body positioned to rule on FIFA's own conduct, a governance gap domestic league critics like Tebas have used before to argue FIFA answers to no one but itself.

What could happen next?

Precedent
Tebas's public call for Infantino to step down adds a senior domestic-league voice to existing governance criticism of FIFA, though it carries no formal mechanism to remove Infantino.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from Mexico

Mexico

Primary parallel: Tebas's attack echoes the 2021-22 dispute over FIFA's proposed biennial World Cup, when European Leagues, the umbrella body representing domestic competitions including La Liga, and the European Club Association publicly opposed Gianni Infantino's plan on the same grounds Tebas now raises, that FIFA expands its own calendar and commercial footprint without accounting for the domestic leagues that supply its players and absorb the resulting fixture congestion.

Counter-parallel: UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin took a more conciliatory public line during that same 2021-22 dispute, negotiating directly with Infantino over calendar concessions rather than calling for his removal, showing domestic and continental bodies have not always converged on Tebas's confrontational approach to the same underlying grievance.

Sources:Proceso

Mentions:LaLiga →Gianni Infantino →FIFA →International Olympic Committee →FairSquare →Aleksander Ceferin →Spain →World Cup →UEFA →

First Reported In

Update #49 · Nine World Cup ledgers, none of them agree

Proceso· 28 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

IOC rejects Infantino complaint on jurisdiction

Tebas's remarks follow the IOC's rejection of jurisdiction over the FairSquare ethics complaint against Infantino three days earlier.

Occurred 24 Jul 2026

Read story →

This Event

Tebas: FIFA rotten from the root

The head of Spain's top league has said in public what the formal ethics routes have so far failed to test, and the English-language football press has largely not carried it.

Different Perspectives

French Football Federation

The FFF called an 11:00 CEST press conference for 28 July, at its Paris headquarters, following an extraordinary executive committee meeting, at which Zinedine Zidane is expected to be presented as head coach succeeding Didier Deschamps. As of this writing no communique confirms the appointment, contract length or start date.

Morocco

Morocco is pushing for the 2030 final at its Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, a planned 115,000-seat venue that would be the world's largest football stadium on completion. The venue is contested by a Spanish petition for the Santiago Bernabeu, and FIFA has fixed neither the venue nor the tournament's proposed 64-team format.

FIFA

FIFA's first tournament report, published 27 July, itemises nearly 300,000 accredited personnel, 73,700 security staff and 300,000 square metres of custom-grown turf, with no revenue or cost figure attached. As a Swiss association answering to its own Congress rather than a treasury, FIFA has followed the same operational-before-financial sequence it used after Qatar 2022.

Javier Tebas / La Liga

La Liga president Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his words, concluded. Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so days after the IOC declined jurisdiction over a separate ethics complaint, he used the only instrument he has.

Mexico City government

Head of government Clara Brugada presented a closing report on 22 July crediting the tournament with 44 billion pesos of economic activity, 2,000-plus accelerated public works and 100,000 formal jobs in June alone. The city has not published the method behind that figure, and three other Mexican bodies count the same five weeks differently.

Town of Foxborough

Foxborough answered Kraft Group's June lawsuit on 7 July with a 61-page counterclaim, calling the stadium's owners 'a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations' trying to shift its $7.8 million security bill onto taxpayers. The town says its licensing power and its billing power run through the same board, and it wants the court to award its own costs too.