Gianni Infantino has no international break. The Fifa president is widely expected to appear at the United Nations general assembly in New York this week, where he will lobby heads of state for their federations' support as he continues his campaign to be re-elected next year — a campaign that sources increasingly believe will end without a single opponent on the ballot.

Infantino has not been idle since Fifa abandoned its controversial World Cup sell-off plan last month. He has crisscrossed the globe on a private jet provided by Qatar Airways as part of its sponsorship deal with world football's governing body, visiting Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Kyrgyzstan and various other countries from his strongholds in Doha, Rabat and Miami — his trips often coinciding with the approval of development funding worth millions of dollars.

Whether Qatar Airways facilitating Infantino's re-election campaign should be considered legitimate Fifa presidential business is a moot point — and one that neatly encapsulates the huge incumbency bias that will benefit the Swiss if a vote takes place at the Fifa congress in March. That ballot itself appears to be in doubt, with multiple sources involved in the push to remove Infantino telling the Guardian they are running out of hope of finding a candidate to beat him.

Although dozens of the 200 member associations that had submitted letters of endorsement for Infantino withdrew them after the emergence of his Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) sale plan in July, the prevailing view is that the silent majority remain steadfastly behind him. A meeting with the Caribbean Football Union, at which funding projects were approved, may have splintered the vote at Concacaf, and there are increasing concerns that the European alliance may not be watertight.

"Running against Fifa the institution"

The scale of the challenge facing any would-be rival was laid bare by one source involved in the effort to unseat the incumbent.

"As long as Gianni is running, I don't think anyone else will raise their hand," the source said. "They would effectively be running against Fifa the institution. Fifa declared his candidacy, provides staff, aeroplanes and cars, even a personal video team."

The same source was blunt about the likely outcome: "If he doesn't step down before March, the election will not be contested. Uefa and others could stage a boycott so the victory would be tainted, but Gianni will win a clear majority of whoever shows up."

Infantino first declared his intention to seek a fourth and final term at the April congress in Vancouver. Fifa statutes limit presidents to three full terms, but under a recent change he is permitted a fourth because his first term lasted three years rather than the usual four, following his 2016 election to replace the disgraced Sepp Blatter. The 56-year-old reasserted his intention to stand after attending the first match of the Under-20 Women's World Cup in Poland a fortnight ago, via a statement issued by Fifa's media team.

As it stands, Infantino has no opponent, despite Uefa, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation having called for him to go. Beyond the obvious difficulty of taking on an incumbent who controls the machinery of office and funding budgets — the last Fifa president beaten at the ballot box was Sir Stanley Rous in 1974 — there are specific reasons why none of the candidates have declared.

Why nobody will stand

The most credible challenger is regarded as Concacaf's president, Victor Montagliani, but the Canadian is committed to standing for re-election at his own confederation, with that vote due in February. Standing in both elections is not regarded as feasible, and Montagliani is understandably reluctant to walk away from Concacaf in favour of fighting a potentially losing battle.

The AFC president, Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, was beaten by Infantino in the 2016 election — the only time Infantino has faced an electoral opponent — and is further hamstrung by the fact that his confederation's main powers, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, are all backing the incumbent.

Qatar's position would also appear to rule out a challenge from Nasser al-Khelaifi, the chair of European Football Clubs, while an openly European move led by Uefa's president, Aleksander Ceferin, would have no chance of success. Ceferin, in any case, has his own presidential contest in March to focus on.

To compound the difficulties, any election would be a secret ballot, making any promises from member associations during the campaign period all but worthless.

Uefa's courtroom strategy

With the electoral route all but blocked, Uefa is focusing its efforts on legal avenues to remove Infantino, accusing him of "criminal mismanagement" in a 56-page document lodged with US state courts in New York, Miami and Colorado last month that seeks the disclosure of all documents relating to FFE.

Fifa responded strongly the week after Uefa made its legal complaint, filing a response in New York in which it sought to block the discovery process. Its submission accused Uefa of mounting a smear campaign against Infantino in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing.

"Uefa's application suffers from a fundamental defect: Uefa seeks discovery in aid of a foreign criminal proceeding that does not exist and that Uefa admittedly lacks the authority to initiate," Fifa's submission said. "While these applications are styled as legal pleadings with captions and docket numbers, they are little more than press releases in further support of Uefa's smear campaign against Fifa and its leadership."

Although there is widespread confidence that at least one of the three jurisdictions will grant discovery, the process grants Fifa the right of appeal, so there is little prospect of new material being made public before the 18 November deadline for presidential candidates to come forward. An initial decision from the courts is expected next month, but an appeal from the losing party appears inevitable whatever the outcome.

"The issue with discovery is that it takes a long time," a source said. "It's likely to run beyond the date of the election in March. If the process is under way by then, Fifa congress could decide to wait until we find out what the courts discover and postpone the election. But there would still have to be a vote on that."

The $20bn question

Uefa's not-so-secret hope is that the discovery process finds evidence that FFE was deliberately undervalued at $20bn (£15bn) to provide a guaranteed future windfall for Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital, which had seemingly agreed to pay $4.2bn for 21% of the new commercial venture — giving it a significant share of future Fifa revenues.

Thrive subsequently bought 20% of the LA Lakers last month as part of a larger transaction with the former Disney chief executive Bob Iger that valued the NBA franchise at $12.5bn, a deal that has further highlighted the gulf between Infantino's valuation of the World Cup and the market.

For context, Fifa's revenues for the four years to 2026 were $15bn, a figure projected to grow to $18bn over the next four-year cycle owing to larger broadcast deals — without accounting for any expansion of the World Cup and Club World Cup, which remains on the agenda.

A corporate fraud lawyer said that undervaluing FFE could potentially constitute a criminal offence by Fifa, a case Uefa would take to the Swiss courts.

"If you're doing a deal that is way off market then you are deceiving the stakeholders, in this case the member associations," the legal source said. "That is criminal. If Uefa has a criminal case that's where it will be. It's about how the valuation was done, by whom, and what conflicts were there."

"All of that should come out during disclosure. If beyond that there were personal deals being struck on the side, that could also be criminal. All those details should be disclosed."

Beyond the $20bn valuation, the identity of the would-be investors and Fifa's claim that it would retain control over governance, very little has been made public about the development of FFE, with a sales deck produced by the US bank JP Morgan among the few known documents. And with the legal process unlikely to bear fruit before the March congress, Infantino's coronation to a fourth term as Fifa president appears ever more likely to take place without a fight.