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Seventy-Three — The Harry Kane Ballon d’Or That Ended the Trophy Argument

Manoel Vasudevan
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Seventy-Three — The Harry Kane Ballon d’Or That Ended the Trophy Argument

The Harry Kane Ballon d’Or rewarded 73 goals over a World Cup winner’s medal, and in doing so the voters finally retired the oldest argument in English football. The angle comes from ESPN’s full Ballon d’Or rankings.

For a decade the case against Harry Kane fitted into one word, and the word was not a number. It was trophies: three lost finals with Tottenham, two lost European Championship finals with England and nearly 600 games before a winner’s medal finally arrived with Bayern Munich’s Bundesliga title in May 2025. On Monday night at the London Palladium, the 100 journalists who vote for France Football’s prize settled the Harry Kane Ballon d’Or argument in his favour, placing him ahead of Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal and making him the first English winner since Michael Owen in 2001, and only the fifth Englishman ever, after Stanley Matthews, Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan and Owen.

The number that won it was seventy-three. That is how many goals Kane scored for Bayern and England across 2025/26, 36 of them in the Bundesliga, 14 in 13 Champions League games and six at the World Cup, a total Bundesliga.com ranks behind only Lionel Messi’s 2011/12 in the history of European football. It came wrapped in a Bundesliga title, a DFB-Pokal won with a hat-trick in the final against Stuttgart, the Franz Beckenbauer Supercup, a third straight Bundesliga scoring title and a second European Golden Shoe, nine goals clear of Erling Haaland. He is the first player from a Bundesliga club to win the award since Matthias Sammer in 1996.

What makes the result interesting is not that Kane won it but what the jury chose not to reward. In a World Cup cycle the Ballon d’Or has often followed the tournament: Luka Modrić won in 2018 after taking Croatia to the final, and Messi won in 2023 on the strength of Qatar. Before Monday, only four of the previous 19 winners had gone through their award year without a Champions League, a World Cup, a European Championship or a Copa América. Kane won none of the four. Bayern went out in the Champions League semi-finals, where he had little impact, and England led Argentina in their World Cup semi-final in Atlanta before losing 2-1, a night Kane described as holding on when “at this level isn’t enough”.

Both men behind him had a cleaner claim on the summer. Mbappé’s ten goals in North America took him to 22 at World Cups, more than anyone in the competition’s history. Yamal has a World Cup winner’s medal, collected with Spain shortly after he turned 19. Both finished behind a striker whose tournament ended in a semi-final defeat and a third-place play-off that he started on the bench while Thomas Tuchel rotated his squad.

So the jury picked the season over the tournament, and volume over silverware. That is a defensible choice, and nothing in the result breaks the rules of the prize, but it is not a neutral one, and not everyone signed up to it. José Félix Díaz, managing editor of AS and Spain’s only juror, told Cadena SER that Kane “lacks something”, and argued that the world champions’ votes had been split with no Spaniard standing out. The final top ten bears him out: Yamal third, Rodri fourth, Fabián Ruiz tenth, with Spain’s recognition going instead to Luis de la Fuente as coach of the year and Unai Simón as the best goalkeeper. The individual ballots are published this Saturday, and they will show how many voters stood where Díaz did.

Here is the case this piece wants to make. The trophy argument against Kane was always measuring the wrong thing. Trophies are a team’s verdict; the Ballon d’Or claims to be an individual one, and for most of Kane’s career the voters let the first stand in for the second. A striker who led the scoring charts in England and then in Germany was marked down, year after year, for the squads around him and for the shoot-out England lost at Wembley in 2021. What Monday’s vote did was separate the two judgments for the first time, and it took an extraordinary set of circumstances to force the separation: 73 goals, three domestic trophies and England’s best World Cup finish since 1966, set against a world champion squad that shared its votes around.

Kane, characteristically, told it as a story about time rather than talent. “I didn’t go straight to the top, I had to experience a lot of loan moves,” he said, before thanking the voters with the admission that “I can imagine it was tough”. He called the night “beyond my wildest dreams”, and Tuchel, his England coach, called him a deserved winner and the team’s leader. He is 33, and he collected it in London, the city where the trophy-counting started.

When we wrote about Kane drawing level with Peter Shilton on 125 caps earlier this month, the closing thought was that November would add one more number to his record and then test the trophy he is still missing. The Ballon d’Or is not that trophy, and it does not pretend to be. Cap 126 is due against Croatia at Wembley on 12 November, five weeks after England’s seven-goal night in Rijeka, and three days later England go to the Metropolitano to face Spain, the world champions whose players finished third, fourth and tenth behind him.

England still need the trophy. After Monday, it is harder to argue that Kane does. The argument did not end because he finally won something; it ended because 100 voters decided, at last, that it had never been the right argument to have about him.

Sources: Wikipedia, ESPN, ESPN (full rankings), Sky Sports, Bundesliga.com, Al Jazeera, GOAL, CBS Sports, TNT Sports, England Football, England Football (match centre), Athlon Sports, RFEF.

