FIFA said football was ‘fully united’ over Ukraine - The ICC complaint shows what that promise was worth

Four days was how long it took FIFA and UEFA only to suspend Russia from international football after tanks crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

As revealed by the BBC, the joint statement on February 28 was, “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” Crimean clubs were stripped from Russian leagues, Russian teams were banned from all competitions, including the 2022 World Cup, and Gianni Infantino signed it all off.

February 16 this year, a coalition of Palestinian footballers, clubs and advocacy groups filed a 120-page complaint at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It says Infantino and UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin have “aided and abetted” war crimes (the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory) and crimes against humanity through the continued sanctioning of Israeli clubs in illegal West Bank settlements.

It is the first time in history that the heads of two major sporting bodies have been mentioned in a complaint of this kind before an international criminal tribunal.

The World Cup starts in June and, as Just Peace Advocates, one of the complainants, put it, “FIFA may get a red card.”

The Israel Football Association (IFA) operates clubs inside settlements on occupied Palestinian land, settlements that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2024 must be evacuated.

Palestinians cannot enter those clubs as spectators, cannot play for them and cannot manage them. FIFA’s own laws do not allow member associations to operate on the territory of another without consent.

The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) has given none. And FIFA’s own Israel-Palestine Monitoring Committee warned Infantino in writing that the situation lacked international legitimacy, recommending either the expulsion of settlement clubs or sanctions against the Israeli FA.

The Swiss-born football administrator ignored it.

The other filing parties are Irish Sport for Palestine, Scottish Sport for Palestine and the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

FIFA and UEFA have provided financial and structural support to settlement clubs, some of which have played in UEFA-organised competitions. The complaint argues that each time Infantino received a warning from UN human rights experts, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International or his own committee, and chose to do nothing, the inaction was a decision.

And decisions, they argue, have mean something.

Infantino has been consistent on this. He told Sky News in early February that banning national teams is “a defeat,” and suggested changing FIFA's statutes to prevent it ever happening again. According to him, football cannot solve geopolitical problems.

He said it in the same breath as a man who, three years earlier, had solved a geopolitical problem involving Russia in four days.

But the contradiction is rather obvious, and those who wrote the 120 pages did not miss it.

The timing around the World Cup draw in December made the optics considerably worse. One week before the filing became public, Infantino stood at the Kennedy Center in Washington and presented Donald Trump with a FIFA Peace Prize. The ceremony took place against a backdrop of protests outside.

The American president’s administration had, according to some reports, intervened to prevent any move towards suspending the Israeli Football Association.

There is just a simple way to understand exactly what Infantino is trying to do here. The United States is the most valuable market in the organisation’s history, the host of the most lucrative tournament ever, and the home of the administration protecting an ally. The math is that straightforward.

But Ceferin’s position is harder to explain away on purely commercial grounds. UEFA had been closer, in the autumn of 2025, to a genuine vote on suspension than at any other point.

Then, the October ceasefire proposal in Gaza came in. And that was enough for UEFA to pull back.

Ceferin has not said much in public since. But he is mentioned as much in this suit, and for the same reason, as Infantino.

Reports have it that more than 1,000 people connected to Palestinian sport have been killed since October 2023. The number has been available to both men for months, but they did not do anything about it.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 will go ahead as planned, and Infantino will be at the centre of it. But a lot has changed with the complaint.

For two years, both men hid behind the same argument: sport cannot be used as a political tool, rules must apply to everyone equally, precedents are dangerous. But the precedent was set in 2022.