Lead image for Why Fifa needs more women in leadership as Infantino faces pressure to exit .
As Fifa President Gianni Infantino fights for survival following a botched attempt to privatise the association, the pressure to take a bow has taken a gender angle, with two powerful women in the leadership calling for his exit to pave the way for their kind to take over. According to an August 5 Reuters article by Lori Ewing, this onslaught is led by Laura McAllister of Wales and Lise Klaveness of Norway.
McAllister, one of Union of European Football Association’s vice-presidents, is reported to have intimated that “it would be wonderful to see a woman elected as president of Fifa”, adding that the global body has “to do some catching up with the rest of society” but acknowledging that it is more complex than “simply bringing forward a woman” however qualified she is.
The call was supported by Fifa former president Sepp Blatter. While decrying commercialisation and politicisation of Fifa, McAllister declared that “women are less bogged down with the business of football and more focused on what the game really is”.
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This blunt call puts the spotlight on the gender breakdown in Fifa’s governance. To start with, there are only 10 Fifa member associations led by female presidents out of 211. And of the 37 members of the Fifa Council, the top executive organ, there are only eight women, constituting 26.6 per cent of the total, having risen from 13 per cent in 2024.
Progress to this level is traced to a crisis detailed by Moya Dodd and Catherine Ordway in a 2020 article in which they note the historical exclusion of women from the sport and “implicit and/or conscious biases”. Specifically, the accountability traumas of 2015 led to amendments in Fifa’s governance instruments in February 2016, providing that members’ legislative bodies “must be constituted in accordance with the principles of representative democracy and taking into account the importance of gender equality in football”.
Dodd, then a member of the Fifa executive, had led the campaign and chaired its Women’s Football Taskforce, which drafted the Women’s Football: 10 Key Development Principles. In these reforms, “six positions were reserved for women on the 37-person Fifa Council” as affirmative action.
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