Alderweireld Backs Kompany for FIFA Presidency
Toby Alderweireld has put a striking name forward for one of football’s most powerful jobs – and it is not a career administrator.
The former Belgium and Tottenham defender says Bayern Munich boss Vincent Kompany would be his ideal future president of FIFA, arguing the world game needs a leader forged on the pitch, not in the boardroom.
Alderweireld’s pick for world football’s top job
Asked by Hajper who he would like to see running FIFA one day, Alderweireld did not hesitate.
“Who would be my pick to be the next president of FIFA? Vincent Kompany,” he said. “He would be my president, always.”
Kompany, now in charge of German giants Bayern and already a back-to-back Bundesliga winner, has built an impressive second career on the touchline after a decorated playing spell in England and Belgium. Titles with Manchester City, leadership of the Belgian national team, and now success in Munich have all burnished his reputation as one of the game’s sharpest modern minds.
For Alderweireld, who shared Belgium’s back line with Kompany 47 times, the idea of his former captain stepping into football’s most powerful office is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
‘On a mission to change football’
Alderweireld revealed that Kompany’s ambitions were always bigger than the next match.
“I never thought before that he wanted to become a manager,” he admitted. “He always talked about going on a mission to change football but maybe it’s his mission to protect football.”
That word – protect – runs through Alderweireld’s argument. In his eyes, the sport is drifting too far towards spectacle and commercialism, and not enough towards the people who actually play and watch it.
Kompany, he believes, bridges that gap. A serial winner who grew up in the game, yet someone who has never hidden his interest in the political and structural side of football.
A shot at Infantino’s FIFA
The endorsement lands at a time when current FIFA president Gianni Infantino faces growing criticism for his vision of the sport. Infantino climbed through the ranks at UEFA as an administrator and never played professionally, a background that grates with traditionalists who feel the game is being reshaped by those who never lived it from the inside.
Alderweireld did not name Infantino directly in every barb, but the target was clear.
“It’s very important that the FIFA president is someone who played the game and knows the game,” he said. “We’ve all been a fan. Then we’ve become a football player. We know both sides.”
He painted his own journey as an example: a kid on the bus to away games, long before the Premier League and Champions League money arrived.
“We’re not just people who made good money out of playing in the Premier League and Champions League,” he continued. “We’re football fans too. We played the game. We know how it is. What it is to be a player and a fan.”
Tradition versus showbiz
Alderweireld’s criticism sharpened when he spoke about how major tournaments are evolving, using the World Cup as his reference point.
“The one thing that’s very important is that the person who’s doing the talking should be a football guy because look at the World Cup. A 20-minute show at half-time? That’s where you need someone who knows football to say no.”
That line cuts to the heart of his argument: football, in his view, is being dressed up for entertainment executives at the expense of what makes it unique.
“The most beautiful thing about the sport is its traditions,” he said. New ideas have a place, he accepted, but not at any cost.
“We need to protect the traditions as well and that’s why you need football players, football people who have been around the game, to keep the businessmen in check.”
In Alderweireld’s mind, Kompany is exactly that type of figure – a modern coach with an old-school feel for the game’s soul. Whether he ever trades the dugout for the FIFA presidency is another matter entirely, but the question Alderweireld poses lingers: when football’s next era is shaped, will it be by those who played it, or those who package it?
