The president of one of the Arab football federations launched a fierce attack against the international governing body of the game, FIFA, headed by Gianni Infantino, amid the intense criticisms the Swiss has faced recently.
Infantino opened the floodgates of attacks against him after proposing to allocate shares in the World Cup tournaments to private sector investors, a move that the continental football federations rejected fiercely.
The wave of attacks on Infantino led to the retraction of the aforementioned proposal, but that did not stop the attacks against him or the calls for his departure from his position.
For his part, the president of the Jordan Football Association, Prince Ali bin Hussein, wrote on his personal account on X: "There are many problems with FIFA; I will clarify some of the issues from the federation's perspective, especially regarding the Jordan national team's participation in the World Cup for the first time."
He added: "Jordan is a small country with a limited budget at the federation level. We suffered enormous problems, starting with our fans entering America, where not all of them obtained visas despite holding the required tickets, which we also know were sold at an exorbitant price."
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He continued: "Second, the American government imposed taxes on us through FIFA for our participation; those funds were supposed to go to the players and the national team staff, but that was not the case for the players who played and held training camps in Canada and Mexico, while we were in America, so we faced those exorbitant costs just for participating."
He went on: "Third, since last December we have been waiting to receive bonuses for our players for their participation in the Qatar World Cup, a tournament belonging to FIFA; we have not received the funds we were supposed to obtain for the team reaching the final match, while FIFA boasts of having billions of dollars in reserves."
He stressed: "The problem is clearly one of leadership. For months FIFA has refused to help us with those matters and others, while I was verbally informed during the World Cup that my support for Infantino would greatly help support our federation."
He concluded: "In Jordan we are proud of our commitment to ethical values; we did not support Infantino previously and will certainly not support him now, but the whole situation amounts to blackmail, and we refuse to submit to it."
