Eto’o Pushes Infantino’s Re-Election as FIFA Ignores His Qatar Fees

Samuel Eto’o is lining up Africa’s 54 football votes for Gianni Infantino while FIFA’s ethics body stays silent on fees paid into his Qatar account.

The Cameroon federation president has not been found to have stolen the money. The paper trail still puts €567,570 from a 2023 Russia friendly on a personal account in Doha, and former officials say Zurich has not answered a complaint filed more than a year ago.

The Russia Contract Named Samuel Eto’o Fils

On October 12, 2023, Cameroon lost 1-0 to Russia at Dynamo Lev Yashin Stadium in Moscow, a friendly played after Russia had already been shut out of FIFA and UEFA competitions. The paperwork around that game is less ordinary than the score.

Agreement 29-09-2023/1 was signed on September 29, 2023, in Yaoundé by Fecafoot secretary general Blaise Djounang and in Moscow by Maxim Mitrofanov of the Russian Football Union. Clause 5 set Cameroon’s fee at €567,570, including Cameroonian tax, with 80 percent due within four working days of the deal and the rest within four working days of the match.

The same clause said the money would be paid “to the following bank account of Fecafoot.” The holder line then named a private person: SAMUEL ETO’O FILS, at Qatar National Bank’s main Doha branch, a euro sight-deposit account. The Russian text used the word for beneficiary.

THE RUSSIA MATCH FEE PAPER TRAIL

The two invoices add up to €567,570 and carry Fecafoot’s stamp plus the signature of then national-team coordinator Benoît Angbwa. Neither invoice is signed by Eto’o. The published Russian payment order, sent through OTP Bank’s iBank system at 12:26 on November 14, 2023, is the balance debit, €111,075.71, not the whole fee, and it still names Eto’o as beneficiary and cites the September 29 agreement.

Where Did Cameroon’s Russia Match Fee Go?

Guibai Gatama, a former Fecafoot executive committee member, says he has seen no later bank or bookkeeping record moving those funds onto an official federation account. Fecafoot’s statutes require federation money to sit in accounts opened in the federation’s name.

To my knowledge, there is no accounting or banking evidence demonstrating that the funds transferred to Samuel Eto’o’s personal account in Qatar were subsequently transferred to an official Fecafoot account or recorded in its accounting records.

Guibai Gatama, former Fecafoot executive committee member

Gatama added that neither Fecafoot nor Eto’o has denied that the transactions exist, calling the papers damning. People close to Eto’o have said the QNB route was a banking workaround while Russia was under international sanctions, and that Fecafoot lacked a convertible-currency account that could take the transfer cleanly. Those explanations have not been matched, in public, by statements showing a later credit on a Fecafoot account.

A Cameroonian defense circulating since the documents resurfaced treats the Doha account as a transit account mandated by the emergency committee on September 29, 2023, with SWIFT traces and a full remittance home. That is a specific claim. It is also still an unpublished one.

FIFA Has Not Answered a Year-Old Complaint

Gatama and other former officials say they took the file to FIFA’s ethics committee more than a year ago and have had no follow-up. Henry Njalla Quan Junior, a former Fecafoot vice-president, filed a separate ethics complaint in 2024 that accused Eto’o of match-fixing and abuse of power. He has drawn the same blank.

FIFA presents those chambers as walled off from the president. Its own judicial-bodies pages describe an independent Ethics Committee and its two chambers, investigatory and adjudicatory, elected by Congress under independence rules in the governance regulations. A spokesperson said the FIFA president has no influence over those bodies, that FIFA welcomes legitimate scrutiny, and that scrutiny is not a license to amplify unsubstantiated claims about Infantino.

That independence clause is the official answer. It does not explain why complainants say they never even received an acknowledgement. FIFA’s 2024/2025 disciplinary and ethics report said the Ethics Committee opened 156 investigations in that cycle, so the machinery is not idle. It is idle, as far as the complainants can tell, on this file.

