Prince Ali Thanks FIFA for Prize Money but Opposes Infantino
The money finally landed. The mistrust stayed exactly where it was.
Two days after accusing FIFA of “blackmail”, Jordan Football Association president Prince Ali bin Hussein revealed that players and staff from Jordan’s national team have at last received their prize money for reaching the 2025 Arab Cup final in Qatar – funds he says were held back for eight months.
The timing was impossible to ignore.
On Thursday morning, Prince Ali took to X to confirm that the overdue payments had arrived, pointedly underlining how long the association had been waiting since their run to the final last December.
“Thank you to the FIFA administration for suddenly this morning delivering what was owed to our players and coaching staff, for the Jordan National team’s accession to the final of the FIFA Arab Cup in Qatar last December,” he wrote. “This was funding that should have been received eight months ago.”
The word “suddenly” did a lot of heavy lifting.
Prince Ali’s public gratitude came laced with context. Earlier in the week, he had accused FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino of leveraging Jordan’s financial difficulties to secure political backing, claiming that during the World Cup he was told support for Infantino “would go a long way to helping our FA out”.
One of the problems he listed at the time was precisely this missing prize money from the Arab Cup.
According to Ali, FIFA had verbally communicated that help could be forthcoming if he endorsed Infantino’s controversial proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup’s commercial rights – a plan that triggered fierce backlash from confederations and national associations and has since been abandoned. Under pressure, Infantino retreated from the project, but the fallout has lingered.
FIFA has not responded to requests for comment on Ali’s allegations.
The overdue payment to Jordan’s players and coaches might have closed one financial file. Politically, it has opened another.
Ali made clear that the arrival of the money does nothing to soften his stance on the direction of the world governing body or the man at its helm.
He described the episode as “symptomatic” of the broader problems that, in his view, surround FIFA governance and typically flare around presidential election cycles. The association’s concerns, he stressed, go beyond a single overdue transfer.
“It is symptomatic of those exact difficulties that we all face and that are usually linked to the FIFA presidential elections,” he said, before drawing a firm line. “And it does not change my clear position concerning the leadership of FIFA: my FA and I will not endorse President Infantino, nor will we vote for him.”
That declaration lands at a delicate moment for FIFA.
In Morocco on Wednesday, the organisation’s leadership convened a crisis meeting after the storm created by Infantino’s World Cup rights plan. FIFA apologised to its members for “mistakes” made over the aborted proposal, but the top brass ultimately closed ranks around the president, reaffirming support for his leadership.
Infantino, already in power for close to a decade, is seeking a fourth and final term, with elections scheduled for March. The governing body’s public apology, coupled with its internal show of loyalty, underlined just how determined FIFA is to keep its current direction intact.
Prince Ali’s intervention cuts against that narrative. A former FIFA vice president and long-time critic of entrenched power structures in Zurich, he has once again positioned himself as a prominent dissenting voice from within the global football establishment, not from its fringes.
This time, the flashpoint is not a grand reform manifesto or a bid for office, but something far more tangible: prize money that, by his account, should have been wired months ago to players and coaches who earned it on the pitch.
The funds are now in Jordanian hands. The bigger question, as Infantino’s election campaign gathers pace, is how many other associations quietly share Ali’s misgivings – and how many will be prepared to say so out loud when the ballots are finally cast.