Thirty Days — The Ronaldo Ban That Cost Portugal Nothing

Manoel Vasudevan
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Thirty Days — The Ronaldo Ban That Cost Portugal Nothing

Cristiano Ronaldo asked to be punished without mercy. The Ronaldo ban that came back was 30 days, backdated to the day after he walked out, and it ran out before Portugal’s next match. The angle comes from the Portuguese federation’s disciplinary verdict on 19 October.

The verdict arrived on Monday 19 October. The Portuguese federation’s disciplinary council upheld the charge against Cristiano Ronaldo “in full”, found that he had broken Article 160(1) of its regulations by leaving the national team’s camp, and gave him a 30-day suspension and a fine of €255. The suspension took effect from 1 October, the day of the Denmark match after he walked out, which means he had already served 19 days by the time the verdict landed and will be available when Portugal next play, on 14 November.

Read the sentence against the rule it applies. Under the federation’s regulations, a player who abandons the team without justification “shall be sanctioned with a suspension of one to six months,” plus a fine. Thirty days sits at the very bottom of that range. And the ban ran from the day of the Denmark match, so it covered exactly two matches, both of which Ronaldo had already walked away from: the 4-2 win in Copenhagen on 1 October and the 2-1 win over Norway in Porto three days later. By the time the verdict was announced, most of the suspension had been served without anyone noticing. It ran out before the end of October, with no Portugal match in between.

What makes the verdict interesting is that Ronaldo asked for something harder. In his statement on 6 October he wrote that the federation “must assess the consequences of my actions and punish me for them”. He wrote that “the responsibility is exclusively mine”, and argued that his position as captain “constitutes an aggravating factor”. He asked, in effect, to be treated more strictly than an ordinary player. Before the hearing, a lawyer quoted by the Portuguese paper Record pointed out that the regulations allow sanctions to be reduced for a full admission and for long service, and that even the one-month minimum could be cut to 15 days. The council did not go that far. It also did not go one day above the floor.

There are good reasons for the federation to land where it did, and they are worth stating fairly. Ronaldo admitted everything, apologised to his teammates and the public, and has more than 20 years of service behind him. The federation’s president, Pedro Proença, said everyone at the federation wanted him back once the matter was resolved. A long ban would have punished Portugal as much as its captain, and turned a dressing-room dispute into a national argument. The minimum, backdated, closes the case without costing the team a single match.

But it also means the federation has not answered the question the walkout raised. The dispute was never about whether Ronaldo should be disciplined. It was about whether he starts. Jorge Jesus left him on the bench in Oslo, told him he would not start in Copenhagen, and Gonçalo Ramos scored in all three games Ronaldo missed. The federation’s verdict returns that question, untouched, to the coach. On 14 November Ronaldo is eligible again. Whether he is selected, and whether he starts, is a decision for Jesus, and no disciplinary council can make it for him.

This is the second time in a fortnight that a football institution has chosen the gesture that costs nothing. When Gianni Infantino apologised to the FIFA Council, he gave his critics contrition and no documents. Portugal has given Ronaldo a sanction and no consequence. Both decisions are defensible. Neither settles anything.

The contrast with Lionel Messi is sharper still. Argentina gave Messi a farewell arranged in his honour. Ronaldo, who has promised fans “one or more farewell matches”, now has his eligibility back but not his place. The Ronaldo ban is over, and it was always going to be short. The harder verdict is still to come, and it will be announced in a team sheet, not a press release.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Fox Sports, Associated Press (via NY1 and News4Jax), World Soccer Talk (citing Record).

Two Currencies — An Infantino Apology for the Critics, $25 Million for the Voters

Manoel Vasudevan
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Two Currencies — An Infantino Apology for the Critics, $25 Million for the Voters

Thursday’s Infantino apology was the first thing his critics had asked for, and the cheapest thing he had to give. In the same meeting, FIFA presented the $25 million each member association had been waiting for. The angle comes from FIFA’s statement after the Council meeting in Zurich.

FIFA’s ruling Council met in Zurich on Thursday for three and a half hours, and Gianni Infantino said sorry. According to FIFA’s own statement, he apologised for “the mistakes made in relation to the withdrawn FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal”, the plan to sell a stake of at least 20 per cent in a subsidiary running FIFA’s tournament commercial rights to private investors. The plan surfaced in media reports nine days after the World Cup final in July and was dropped soon after. The Council has now permanently withdrawn it. The FA chair Debbie Hewitt, a FIFA vice-president, said he apologised “with some contrition”.

The critics did not come for an apology. They came for documents, and they did not get them. Infantino provided no documents on the $4.2 billion sell-off plan and asked members to submit their questions in writing instead. Bernd Neuendorf, the German federation president and one of eight UEFA delegates on the 37-member Council, said afterwards: “No satisfactory answers were provided.” Hewitt went further: “The man has to answer those questions, and if he doesn’t answer those questions, no, he’s not fit to be FIFA president.” UEFA wants him gone before or at the March election, and has asked US courts for evidence to support a criminal complaint against him in Switzerland. FIFA’s lawyers have called the filings a “smear campaign”.

