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FIFA may have put its World Cup power grab on hold, but UEFA’s intentions are now hard to miss.

The fight over the attempted World Cup sell-off may have ended for now, but the wider struggle is only beginning.

FIFA’s humiliating retreat over the power move devised by its president Gianni Infantino to auction stakes in several of its competitions, including the World Cup, to private investors brought football together in clear condemnation of the audacious plan.

No organisation was more direct in rejecting those proposals than UEFA, which wrote to its former Secretary General to warn that it was ‘actively considering legal action’ against him over the profit-driven scheme, even though it was quickly abandoned.

But that may have been only a small part of the possible punishment from European football’s governing house, which also backed a unanimous boycott of all FIFA tournaments if the controversial break-up under the current leadership had gone ahead — a position it has firmly maintained.

UEFA must also accept some responsibility for Infantino’s plan. After all, it was from its headquarters in Nyon that the Swiss-Italian powerbroker was allowed to build his influence before rising to the top, 167 miles to the north-east, at world football’s Geneva base more than a decade ago.

To UEFA, he is what Anakin Skywalker became to the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars: once seen as a great hope for the future before crossing over to football’s dark side.

Resentment towards Infantino runs deep among his former employers. Their president Aleksander Ceferin led an eight-person walkout at last year’s FIFA Congress in Paraguay after a three-hour delay caused by FIFA’s leader choosing to spend time with world leaders, including United States president Donald Trump, in the Middle East.

That slight worsened relations between two of international football’s most powerful institutions, but the tension had existed long before the failed attempt to allow Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, and a range of shadowy investors to profit from the World Cup’s legacy. Infantino’s break from UEFA in 2016 saw FIFA move aggressively in a bid to overtake the Champions League as the game’s highest-earning competition.

It also pushed Ceferin to shape UEFA as the opposite of FIFA, while at the same time trying, wherever possible, to outshine his former colleague turned rival. The latest example came when UEFA appointed Omar Artan, the Somali referee who was denied entry to the World Cup by the Trump administration, to officiate this month’s Super Cup.

Another such push reportedly involved UEFA planning to team up with the International Champions Cup, a pre-season exhibition competition featuring some of Europe’s biggest clubs, to launch a Champions League-style tournament in summer 2021. The idea was to overshadow the debut of the expanded Club World Cup before Covid ended the rival project.

Infantino’s attempted retaliation took the form of talks over rebranding the European Super League under FIFA’s umbrella, only months before the controversial breakaway project — which threatened to wreck the integrity of the Champions League — was launched and then quickly collapsed amid widespread backlash.

When that short-lived idea was unveiled by 12 of the continent’s biggest clubs, Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi replaced Juventus chief Andrea Agnelli as head of the European Club Association, now known as European Football Clubs. In normal circumstances, Ceferin’s administration might have criticised such a move because of the murky associations linked to state ownership in top-level football.

But Al-Khelaifi was welcomed openly at a time of genuine confrontation and has even been mentioned as a possible UEFA-backed challenger to Infantino in next year’s FIFA elections, despite the Qatar Football Association already ruling out support for any candidate running against the incumbent.

Even worse could still be ahead for the 56-year-old if the World Cup’s standing continues to be damaged by a summer of controversy that went beyond his doomed FIFA Forward Enterprise. It recently emerged that plans for an alternative competition, under the working title of the Global Nations League, have been kept locked in UEFA’s vaults for nearly a decade, and the proposed eight-team format had already received early backing from both CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation.

Infantino’s greed has undermined his attempt to tamper with international football’s golden goose, but Ceferin would have no hesitation in pulling the trigger that removes him from power altogether. If that happens, the accusations of a ‘UEFA Mafia’ often voiced by supporters will no longer be without basis.