HOW THE FILE REACHED ZURICH

1. October 12, 2023: Cameroon plays Russia in Moscow; invoices already name Eto’o’s QNB account for the fee.
2. November 14, 2023: OTP Bank processes order 42485 for €111,075.71 to Samuel Eto’o Fils in Doha.
3. 2024: Quan Junior files ethics complaints on match-fixing and abuse of power; CAF also looks at “improper conduct” claims.
4. June 2025: Gatama files inside Fecafoot over the Russia funds; Fecafoot’s emergency committee attacks the leak and says decisions were taken in committee.
5. July 2025: Los Angeles counsel for a group of Cameroonian football officials writes to the FBI and the Southern District of New York about a separate $600,000 San Diego fee.
6. September 10, 2026: Eto’o, on television, pledges to campaign for all 54 CAF presidents to vote for Infantino; the Russia invoices return to wide view the same day.

Quan has asked whether political reciprocity is at work, given the support Eto’o has received from FIFA and Infantino in hard periods. FIFA’s reply is the independence line. The gap the complainants keep pointing to is simpler: a documented payment path and no recorded closing of the case.

Eto’o Is Campaigning for All 54 CAF Votes

Infantino announced in Vancouver on April 30, 2026, that he will stand again. The vote is set for March 18, 2027, at the 77th FIFA Congress in Rabat. Nominations close on November 18, 2026. He needs a simple majority of 211 member associations, each with one vote.

THE VOTE INFANTINO STILL NEEDS

• The electorate: 211 member associations, one vote each, majority wins.
• Africa’s share: 54 CAF associations, just over a quarter of the room.
• The calendar: nominations close November 18, 2026; the ballot is March 18, 2027, in Rabat.
• The April line: CAF’s 54 associations, meeting in Vancouver on April 29, 2026, “unanimously agreed” to support Infantino for 2027 to 2031.

A unanimous CAF statement is not a whip. Each federation still marks its own ballot, and Europe’s revolt over Infantino’s abandoned commercial plan has already shown how fast public backing can peel. That is the job Eto’o assigned himself on September 10.

If I remain president of the Cameroonian Football Federation, I will vote for him for everything he has brought to African football. I will campaign among my fellow presidents so that, for once, all 54 presidents of the Confederation of African Football will vote in favour of Gianni. I think the one who has brought the most to Africa is President Gianni.

Samuel Eto’o, Fecafoot president, on France 24, September 10, 2026

He went further than a vote. “In my heart, president Gianni has become, well beyond the world of football, a brother, a big brother, a friend,” he said, “someone we watched to come to the fore, someone we’ve supported, with whom we have built things together that serves football.” In a late August interview he said Infantino had “done anything wrong,” blamed the timing on the coming election, and argued that the loudest critics were not the majority.

Eto’o has run Fecafoot since 2021. His public loyalty is now part of FIFA’s own legal file: his defense of Infantino was cited in recent FIFA court papers amid UEFA’s criminal threats. The ethics complaints sit in the same organization that needs those 54 marks in Rabat.

The San Diego Fee Followed a Similar Path

The Russia invoices are the fresh exhibit. They are not the first. On June 10, 2023, Cameroon and Mexico played a 2-2 draw at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego in front of 30,543. Soccer United Marketing, the U.S. organizer, paid a $600,000 appearance fee in two wires, $400,000 after the match was announced and $200,000 in May 2023.

THE SAN DIEGO APPEARANCE FEE

• The match: Mexico 2-2 Cameroon, June 10, 2023, Snapdragon Stadium, San Diego.
• The organizer fee: $600,000 from Soccer United Marketing, in $400,000 and $200,000 payments.
• The state budget: Cameroon’s government also cleared 504,671,731 FCFA for a trip whose housing and local transport Mexico had already covered.
• The U.S. letter: in July 2025 the Nsahlai Law Firm wrote to the FBI and the Southern District of New York seeking an inquiry into wire fraud, money laundering, tax fraud and conspiracy over the missing $600,000, arguing the game on U.S. soil gives American jurisdiction.