Then the meeting turned to money, and the mood of the statement changed. FIFA presented a proposed development fund of $6.35 billion for 2027 to 2030, more than double the level previously planned, including $25 million for each member association — a figure that still has to be finalised by the Council in December and approved by Congress in March. Infantino framed it as a record of his decade in charge: “from USD 1 million per FIFA Member Association to USD 25 million each”. He added a line written for the people who vote: “FIFA’s money, including its reserves, belongs to the 211 FIFA Member Associations.” When we first reported the $25 million figure on Wednesday, it came from a document seen by the Associated Press. On Thursday it came from FIFA itself.

This is the shape of the contest now. The Infantino apology was addressed to his critics, and it cost him nothing to give: no document changed hands, no decision was reversed that had not already been reversed in July. The $25 million is addressed to the electorate, and it is the most expensive thing on the table. The critics wanted accountability and got contrition. The members wanted money and got a number. Only one of those groups chooses the president.

The arithmetic still favours the man with the number. When the AP counted endorsements earlier this month, Infantino had 87 federations against 49 opposed, with 75 undecided, and he needs 106 to win. The opposition’s base is strong in Europe, but Europe has only 55 votes. Africa has 54, and on Thursday the Mauritanian Council member Ahmed Yahya said Infantino is “the right person to continue leading football”. As we argued when we priced the vote, a federation treasurer reads a funding plan more closely than a governance complaint.

What the critics still lack is a candidate on the ballot. Arsène Wenger, Luís Figo and Michele Kang have all been mentioned, but none has declared. The one man who has, the former Switzerland defender Ramon Vega, announced on 7 October that he intends to run, but he is not UEFA’s candidate and still needs nominations from at least five member associations, a test he failed to pass on a previous attempt. Nominations close on 18 November. The funding plan goes back to the Council in Doha on 16 December and needs final approval at the 77th FIFA Congress in March 2027, the same Congress that will elect the president in Rabat on 18 March. A challenger who declares in November will be running against a man who has apologised for the past and put a price on the future.

None of this settles the election. Written questions can still be answered badly, the legal case in Switzerland has not run its course, and an apology can be followed by another revelation. But Thursday showed which argument each side is making. The critics are asking who Infantino is. Infantino is telling 211 federations what they could be paid. Unless a challenger is formally nominated by 18 November, nobody will be asking the members what they want instead.

Sources: FIFA (official Council statement), Associated Press (via KSAT), Al Jazeera, Sky Sports.

Updated 24 October 2026: adds Ramon Vega’s declared intention to run.

Two Hundred and Eight — The Messi Farewell and the Ending Ronaldo Is Still Waiting For

Manoel Vasudevan
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Two Hundred and Eight — The Messi Farewell and the Ending Ronaldo Is Still Waiting For

The Messi farewell went exactly as Argentina planned it: a sold-out Monumental, a goal and two assists, and a 3-0 win over Benin. In the same week, Cristiano Ronaldo was promising farewell matches from inside a disciplinary process. The angle comes from the Associated Press report from Buenos Aires.

The last goal Lionel Messi scored for Argentina came from the penalty spot, in the 71st minute of a friendly against Benin, into the roof of the net. It was his 126th international goal, in his 208th appearance, and both figures are national records. By then he had already set up the other two: a corner from the left that Nicolás Otamendi finished in the 48th minute, and a pass that sent the substitute Nico Paz through to curl in the second, in the 61st minute. Argentina won 3-0. More than 85,000 tickets had sold out in 90 minutes.

It was an ending built to order. Messi announced his retirement from the national team on 31 August, a few weeks after Argentina lost the World Cup final 1-0 to Spain. The Argentine Football Association then persuaded him to play one more game, which it called “the farewell he deserves”, and billed it as “the last tango”. Players from the 1978, 1986 and 2022 World Cup-winning squads were in the stadium, and a banner at midfield called him the Eternal Captain. Afterwards he told the crowd: “I don’t want to leave here, I don’t want to leave this field.” The career that began with a red card on his debut against Hungary in 2005 ended twenty-one years later with the stadium refusing to let him go.

Even the details of the night had a purpose. Otamendi’s goal came in his 140th and last cap, so two members of the 2022 side left together. Paz’s goal was the other half of the message. The captain’s last assist went to a substitute who was not yet a year old when Messi made his debut, on a night the federation had chosen. Argentina’s succession was not imposed on Messi. He handed it over.

Now look at the other great career of the era. Spain ended both men’s World Cups this summer, Portugal in the last 16 and Argentina in the final. Their two exits since have nothing in common. In the international break that Messi spent saying goodbye, Cristiano Ronaldo walked out of Portugal’s camp after Jorge Jesus left him out against Norway and told him he would not start against Denmark. Portugal won all three games he missed, and Gonçalo Ramos scored three goals in that span. On 10 October the Portuguese federation suspended him and opened disciplinary proceedings.

Ronaldo has not retired. In a long post at the end of the break, he apologised and wrote that “actions must have consequences”. He has argued that being captain should count against him, not for him. He also made a promise: “we will have one or more farewell matches”. Under the federation’s rules, a player who abandons the team without justification faces a suspension of one to six months, plus a fine. So Ronaldo’s farewell, if it comes, will be arranged after a disciplinary committee has finished with him, not before.

