Cafu, Roberto Carlos and Zanetti just picked a side in the FIFA war
There is a civil war going on inside football right now, and the combatants are not clubs or countries. They're legends. Retired, garlanded, World-Cup-winning legends, and they have split down the middle like a group chat that discovered politics.
On one side, as of this week: Cafu and Roberto Carlos — two men with a 1994 and 2002 World Cup between them — plus Inter icon and current club vice-president Javier Zanetti, all lining up in public support of FIFA president Gianni Infantino. Their pitch is essentially that Infantino gave players a seat at the table that never existed before.
"Players have been given a voice and a place in our sport through participation in committees, projects and working groups. Our opinions are heard."
That's the crux of the South American legends' statement, and Brazilian midfielder Felipe Melo backed the sentiment too, arguing that players and former players finally have a real say in football's decisions. Warm, collegial, on-message. Everyone's a stakeholder now.
So what's everyone actually fighting about?
The backdrop is not warm and collegial at all. Infantino, president since February 2016, floated a plan to sell stakes in the World Cup's commercial rights to private investors. The reaction was so severe he ultimately withdrew it — but the withdrawal didn't put out the fire.
Because this is where the other side of the legend divide comes in. Before the South Americans spoke up, their European counterparts had already broken cover, and they were not sending compliments.
The other trench
French World Cup winners Emmanuel Petit, Robert Pires and Bixente Lizarazu, joined by Ivorian great Didier Drogba, called for a change at the top, and they did not phrase it gently. Their argument, in essence, was that the leadership had lost the plot:
"Power has clouded the ability of the current leadership to distinguish between their own interests and what is really best for football."
They added that recent events had made it "impossible to remain silent any longer" — which is the kind of sentence you write when you have decided the polite phase is over. And the dissent isn't limited to former players milling about with strong opinions. Multiple confederations — UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF among them — have pushed back on the rights plan, which is a rather more structural problem than a few unhappy alumni.
A quick map of who's standing where:
- Team Infantino: Cafu, Roberto Carlos, Zanetti, Felipe Melo, and a roster of other South American names, plus institutional backing from parts of Africa.
- Team "Necessary Change": Petit, Pires, Lizarazu, Drogba, and the weight of several major confederations.
- The prize they're fighting over: control of the direction of FIFA heading into the presidential Congress scheduled for March 2027, where Infantino intends to seek another term.
The delicious part is that both camps are using the exact same vocabulary — the good of the game, the future of football, the players' voice. Everyone is fighting for football. They just violently disagree about who gets to hold it. Two thousand twenty-seven is going to be a long year.
