Infantino apologises and survives as FIFA's plan to sell investors a stake in the World Cup collapses
FIFA wanted private money in its tournaments. UEFA and its own staff killed the deal in a fortnight.
The organisation that owns the biggest event in world sport spent the past week discovering how little room it has to sell a piece of it. Gianni Infantino will remain FIFA president after a crisis meeting at the governing body's Africa office in Rabat on Wednesday, but only after apologising in writing to FIFA's vice-presidents, its council and all 211 member associations for what he called errors in a plan to open FIFA's tournaments to private investors.
The plan ran through a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise. It would have taken outside money into FIFA competitions including both the men's and women's World Cups; Reuters reported the target as 20 per cent of the vehicle in exchange for $4.2 billion. Infantino put it to the member associations in late July with an offer of $40 million each if they backed it. The Times made the proposal public on 28 July, and it did not survive the fortnight.
The members were the veto
UEFA said it had lost confidence in Infantino's leadership and called the proposal a "shabby, back room, opaque deal". Criticism came from inside the building too: secretary general Mattias Grafstrom wrote to staff describing "a sad and reproachable series of events". Mark Carney, prime minister of one of the three countries that had just co-hosted the World Cup, said he no longer had confidence in the FIFA president, and the former Portugal winger Luis Figo called on him to resign outright.
Four hours after Wednesday's meeting FIFA issued a statement in which the management board, Grafstrom included, reaffirmed its full support for Infantino. FIFA acknowledged mistakes, said it had not been the intention for the council and members to feel excluded from the process, and accepted that the process should have been handled differently. It also warned that it would no longer tolerate attacks on its integrity and good governance.
Why this matters beyond football
Strip out the personalities and this is a governance question every large event eventually faces: who actually controls the commercial rights, and who has to agree before they are sold. FIFA needs its members and confederations behind a deal of this size, and once its largest confederation refused — with individual European federations withdrawing support behind it — a $4.2 billion transaction was dead inside two weeks. Very few event owners have that check built in, and the ones that do rarely have to test it in public.
Two things remain open. Infantino faces re-election at the FIFA Congress in Morocco next March, a vote that looked settled two months ago. And FIFA has denied a report that it promised Morocco the 2030 World Cup final in return for support, saying a decision on the venue for that final — in a tournament it will co-host with Spain and Portugal — will be made in due course.
