FIFA spent decades lecturing the football world about protecting the integrity of the game, and now Gianni Infantino wants to sell a piece of the World Cup to private equity investors.
Less than two weeks after Spain lifted the trophy in front of Donald Trump at the newly built stadium in East Rutherford, FIFA announced a plan to spin off the commercial rights to the World Cup and its other flagship competitions into a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, then sell up to 20% of that entity to outside investors led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Eternal.
FIFA says it would still own and control the new entity through majority board representation and exclusive authority over football governance, framing the move as a way to unleash commercial potential the sport has built up around its own popularity.
Strip away the corporate language and what remains is simple enough for anyone to understand without an economics degree.
The biggest single event in world sport, a tournament built on a century of shared ownership by federations, players, and fans, is being carved into an investment product for people who have never kicked a ball competitively in their lives.
The Architecture of the Sell-Off
FIFA expects the 2026 World Cup to generate somewhere around $15 billion in total revenue once every figure gets fully audited, and instead of treating that windfall as proof the current model works, Infantino has decided the smarter play is to bring in outside capital and rebuild the sport’s financial architecture around it.
The proposed vehicle carries an initial valuation of $20 billion, and FIFA intends to raise a little over $4.2 billion by selling minority, non-controlling stakes to what it calls long-term investors, with J.P. Morgan already retained to structure the raise alongside Thrive Eternal.
Under the term sheet FIFA has circulated, those outside investors would receive no representation on the FIFA Council, no vote at the FIFA Congress, and no say whatsoever over the format, frequency, or expansion of the World Cup or any other sporting or regulatory decision.
That difference matters because it cuts against the loudest fear circulating online this week, the idea that Wall Street would get a direct hand on the calendar itself.
The truth is almost worse in a quieter way. Investors would not need a seat at the table to shape outcomes, because the moment FIFA’s operating income depends on satisfying a private equity return target, every future decision about ticketing, sponsorship density, and match scheduling gets filtered through that obligation whether or not a fund manager ever shows up to a FIFA Council meeting.
The mechanics of the deal, once you separate what FIFA has confirmed from what has been assumed online, look like this:
- A new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, would absorb the World Cup’s broadcast rights, sponsorship deals, ticketing revenue, and licensing income into a single commercial vehicle carrying an initial valuation of $20 billion.
- Investors led by Thrive Eternal, the venture firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, would be permitted to buy up to a 20% stake in that vehicle for roughly $4.2 billion.
- FIFA’s existing development funding for member associations, historically around $8 million per federation per cycle, would rise to $20 million for the 2027 to 2030 cycle if the plan gets approved, climbing further toward $22 million and then $24 million through the 2035 to 2038 cycle.
- Member federations have until September 19, 2026 to approve the arrangement, a deadline Infantino set unilaterally and one that left several national associations furious they only learned the specifics through press coverage rather than direct consultation from Zurich.
- Should the plan be rejected, FIFA has told members funding would instead revert to roughly $10 million per association under the existing Forward program for the next cycle, effectively halving what federations stand to gain by saying no.
That last bullet deserves its own paragraph, because it is the part of this scheme that should make anyone who still believes in a fair footballing world genuinely angry. Infantino is not simply proposing a business deal and letting the merits speak for themselves.
He is dangling $20 million in front of small and often cash-strapped federations while silently halving that figure for anyone who does not fall in line, and he did it through a video message rather than a negotiated conversation with the people whose votes he actually needs.
Poorer nations across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the very federations FIFA claims to serve through its development mission, are being placed in a position where voting against a private equity arrangement around the World Cup comes with a direct financial penalty attached.
A football finance professor put the dynamic bluntly to CNBC last week, explaining that FIFA under Infantino has built a pattern of distributing large sums to smaller countries, who then return the favor by backing him at election time.
Call it what it actually is. This is vote buying dressed up as a funding opportunity, and it uses the World Cup as collateral.
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Who Is Fighting Back
The backlash arrived within hours and has not slowed down since. UEFA moved first and moved hardest, releasing a statement so direct it barely sounds like something that comes out of a football confederation’s press office.
“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade, especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially,” the statement read. “None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”
Within days, sources confirmed that UEFA’s 55 member associations were preparing for an emergency virtual meeting to weigh their options, including a potential boycott of future FIFA competitions, a threat with real teeth given that three of the four semi-finalists from the tournament that just ended belong to UEFA.
The opposition has not stayed confined to Europe’s governing body either. It has spread across nearly every corner of the sport that still has a functioning conscience about who football actually belongs to:
- FIFPRO Europe, the players’ union representing professional footballers across the continent, said it holds deep concern that the proposal risks turning the World Cup and other competitions into investable assets for private capital, a shift that would fundamentally and irreversibly reshape the incentives underpinning the competitions players build their careers around.
- European Leagues, the body representing domestic competitions across the continent, called the plan a reckless and divisive development and argued the World Cup’s value is created daily by leagues, clubs, players, and supporters, none of whom have been given a voice or a vote in the process.