That is the real difference between the two endings, and it is not about talent or numbers. Ronaldo has more of both caps and goals: 234 appearances and 146 goals for Portugal, the only man in men’s international football ahead of Messi on either count. The difference is control. Messi announced a date and walked towards it. Ronaldo waited for a coach to decide, disagreed with the decision, and left. Argentina had a successor and gave him the stage. Portugal’s successor took the stage first, three goals in three games, and the captain found out from the bench.

None of this means the Messi farewell was the only right way to go. Messi is 39 and a World Cup winner with nothing left to prove. Ronaldo is 41, still scoring for Al Nassr, and has not retired from international football. It is easier to leave on your own terms when the terms are kind. But the contrast is worth recording while it is fresh. One federation had a plan for the end of an era and carried it out. The other is still deciding what the end should look like, and its captain has handed it the decision.

Messi now goes back to Inter Miami, under contract through the 2028 season. Argentina go forward with Paz, Mastantuono, Álvarez and Fernández. Portugal go to the Nations League with Ramos, waiting for a disciplinary verdict on the most-capped player in men’s international football. Two careers of more than twenty years, both knocked out of the same World Cup by the same opponent. One finished on 6 October at the Monumental. The other has not finished yet.

Sources: Associated Press (via WAFB and NY1), NBC Sports, Outlook India, blue News, Al Jazeera.

Twenty-Five — FIFA Fills In the Blank Cheque Before the Election

Manoel Vasudevan
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Twenty-Five — FIFA Fills In the Blank Cheque Before the Election

Two weeks ago the FIFA election had become an auction, and the incumbent’s bid was a blank cheque. Now the blank has a number: $25 million for every member association, to be approved at the same March Congress that chooses the president. The angle comes from a FIFA document reviewed by the Associated Press.

When we priced the vote at the start of October, there were three offers on the table. The withdrawn FIFA Forward Enterprise plan had promised each association up to $40 million. UEFA and Concacaf had proposed the existing funding plus at least $10 million more from FIFA’s reserves. Gianni Infantino’s offer was a blank: he wrote that he would “not prejudge the amount”. The blank has now been filled in. According to a FIFA document seen by the Associated Press, FIFA is proposing a $6.35 billion development fund for 2027 to 2030, with $25 million for each national association and $99 million for each of the six confederations.

The money comes from where the opposition said it could. FIFA would distribute more than $3.5 billion from its financial reserves, which it links to the “unprecedented commercial” success of the 48-team World Cup. In FIFA’s words, the proposal would “more than double the level of planned distribution funding for the 2027-2030 period”, with a focus on women’s and youth football. The AP describes the $25 million as up from an originally planned $10 million per association.

Set the offers side by side and the shape of the contest changes. UEFA and Concacaf asked FIFA to release around $2.1 billion from reserves they estimated at about $6 billion. Infantino’s administration now proposes to release more than $3.5 billion. Whichever baseline you start from, $25 million is more than the existing plan plus the opposition’s $10 million. The confederations that spent September arguing FIFA could afford to pay its members more, without selling a stake in the World Cup, have been taken at their word and then outbid.

The timetable matters as much as the amount. The FIFA Council is to finalise the plan in December, and it then needs final approval at the 77th FIFA Congress in March 2027. That is the Congress at which the 211 federations will vote for their president, on 18 March in Rabat. The members will approve their money and choose the man who proposed it in the same room, on the same trip. Nominations for the presidency close on 18 November, a month before the Council finalises the fund. Any challenger will have to declare before the money is settled.

Recall the count. The AP’s tally gave Infantino 87 federations, against 49 opposed, with 75 still to declare. He needed 19 of them to reach the 106 that win the election. A challenger needed 57. For many of those 75 undecided associations, $25 million over four years is not a rounding error. It is the budget for a national team, a women’s programme and a training centre, and it arrives with the incumbent’s name on it.

This leaves the opposition in an awkward position. It cannot campaign against the payout, because it proposed the principle. It cannot outbid it, because the Council controls the agenda and the incumbent chairs the Council. What it has left is the argument it started with, about governance. UEFA has said it is preparing a criminal complaint in Switzerland over the abandoned World Cup sell-off and has asked US courts to authorise discovery. Those are serious steps. They are also slower than a cheque, and less easy to explain to a federation treasurer.

None of this is decided. The Council can change the figure, Congress can reject it, and an endorsement is not a vote. But the series of numbers tells its own story. In August the number that mattered was 106. In October it was 87. Now it is 25, and the man who controls it is the one on the ballot. The challenger, whoever it turns out to be, has until 18 November to put a name against it.

Sources: Associated Press (via Dhaka Tribune, 10BM News and The Washington Times), ESPN, AFP, BBC Sport (via Yahoo Sports), Japan Today.

Cap 126 — Harry Kane’s Record Falls Against the Team That Ended His First World Cup

Manoel Vasudevan
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Cap 126 — Harry Kane’s Record Falls Against the Team That Ended His First World Cup

Harry Kane now shares England’s appearance record with Peter Shilton on 125 caps. The cap that makes it his alone is due at Wembley on 12 November, against the Croatia side that ended his first World Cup. The angle comes from UEFA’s report of Tuesday’s 3-0 win over Czechia.