Former officials say that $600,000 also passed through Eto’o’s personal Qatar account and never showed up on Fecafoot’s books. Sporting Intelligence published documents on that route in August 2025. The U.S. letter does not, by itself, name Eto’o as a criminal defendant; it names a missing fee owed to Cameroonian football and puts the federation president in the frame because he controls the money.

Players from that San Diego squad have been described as still waiting on their cut. That is the part of the file that does not care who Infantino’s brother in football is.

Fecafoot Calls the Qatar Account a Workaround

Fecafoot has not produced a statement that the invoices are fakes. In June 2025, after the first Russia invoice and the contract were published in Cameroon, the emergency committee said the papers had been “fraudulently obtained or shared by former employees” and that “all decisions have always been debated during Emergency Committee sessions.” It contested the leak. It did not contest the account name on the page.

A later federation statement said vice-presidents, sitting as the emergency committee, took the decisions on collecting and using friendly-match money, called the criticism a campaign of “defamation, slander and insults,” and threatened legal action. It also said Fecafoot’s own funds, from licences, sponsors, friendlies, tickets, and CAF and FIFA grants, are audited, and that four years of clean grant use has kept the federation eligible for development programmes.

Those grant audits matter, and they do not close this question. FIFA Forward money is logged inside FIFA’s own system. A Russian appearance fee never had to pass through Zurich. A clean Forward file can sit beside an untraced bilateral wire, and both statements can be true at once.

Eto’o’s own reply, posted after the invoices returned to view, did not walk through the SWIFT chain. He said the attacks arrived because he had spoken for Africa.

“All it took was for me to speak out to defend our interests, the interests of Africa, for them all to come out in force,” he wrote. “As if by chance, the same attacks, the same talking points, relayed almost simultaneously by journalists who are in their pocket.” He added that people who lecture Africa on democracy dislike it when an African official “speaks freely, defends his convictions and refuses to remain silent.”

That is a political answer. Gatama’s question was a bookkeeping one. Fecafoot can be right that the emergency committee signed off on a transit account and still owe a public ledger line showing the money came home.

He Wants the World Cup Sale Put Back on the Table

The reason Eto’o’s voice is expensive in Zurich this autumn is not only the Doha account. After the 2026 World Cup, Infantino tried to stand up FIFA Forward Enterprise, a commercial subsidiary valued at $20 billion, and sell about 20 percent to private investors, led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Eternal, to raise $4.2 billion. FIFA told associations the plan would unlock USD 20 million of extra development funding apiece, on top of ordinary Forward money, if they backed it.

UEFA’s 55 associations voted to boycott FIFA competitions until the plan died. Infantino withdrew it around August 1, 2026, saying it had created divisions that no longer served the original aim. UEFA has since moved toward a possible Swiss criminal complaint for mismanagement and sought U.S. discovery from Kushner’s firm. Infantino has not been charged. A FIFA spokesperson on September 6 said he is still running in March.

Eto’o was the rare senior African official who wanted the sale revived. After Infantino is re-elected, he said, presidents should reread the project and put it back on the table, because “if there is a democratic vote, this project will be adopted because it’s good for the majority.” He told a French sports interviewer that football is already sold, that African budgets of €150,000 cannot match Europe, and that Infantino “gives Africans the chance to dream.”

The existing Forward 3.0 cycle, which runs through 2026, already offers each of the 211 associations up to $8 million over four years, including up to $1.25 million a year for running costs and $3 million for projects. That is the programme Fecafoot cites when it says audits have kept it eligible. It is also the programme that makes a CAF ballot precious: the same president who signs off on development cash is the one whose ethics chambers have not, the complainants say, picked up the phone.

Infantino still has CAF’s April statement, Morocco as host, and a continent that received the expanded World Cup as a real gain. He also has a European legal war and a Cameroon file that will not stay in Yaoundé. Eto’o has promised to deliver all 54 African presidents. The invoices that named his Doha account are older than that promise. The silence in Zurich is not.