- La Liga president Javier Tebas went furthest of all, telling reporters the plan does not resemble reform so much as an electoral campaign financed through the future of football itself, adding that development should never be used to buy votes or silence.
- FA chair Debbie Hewitt was reportedly among the FIFA vice presidents who learned of the plan through media coverage rather than internal briefing, a detail that has fueled accusations Infantino deliberately kept the process closed to avoid resistance forming early.
- Former Football Association and Manchester City chairman David Bernstein went as far as suggesting England should withdraw from the World Cup entirely if Infantino’s proposal moves forward as written.
- Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president whose own tenure ended in scandal, criticized the plan too, arguing that the closeness between Infantino and Donald Trump had taken on a financial dimension damaging to the sport and insisting nobody has the right to sell football off.
Even Britain’s new prime minister has weighed into a plan that was supposed to sail through quietly on the momentum of a record-breaking tournament, joining a growing list of political voices that FIFA rarely has to contend with when pushing through commercial decisions.
Not every federation has closed ranks against the proposal though, and that split is exactly the wedge Infantino appears to be counting on.
The Czech Football Association’s president publicly backed the $20 billion plan even as domestic Czech league officials pushed back against his position, a small but telling sign that the $20 million carrot is already doing its job in some corners of the voting block.
On Friday, FIFA stressed it would not go ahead with the plan without the support of the majority of its member associations.
“These principles underpin the FFE proposal: Unprecedented development funding, truly global ownership of the commercial opportunities of our sport, and full self-determination through a democratic process for all MAs,”
Xabi Alonso said on Friday that football had to prioritise the people who watch the game, not private interests.
“The way we love football is like this, and we have just seen a great World Cup. If things stay this way, then good. We have to defend the interests of all the people.
I think this is a common feeling among football people. We want to keep football for the fans, for everyone, not for other interests.
So hopefully this will not happen.”
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This Is Not a New Pattern
None of this should come as a shock to anyone who has watched Infantino run FIFA over the past decade. The private equity plan is not a sudden departure from character. It is the next chapter of a strategy that has been building since he first took charge of the organization.
The men’s World Cup grew from a 32-team format to 48 teams for this year’s tournament, expanding the competition from a projected 80 matches to 104 and forcing eventual champions to win 8 games instead of 7, all under the justification of growing the game globally.
Around the same period, the Club World Cup itself was overhauled into a 32-team competition running every 4 years, a decision the FIFA Council approved during a meeting in Rwanda over the objections of leagues who felt completely shut out of the process.
That expansion did not come without a fight either. Players’ unions in England and France, backed by FIFPRO and the World Leagues Association, filed a legal claim in a Brussels court challenging FIFA’s authority to unilaterally set the international match calendar around the expanded Club World Cup.
The complaint centered on the same issue that has run through every one of Infantino’s decisions since he took the presidency.
Expansion means more matches, more matches mean more broadcast windows to sell, and more windows to sell mean more revenue flowing toward a commercial machine that keeps growing regardless of what it costs the players whose bodies actually generate that revenue.
Every plank of this administration’s playbook points toward the same conclusion, and the private equity sale is just the moment the pattern became impossible to ignore. Growth for growth’s sake stopped being about reaching new fans a long time ago.
It became about creating more inventory, more sponsorship slots, more matchdays, and now more equity to sell, all funneled through a governing body that keeps insisting every decision serves the good of the world game while its own leadership collects the political capital and financial leverage that come with controlling the largest revenue engine in sport.
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What Comes Next
FIFA’s own deadline sits on the calendar for September 19, 2026, giving member associations roughly 7 weeks to decide whether they accept $20 million now with a rising scale through 2038, tied to a permanent stake sale to a Kushner-backed investment vehicle, or hold out for half that amount under the existing funding structure.
Reports suggest FIFA could begin receiving the first tranche of external investment as soon as October, assuming enough federations fall in line before the vote.
UEFA’s emergency meeting, FIFPRO’s public condemnation, European Leagues standing behind them, and now even a former FIFA president adding his voice to the opposition all point toward a genuine standoff rather than a formality on the way to rubber stamping the deal.
Whatever happens over the coming weeks, the fight itself has already exposed something fans across every continent have suspected for years without always being able to prove it outright.
The World Cup stopped being treated like a shared inheritance belonging to everyone who plays and watches the game a long time ago, and it started being treated like a balance sheet asset waiting for the right buyer.
Infantino built the expanded tournament, built the bloated Club World Cup, and built the financial machinery required to make private investors take FIFA seriously as a business partner.
Now he is asking the very federations he has spent a decade courting with cash to approve handing a slice of football’s biggest stage to a venture capital firm run by the brother of the American president’s son-in-law.
Football does not belong on an auction block, and the fact that anyone inside FIFA thought otherwise says more about where the sport’s leadership has drifted than any commercial pitch deck ever could.
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