On Tuesday night at Wembley, Harry Kane set up England’s opener against Czechia and scored the other two. The goals took him to 91 for his country, and the appearance took him to 125 caps, level with Peter Shilton’s all-time England record. The brace also made him the Nations League’s top scorer, with six. One more game and the record is his alone, and the fixture list says that game is England against Croatia at Wembley on 12 November.

Shilton’s 125 caps belonged to a goalkeeper whose international career ran for two decades and ended at the 1990 World Cup. Kane’s have taken eleven and a half years, from a substitute debut against Lithuania in 2015 in which he scored. Goalkeepers are built for longevity. Strikers are not, and a centre-forward matching a goalkeeper’s appearance record says as much about Kane’s durability as the goals do about his finishing.

The goals are almost beyond comparison now. Kane is 38 clear of Wayne Rooney, England’s second-highest scorer on 53. He is England’s all-time World Cup top scorer, with 14 goals to Gary Lineker’s 10, and level with Alan Shearer on seven at the European Championship. Across major tournaments, only Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé have scored more. He has scored against 41 different nations. His 91 goals have come in 125 appearances, almost three goals in every four games. He also has 19 assists, joint fourth on England’s all-time list. The record that remains is not a number.

It is the trophy. Kane has played in eight major tournaments since 2016 and won none of them. This summer England went out of the World Cup in the semi-finals to Argentina. The appearance record measures how long he has been there. It cannot measure what he has been there for.

Which is why the opponent for cap 126 is so fitting. Croatia were the team that beat England in the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup in Moscow, the tournament at which a 24-year-old Kane won the Golden Boot. Eight years on the roles have reversed. Last Saturday England won 7-0 in Rijeka, Croatia’s heaviest defeat, and Kane scored twice. The record that took Shilton twenty years will fall against the side that ended Kane’s first serious chance of a trophy.

Three days later comes the harder question. England travel to Spain, the world champions who beat Argentina in the final in July and who won 2-1 in Croatia on Tuesday to reach the quarter-finals with an 11-match winning run intact. England have already lost to them once in this campaign, 3-2 at Wembley in September. Goal’s verdict after Tuesday was that Kane is one game away from history. The game after that will say more about whether England have closed the gap on the team that has done what Kane has not.

Records like Shilton’s are usually marked with a presentation before kick-off and a framed shirt. Kane’s will come with a better symmetry: the cap against the team that ended his first World Cup, and then, ninety minutes of football later, the team that holds the trophy he is still missing. Kane has spent eleven years being judged on two things at once, the numbers he keeps adding and the prize he keeps missing. November will add one more number, and then test the other.

Sources: The FA, UEFA, beIN Sports, Free Press Journal, Goal.

Eighty-Seven — The Count That Replaced the Target in the FIFA Election

Manoel Vasudevan
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Eighty-Seven — The Count That Replaced the Target in the FIFA Election

In August the FIFA presidential election came down to a target: 106 votes. Now it has a count. Gianni Infantino has 87, his opponents have 49 and no candidate, and the 75 federations in between will decide who runs world football until 2031. The angle comes from the Associated Press tally published on Tuesday.

When we counted the votes in August, the only number that mattered was 106, the simple majority of FIFA’s 211 member associations. There is now a number to set against it. An Associated Press tally shows 87 federations have indicated support for Infantino, either individually or by endorsing their confederation’s statement of support, and 49, mostly in Europe, have come out against him. That leaves 75 still to declare. Infantino needs 19 of them. A challenger would need 57, and there is not yet a challenger.

The 87 rest on two continents and a bloc. All 10 South American federations have endorsed him, including World Cup finalists Argentina, and the AP’s count reflects the African backing he has held throughout. The bloc is the Arab world. At a meeting in Jeddah, 21 of the 22 members of the Union of Arab Football Associations backed him, with Jordan the only exception. Jordan’s federation is led by Prince Ali bin Al Hussein, a long-standing opponent of FIFA’s establishment. Elsewhere, Qatar and Mexico have declared for Infantino, as have the Solomon Islands, Tahiti and New Caledonia in Oceania, while New Zealand withdrew its support in August.

The 49 are a list of the federations that built modern football. France, England and Belgium are among those that have withdrawn their support, and last week Infantino lost the backing of his home federation, Switzerland, which said its conditions on credibility, transparency and accountability were no longer being met. UEFA has also said it is preparing a criminal complaint against him over the investment plan. On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada is among the federations opposing him.

Asia is where the arithmetic gets interesting. The Asian Football Confederation has openly distanced itself from FIFA’s current leadership, and its leadership is among those backing UEFA’s promise to put up a challenger. Yet twelve of the Arab union’s members belong to the Asian confederation, and all of them except Jordan have just declared for Infantino. A confederation that wants a challenger cannot deliver its own members’ votes. That is not a detail. It is the reason Infantino’s 87 looks more solid than the opposition’s 49.

Now compare the two tasks. Infantino needs roughly one in four of the uncommitted. His opponents need three in four, for a candidate they have yet to name. Nominations close on 18 November, and the vote is on 18 March in Rabat. According to reports from the Berlin meeting, UEFA has considered waiting until late October to name its candidate, to give the incumbent less time to lobby against them. That is a sensible tactic. It is also an admission that the challenger, whoever it is, will start the race weeks behind a man who has been campaigning around the world for months.

