FIFA Tried to Sell the World Cup. Then Everyone Started Asking Questions

Imagine finding out the company you technically co-own had quietly agreed to sell a fifth of itself to outside investors, without ever asking you first.

That's roughly the position FIFA's 211 member federations found themselves in this July, when president Gianni Infantino unveiled a plan to sell a minority stake in a new commercial entity controlling the World Cup itself.

The backlash it triggered says as much about how football is governed as the plan itself ever could.

What FIFA actually proposed

The vehicle was called FIFA Forward Enterprise, shortened to FFE.

Under the plan, FIFA would have remained a Swiss non-profit association exactly as it is today, but the commercial and tournament operations that actually generate its money, broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing for events including the World Cup, would have been spun into a separate for-profit company.

Outside investors, reportedly including a New York investment firm associated with Joshua Kushner, would then buy roughly a 20 percent stake in that new entity, which FIFA valued at $20 billion.

The pitch to member federations was straightforward: money, now.

Each of FIFA's 211 members would receive an initial $20 million payment on approval, with three further instalments of $20 million, $22 million and $24 million running through 2038.

FIFA argued this would let it double guaranteed development payments to smaller nations, funding that genuinely matters for football associations with limited resources of their own.

Why the reaction was so fierce

The opposition wasn't really about the money on offer. It was about what FIFA would be permanently giving up in exchange: real, structural control over its own biggest asset, handed to private investors with no accountability to the sport's own governance structures.

UEFA's statement called the proposal "irresponsible and indefensible," accusing FIFA of putting the sport's "soul" up for sale, and specifically criticised the fact that a decision of this magnitude had been developed behind closed doors rather than through FIFA's normal consultative processes.

There was also a sense of déjà vu built into the anger.

FIFA had floated remarkably similar private-investment plans for an expanded Club World Cup back in 2018 and 2019, both times involving Middle Eastern and Asian investors and both times abandoned after UEFA-led opposition.

This felt, to critics, like the same idea returning in a bigger, bolder form, this time targeting the World Cup itself rather than a secondary club competition.

A plan that collapsed faster than it arrived

Once UEFA voted to threaten a boycott and Concacaf and Asia's confederation both rejected the plan within the same week, FIFA's own senior staff began breaking ranks publicly, and Infantino withdrew the proposal entirely within days of first announcing it.

The speed of the collapse, from unveiling to abandonment in under a week, is itself part of the story: a proposal this consequential moved from secret planning to public death without ever going through anything resembling the deliberative process a $20 billion decision might reasonably expect.

It leaves an open question hanging over football's governance that the collapsed deal never actually answered: FIFA's revenue needs, the ones that made this proposal attractive in the first place, haven't gone away just because the specific plan to address them did.

Should football's governing body be allowed to consider deals of this scale through private negotiation, or does an institution this central to a global sport need a fundamentally more transparent way of making decisions about its own ownership?