Kevin Lamour Leaves FIFA Amid Controversy
Kevin Lamour has left FIFA. The timing could hardly be more explosive.
Football’s world governing body confirmed late on Monday that its chief operating officer had departed on 17 August 2026, just weeks after he publicly attacked Gianni Infantino’s controversial plan to sell a stake in FIFA’s commercial rights.
“FIFA can confirm that the working relationship between FIFA and Kevin Lamour as FIFA’s Chief Operating Officer has ended on 17 August 2026,” a spokesperson said. “FIFA thanks Kevin for his two years of service and wishes him the best of luck for the future. No further comment will be made on the matter.”
No explanation. No detail. Just a clean break on paper, in a moment when almost nothing around Infantino feels clean or simple.
A close ally turned critic
Lamour was no outsider. The French executive joined FIFA’s senior leadership in November 2024 and had previously been part of the inner circle that helped drive Infantino’s successful bid for the presidency in 2016.
Then he turned his fire on the president’s flagship commercial project.
Last month, Lamour went public with his opposition to Infantino’s proposal to create a $20bn subsidiary and sell up to a 20 percent stake to private equity investors, a deal designed to raise $4.2bn. He said FIFA staff had been “deceived” over the plan and branded it “the project of one person”.
“Our mission … is to serve football, not to serve the personal interests of a person who, unfortunately, believes he embodies FIFA when he is supposed to be at its service,” Lamour said.
The words landed like a direct challenge to Infantino’s authority at the very top of the organisation.
They did not come in isolation. Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino and former U.S. Soccer president, had already resigned in protest, calling the proposal “a bad deal for football”. Infantino pulled the plan later the same day, but the damage has lingered.
The revolt inside Zurich has not gone away just because the document was shelved.
A presidency under siege
Infantino’s grip on power once looked unshakeable. His bid for a fourth term as FIFA president in March next year was widely seen as a formality.
It no longer is.
The powerful European confederation UEFA, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and CONCACAF, which oversees the game in North and Central America and the Caribbean, now stand in open opposition to the 56-year-old Swiss official. He still has the backing of the African and South American confederations, but the fault lines are clear and deep.
Off the pitch, the pressure is intensifying.
On Monday, human rights in sport organisation FairSquare confirmed it had written to FIFA’s Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee (GACC), urging that Infantino be ruled ineligible to seek another term.
FairSquare director Nicholas McGeehan told Reuters that the complaint sets out “clear evidence” of a “clear breach of the rules” on term limits.
“The rules state clearly that three presidential terms is the maximum allowed. FIFA can’t simply circumvent this rule – which serves as a check on presidential power – by saying that his first term doesn’t count,” McGeehan said.
FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The term-limit fault line
At the heart of the legal fight is a technical, but crucial, argument.
FIFA presidents are limited to three terms. Infantino, though, successfully argued in 2022 that his first spell in office, from 2016 to 2019, should not count because it completed an interrupted mandate after Sepp Blatter’s resignation amid a corruption scandal. He was first elected at an Extraordinary Congress, then re-elected unopposed in 2019 and 2023.
FairSquare’s letter, drafted with the help of Miguel Maduro, the former head of FIFA’s independent Governance and Review Committee, insists that FIFA cannot simply bend its own rules to suit the man in charge.
“The principle of term limits was a fundamental aspect of the 2016 reform aimed at limiting power and the rule introduced is clear: no FIFA President can serve more than three terms of office,” Maduro said in a statement.
“Trying to carve out an exception to such a rule for Mr Infantino reveals both a resistance to the principle of term limits and how some at FIFA conceive of rules not as rules but as obstacles to be circumvented.”
The language is stark. So is the implication: if FIFA ignores its own statutes here, what stands in the way of any future president doing the same?
Calls for Infantino to step aside
The institutional pushback is not confined to FairSquare’s legal arguments.
Last week, UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF jointly called for an independent review of Infantino’s conduct. Sources with knowledge of the situation said the three confederations saw the letter as a potential exit ramp, a way for Infantino to walk away with his dignity intact rather than face a bruising election fight and possible disqualification.
The tension reaches beyond football’s internal politics. FairSquare recently took a separate complaint to the International Olympic Committee, accusing Infantino of breaching the IOC’s rules on political neutrality through his support for United States President Donald Trump. That case was rejected last month. Infantino has been an IOC member since 2020.
Still, the pattern is clear: the FIFA president is under scrutiny on multiple fronts, at the very moment he is trying to extend his reign.
A battle for FIFA’s future
Lamour’s exit now slots into a broader story: a governing body wrestling with its own power structures, its own rules, and its own sense of what “serving football” actually means.
A key insider who helped Infantino into office has gone, shortly after accusing him of treating FIFA as a personal project. A major commercial play has been abandoned in the face of internal revolt. Three heavyweight confederations are pushing back. Human rights campaigners and governance experts are challenging the president’s right even to stand again.
The next months will decide whether Infantino rides out the storm or becomes the man who tested FIFA’s reforms to breaking point.