History is on the incumbent’s side too. As the AP points out, no sitting FIFA president has lost an election in the last 50 years, and the power to distribute World Cup profits has always been the incumbent’s biggest advantage. That power is about to be exercised. The FIFA Council meets on 15 October to decide how much extra money to release from FIFA’s reserves to the 211 associations. As we argued last week, whatever the Council approves, it is the man already in office who will be seen to have paid it, and it will land on 75 federations that have not yet made up their minds.

None of these numbers is a vote. Endorsements made in public, sometimes through a confederation statement rather than a federation’s own, are promises, and promises shift. The opposition’s whole case is that they will shift. But the count tells you where the burden lies. In August, 106 was a target both sides had to reach. In October, Infantino is 19 short, and the people trying to stop him are 57 short, without a name to put on the ballot.

Sources: Associated Press (via The Washington Times and Medicine Hat News), Japan Today, Inside the Games, Africa Soccer, Italpress, Time News.

Seven Goals, Two Roads — What the World Cup Did to England and Croatia

Manoel Vasudevan
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Seven Goals, Two Roads — What the World Cup Did to England and Croatia

Three months ago England and Croatia left the same World Cup. On Saturday in Rijeka they met again, and the Croatia England scoreline showed how differently the two have taken their exits. The angle comes from World Soccer Talk’s note that no beaten World Cup finalist had ever lost by seven at home.

Croatia 0, England 7. Harry Kane scored inside eight minutes, and England were four up by half-time. Kane and Bukayo Saka both scored twice, with Jude Bellingham, Anthony Gordon and the substitute Morgan Rogers also on target, and Kane’s pair took his record England tally to 89. It was the kind of night that happens to small nations, and Croatia have not been a small nation in football for the best part of three decades.

The numbers are brutal. It was the heaviest defeat in Croatia’s history, beating a 6-0 loss to Spain in September 2018, and it made them the first former World Cup finalist to lose by seven goals on home soil. Before Saturday, no visiting side had ever scored more than four against them.

That 2018 precedent is the real story. The 6-0 in Spain came less than two months after Croatia’s run to the World Cup final in Russia. Eight years later, the pattern has repeated within weeks of another World Cup. This summer Croatia finished second in Group L and went out to Portugal, 2-1, in the round of 32 in Toronto. Cristiano Ronaldo scored a penalty and Gonçalo Ramos struck late to win it, the same Ramos who has since become Portugal’s answer to the Ronaldo question, and Croatia had a late Joško Gvardiol equaliser ruled out for offside. Zlatko Dalić stepped down after the exit, and Slaven Bilić took over. In this Nations League window Croatia beat Czechia 2-1, then lost 4-1 in Seville and 7-0 in Rijeka, conceding eleven goals in two matches.

Luka Modrić was there for all of it. He won his 200th cap at the World Cup against Panama, and on Saturday he was back in the starting line-up after being rested in Seville. Afterwards he said that for the first time in his national-team career he felt “ashamed”. Bilić, who described a side in transition as the golden generation fades, was blunter still about what the result demanded of everyone involved, apologising to the fans and to the children in the stands.

England took the opposite road out of the summer. They went out of the World Cup in the semi-finals to Argentina and finished third, a tournament that will be remembered as another missed chance. In Rijeka they looked like a team that had used the disappointment rather than been flattened by it. Gordon’s goal was his fourth in his last four England matches, and Thomas Tuchel and his players called it a complete performance. Earlier in the week, after the squad had swum in the Adriatic, Tuchel had warned them against slipping into holiday mode. They did not.

It is worth keeping the result in proportion. This is the Nations League, not the World Cup, and an ageing Croatia could not provide an elite test. England had already beaten Croatia 4-2 in the World Cup group stage. The examination that matters comes next: Spain away in November, against the world champions who went on to beat Argentina in the final and who put four past Croatia on Tuesday. If England can do to Spain even half of what they did to Croatia, Saturday will look like the start of something. If not, it will look like a good night against a team in decline.

For Croatia, the question is harder. Jutarnji List told its readers the country had become San Marino, which is unfair to the result and true to the feeling. A golden generation rarely ends with an announcement. It ends with a run of results that nobody believed possible, and then one that nobody can explain away. Croatia have had their 6-0 and now their 7-0. Bilić’s task is to make sure there is not a third.

Sources: beIN Sports, The FA, World Soccer Talk, Sky Sports, ESPN, Goal, LiveScore, UEFA, Bolavip, VAVEL.

The Ramos Rule — Why Portugal Keeps Reaching the Same Answer Without Ronaldo

Manoel Vasudevan
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The Ramos Rule — Why Portugal Keeps Reaching the Same Answer Without Ronaldo

Four years apart, two Portugal coaches left Cristiano Ronaldo on the bench, and both times the same striker stepped in and scored. What changed this week was not the answer on the pitch but the captain’s response to it. The angle comes from Sunday’s match report from Oslo, where Gonçalo Ramos started in Ronaldo’s place.

Updated 24 October 2026 with the federation’s 30-day suspension. First updated 14 October 2026 with Portugal’s wins over Denmark and Norway, Ronaldo’s statement and the federation’s suspension.

