Gianni Infantino claims "self-professed governance gurus" hired to help FIFA reform have "failed miserably" as he defended his own efforts to restore the organisation's credibility.
The 47-year-old Swiss-Italian used his presidential address at the 67th FIFA Congress in Bahrain to respond to criticism of his actions since taking over at world football's governing body in February 2016, while warning the assembled 'FIFA family' that corruption would "never again" be tolerated.
In a wide-ranging speech which switched between four languages, Infantino said he and his new team have been "rebuilding FIFA" from its "lowest point" - a reference to the scandals of 2015 that brought down his predecessor Sepp Blatter and dozens of other senior figures in world football.
He thanked the criminal authorities in Germany, Switzerland and the United States for helping FIFA to root out the corrupt officials but suggested "fake news" and "FIFA-bashing" has painted an overly negative picture of his regime.
Without naming anybody, Infantino then launched into a remarkable attack on "many highly-paid experts" who simply "rubber-stamped a sick and wrong system".
He said: "We will not accept any governance lessons from these self-professed governance gurus who failed miserably."
It is unclear who he was speaking about specifically but, at last year's Congress in Mexico, Swiss-Italian businessman Domenico Scala quit his role as audit and compliance committee chairman in protest at what he said was Infantino's attempts to curtail his independence.
Scala, however, is far from being the only person brought in by FIFA in the last few years to reform its processes only to leave in anger or frustration.
Infantino was speaking two days after the FIFA Council announced sweeping changes to its audit and compliance, ethics and governance committees, which included replacing the chief ethics investigator Cornel Borbely, ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert and governance chairman Professor Miguel Maduro.
The latter's departure is understood to have led to the resignation of the highly-rated professor Joseph Weiler in protest, while Borbely and Eckert have reacted furiously to their replacement.
They said in a press conference on Wednesday that their exit is "politically motivated", that it threatens hundreds of ongoing corruption cases and effectively ends the reform process. They had issued sanctions against more than 70 individuals since 2015.
Infantino did not address any of this directly but did make a reference to term limits and the need to respect democratic decisions.
The president, however, was much more forceful on the subject of FIFA's finances, after recent reports of big losses, high legal bills and a struggle to find sponsors for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
"Our finances are extremely solid - we don't need to b******* you with false figures," said Infantino, in remarkably direct language for these usually sterile occasions.
He pointed out it was "business as normal" for an organisation that gets "90 per cent" of its revenues from one event, the World Cup, to record three years of losses and then one year of profit.
He said FIFA would finish the four-year 2018 World Cup cycle by distributing one billion US dollars (£770million) more to national associations for development projects than the 2014 cycle, and still have a further one billion US dollars in reserves.
Infantino said FIFA's books were "solid and transparent" and no longer would anybody see high sums of "other costs" in the accounts.
On the issue of the £39million spent on lawyers last year, he said: "We don't need to be ashamed of this. Those who caused it do, not us."
The former UEFA general secretary, who only emerged as a FIFA presidential candidate when his boss Michel Platini was banned, concluded his speech by racing through a number of other issues in his in-tray, including the need to fight racism, match-fixing and doping.
He also said more should be done to boost women's and youth football, saying FIFA was looking at the creation of a "world league" for women's football, without giving any further details of how this might work.
Later on in the congress, Infantino dropped in another announcement related to one of his favourite projects, the FIFA Legends team of former players. He said an England Legends team would play a World Legends team in a charity match at Wembley when London hosts the FIFA Best Awards on October 23.
Earlier on, however, there was bad news for the national associations in Guatemala and Kuwait, as congress voted almost unanimously to extend their suspensions from FIFA.
Source: PA
