Infantino drops the World Cup sell-off, and UEFA says he has lost its confidence

FIFA’s plan to sell a fifth of its World Cup business to private investors lasted three days. It was announced on 28 July, rejected by three of the six confederations inside 72 hours, and pulled on 31 July. What survives it is a UEFA statement that reads less like a reaction to a failed proposal than an opening move against the man who made it.

What FIFA Forward Enterprise actually was

The vehicle was to be called FIFA Forward Enterprise. It would have held the commercial and operational rights to FIFA’s competitions, the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup among them, and FIFA put a value of around 20 billion dollars on it. The plan was to sell about 20 per cent, a minority stake with no control attached, and raise up to 4.2 billion dollars. The anchor investor was to be Thrive Eternal, the New York firm founded by Joshua Kushner.

Infantino wrote to all 211 member associations with the pitch attached to a number. Federations that backed it would get 20 million dollars, with 19 September set as the deadline to secure the first payment. Once the objections started, the offer doubled to 40 million the following day. That doubling is what turned a financing argument into an argument about buying votes.

Three confederations said no inside 72 hours

UEFA went first. Its 55 associations voted on 30 July to boycott all FIFA competitions if the plan went through, which from the bloc that has won more than half of all World Cups is not a gesture. CONCACAF’s 41 members rejected it the same day. The AFC came out on 31 July, saying it stood with both and that the proposal could not realistically reach the consensus it needed.

That last one is the part with a direct line to Indian football. The AIFF sits inside the AFC, and the money it receives from Zurich comes through the development programme whose name the new company had borrowed. India’s current FIFA Forward allocation runs to roughly 4.3 million dollars for competitions and 2.7 million for infrastructure, and FIFA has said it wants to lift the per-association figure from 8 million dollars to 20 million for the 2027-30 cycle. Where that money comes from was exactly what the argument was about.

The resistance came from inside as well

Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino, president of US Soccer from 2018 to 2020 and FIFA’s representative on the White House task force for this year’s World Cup, resigned on 31 July. He said he had no involvement in the proposal, called it a bad deal for football, and asked why FIFA would sell part of its most valuable asset to raise 4.2 billion dollars while sitting on billions in reserves with no debt.

Kevin Lamour, FIFA’s chief operating officer, went further and said staff had been misled by the lack of openness around the plan. He described FFE as the project of one person and said it must not go ahead.

UEFA is not treating this as settled

Infantino’s statement said the project had “created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place”, and that the proposal would not proceed. He said he wanted to bring all interested parties back together.

UEFA’s reply did not accept the framing. “We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast-track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game,” it said. It went back to what Infantino promised on transparency and development money when he took office in 2016 and concluded that “on both these promises, he has failed to deliver”. Then the line that matters: the current FIFA leadership “has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family”. It wants a thorough review with no option off the table.

What can actually happen now

There are two mechanisms. An emergency FIFA Congress requires the backing of 20 per cent of the 211 member associations, meaning 43 federations, and a no-confidence vote would sit there. The other is the presidential election in Rabat in March 2027, with candidates required to register by 18 November. Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa of the AFC, CONCACAF’s Victor Montagliani and UEFA’s Aleksander Ceferin have been named in the reporting since as possible challengers, though none has declared anything.

Withdrawing the plan was the easy part, and it took three days. Rebuilding the relationship with confederations that were willing to threaten a World Cup boycott to stop it is the part that will decide whether Infantino makes it to Rabat with a job to defend.

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