Gonçalo Ramos has now settled the same argument twice. In December 2022, at the World Cup in Qatar, Fernando Santos left Ronaldo out of the starting line-up for a last-16 tie against Switzerland, and Ramos, picked in his place, scored a hat-trick in a 6-1 win. In Oslo last Sunday, Jorge Jesus made the same call, and Ramos started instead of Ronaldo and scored the winner in a 2-1 victory over Norway, chipping the ball into an empty net after the Norwegian goalkeeper passed it straight to him. Two coaches, four years and one striker, and the same answer to a question Portuguese football has spent half a decade reluctant to ask out loud.

What changed is the response. In Qatar, the federation was obliged to deny reports that Ronaldo had threatened to leave the squad, and he stayed. This week he left. On Wednesday, Jesus said Ronaldo would not start against Denmark either. Ronaldo had arrived at Parken on the team bus, but he did not join his teammates on the pitch and left the stadium soon after the coach’s news conference. On Instagram he wrote that, following that news conference and a conversation with the federation president, “I have decided to leave the national team’s training camp”, and promised to explain his reasons to Portuguese fans in due course. According to Al Jazeera, it is the first time in 23 years with Portugal that he has walked out of a camp.

It is worth being precise about what each side has said. Ronaldo’s own account, published on 6 October, is that “the coach had broken his word to me”, and that he is not retiring from international football. Jesus’s account is that he told Ronaldo before the Norway game that he would not start, but might come on late, and then decided as coach not to use him, insisting there was no incident. Portugal’s own framing at the time was workload: the coach is managing his minutes across an expanded international break. And Jesus is no stranger to him. He coached Ronaldo at Al-Nassr, which makes him the manager who has seen the 41-year-old’s current body more closely than any of his predecessors. That is what separates this from Qatar. Santos made a selection call in a World Cup knockout game. Jesus is making one with more first-hand knowledge of the player than any Portugal coach before him.

The record behind the decision is extraordinary, which is precisely why it is so hard to make. Ronaldo holds Portugal’s records for appearances and goals, has 979 goals for club and country as of late September and is closing on a thousand. He also told Vogue in August that this is probably his last year of football. Sunday was the first time he had been named among Portugal’s substitutes since a Nations League game against Scotland in September 2024. For two years the question of whether to start him barely arose. It has now arisen twice in a week.

The context is the summer. Portugal’s World Cup ended with a tame last-16 defeat to Spain, in the tie we framed as a meeting of generations between Lamine Yamal and Ronaldo. Spain went on to the final and beat Argentina 1-0. The generation that knocked Portugal out is the one Portugal will have to beat in 2030, and the question Jesus is answering now is whether Portugal will be built to do it.

That is the real deadline. The 2030 World Cup will be staged in Morocco, Spain and Portugal, a home tournament for the country Ronaldo has defined for two decades. He will turn 45 that year. Every Portugal coach between now and then inherits the same choice Santos and Jesus faced, and the evidence from Lusail and Oslo is that the team has an answer when it is allowed to look for one. Whether the captain accepts that answer is a different matter, and not one any coach can settle with a team sheet.

Portugal went on without him. In Copenhagen they beat Denmark 4-2, with João Cancelo, Ramos, Vitinha and João Félix scoring, and Ramos led the line in Ronaldo’s place. Asked about his captain’s departure, Jesus was blunt: “It will never be any player that will change my ideas as coach”. Then, at home to Norway, Ramos scored the late winner in a 2-1 victory that took Portugal into the Nations League quarter-finals. Across the three matches in which Ronaldo was benched or absent, Portugal won all three and Ramos scored three goals.

Ronaldo gave his answer on 6 October, and it was not the one many expected. In a long statement he apologised to supporters and to his teammates, and asked to be disciplined: “The Portuguese Football Federation must assess the consequences of my actions and punish me for them”. He added that “I have already apologized, but I know that actions must have consequences”, and promised fans one or more farewell matches. Four days later the federation suspended him and opened disciplinary proceedings. Under its rules, a player who abandons the team without justification faces a suspension of one to six months. On 19 October the disciplinary council gave him the minimum, a 30-day suspension and a €255 fine, backdated to 30 September, the day he left camp, so he is available again when Portugal next play on 14 November.

So the question has now been answered on both sides of the touchline. Ramos has answered it three times on the pitch. Ronaldo has answered it off it, not by contesting the coach’s verdict but by asking to be punished for the way he reacted to it. That is a more graceful exit from the argument than the walkout suggested, and it leaves the decision where Jesus said it belonged. What it does not settle is the deadline. The farewell matches Ronaldo has promised will come at some point. The 2030 home World Cup, for which Ramos keeps making the case, is the one date that cannot move.

Sources: Al Jazeera (with AFP and Reuters), Reuters (via Soccerway), Sofascore, ESPN, LiveNOW from FOX, Vogue (via Al Jazeera), Instagram, Malay Mail, The Express Tribune, FotMob, UEFA, Football365, Associated Press (via KSAT).

Forty, Eighteen and a Blank Cheque — The Auction for FIFA’s 211 Votes

Manoel Vasudevan
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Forty, Eighteen and a Blank Cheque — The Auction for FIFA’s 211 Votes

In July the price of a FIFA vote had a number. The plan that set it is dead, but the number has simply been repriced, and on 15 October the FIFA Council sits down to decide what each of 211 associations is worth in the run-up to an election. The angle comes from Infantino’s letter to the six confederation presidents, first reported by The Athletic.

Start with the offer that was withdrawn. Under the FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, every member association would have seen its regular Forward funding rise from $8 million to $20 million for the 2027-30 cycle, with the option of a further $20 million one-off payment through the new Fast Forward programme. Across the cycle that comes to up to $40 million a head, which is the figure Infantino had put to members. The plan was pulled within days after uproar across the game, and by 27 August UEFA said FIFA had confirmed in writing that it was gone for good. The idea of a per-association price, though, survived the plan. It just went looking for a new home.

It found one on 18 September. In a joint letter, UEFA’s Aleksander Ceferin and Concacaf’s Victor Montagliani asked FIFA to release at least $10 million to each of its 211 members over the 2027-30 cycle, about $2.1 billion in all, paid on top of the regular development funding and drawn from reserves they put at around $6 billion. The letter’s sharpest line was aimed squarely at the dead deal: FIFA, it said, could do this “without asking anything of the MAs in return”. The subtext was hard to miss. AP read the letter as reassurance to members that the money would keep coming even without Infantino.

Infantino did not say no. In a letter reported on Monday 28 September, he confirmed that the size of the distributions will be on the agenda of the FIFA Council’s 15 October meeting, declined to name a figure and wrote that “a single figure can begin the discussion, but it cannot complete a global policy”. He has asked the confederation presidents for financial models and supporting evidence and said he would back the largest amount that could responsibly be released through FIFA’s own procedures. That is not a man resisting a payout. It is a man taking ownership of one.

Lay the numbers side by side and the shape of the contest becomes clear. Under the existing FIFA Forward programme, each association is budgeted to receive $8 million over the 2027-30 cycle. The withdrawn FFE offer was worth up to $40 million. The opposition’s offer is that same $8 million plus at least $10 million, or $18 million in all, which is less than half of the most the dead deal offered, and less than even the part of it that was guaranteed. The incumbent’s offer is a blank: whatever the Council can be persuaded to approve, assembled by a Secretary General Infantino has instructed to consolidate every submission into one integrated assessment. There is a principled case behind the lower number. The opposition’s objection was never that members should get less, only that they should not be paid with a slice of the World Cup. But principles are not what the electorate is being asked to count.

Where the money comes from matters as much as how much there is. The reserves stand at a level the two confederation presidents described as the highest in FIFA’s history, and they are, overwhelmingly, the proceeds of the 104-match, 48-team tournament that we argued before kick-off was a competitive gamble and that turned out to be a commercial certainty. Insider Sport has reported that the 2026 World Cup generated more than $15 billion. In its US court filings, UEFA put the price investors would have paid for a stake in FFE at $4.2 billion, which, as we noted when we counted the votes, is almost exactly $20 million multiplied by 211. Both offers, in other words, are drawn on the same asset. FFE would have sold a share of the World Cup’s future. The reserves letter proposes to spend its past.

Money and votes have travelled together at FIFA for a long time, and the record is not encouraging for the side offering less. When Infantino was returned unopposed in Kigali in 2023, AP pointed to FIFA’s wealth, and to member funding that had grown from $250,000 a year to at least $8 million a cycle, as a big part of the reason. This time the African and South American confederations have backed him, and he does not need Europe. UEFA’s 55 associations are around a quarter of the electorate. The 106 that decide the election in Rabat are mostly the federations for whom $10 million, or $18 million, or $40 million, is not a rounding error but the budget.

That is the risk in the opposition’s move. By arguing that FIFA can afford to pay every member more, Ceferin and Montagliani have conceded the terms of the contest: the election will be fought, at least in part, over how many dollars each association receives. In that contest the incumbent holds the pen. The confederations can only make recommendations to the Council. Whatever the Council approves will flow in a cycle that opens in January 2027, eleven weeks before the vote on 18 March. If the Council approves something close to $10 million, the opposition can fairly say it forced FIFA to pay without strings, and Infantino can fairly say he delivered it. Only one of them will be on the ballot.

For now, the opposition’s other campaign is being fought in American courtrooms. UEFA has sought discovery over FFE in the US, and FIFA’s lawyers accused the European body of harassment and of trying to influence the election, while insisting the FFE plan had always been subject to approval by members and the Council. What UEFA has not yet produced is a candidate. The deadline for nominations is 18 November, and UEFA’s leadership meets in Berlin next week. A lower bid can still win an auction if the bidder is more trusted. It cannot win one without a bidder.

So 15 October is the date to watch. It will not settle the election, but it will settle the price, and it will settle who is seen to have paid it. In July the question was whether FIFA would sell part of the World Cup to fund its members. By October it has become how much of the World Cup’s money the members get, and from whose hand. That is a smaller question, and a far more dangerous one for anyone hoping to beat the man who controls the timing of the answer.

Sources: The Athletic (via Field Level Media), Associated Press, AFP, BBC Sport (via Insider Sport), Inside World Football, Al Jazeera, Variety, NBC Sports, Football Today, Anadolu Agency, Insider Sport, Wikipedia.

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