Infantino’s World Cup sell-off plan exposed this week sparks revolt within FIFA
Gianni Infantino’s proposal to sell a share of future World Cup revenues to outside investors was revealed within FIFA this week and has provoked a backlash that now threatens his presidency. The disclosure followed public celebration of a World Cup that generated a record $15bn in revenues and came days after Infantino attacked “those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours” on Instagram.
The controversy has roots that the article traces back to the 2010 Zurich decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, episodes of high-level anger including Bill Clinton throwing an ashtray, an FBI corruption inquiry, and the larger story of Chuck Blazer’s cooperation with investigators. Blazer’s evidence led to arrests at Zurich’s Baur au Lac hotel in 2015 and Sepp Blatter’s resignation six days later. Michel Platini was the overwhelming favourite to succeed Blatter but a 2011 payment led to his suspension, with the Berne federal prosecutor Michael Lauber breaking protocol to call Platini “between a witness and a suspect”; Lauber later became Switzerland’s attorney general and resigned after a secret meeting with Infantino while investigating FIFA, and Platini has since been cleared and is suing FIFA and Infantino.
Infantino rose from his role as UEFA secretary general to win the FIFA presidency in February 2016, defeating the Bahraini Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa. The article notes Sheikh Salman was described in the campaign as an avid hunter who denied allegations of complicity in the torture of pro-democracy campaigners. A late shift by the Caribbean bloc, for which Sunil Gulati of the US Soccer Federation took credit, helped secure Infantino’s election and, subsequently, the US, Mexico and Canada were awarded the right to host the 2026 World Cup.
The piece records a continuing US presence in Infantino’s presidency, including a 2020 dinner in Davos where Donald Trump told Infantino: “You wanted to have it there and I wanted to have it there, and we really did it before we came to office.” It reiterates a chronology — Infantino elected February 2016, Trump inaugurated January 2017, hosting decision May 2018 — and details legal-reform gestures such as FIFA appointing the US law firm Paul Weiss as legal representatives in May 2019, shortly after Paul Weiss had named the former US attorney general Loretta Lynch as a senior partner; the following year Lynch praised FIFA’s newfound “transparency and ethical behaviour.”
The article describes how Infantino’s early reform pledges faltered: within a year he had removed two leaders of FIFA’s ethics commission and, the same weekend Donald Trump sacked James Comey, Infantino dismissed Miguel Maduro after Maduro had blocked the re-election of the head of the Russian Football Union, Vitaly Mutko, on the grounds of political involvement. The report says Infantino increasingly bypassed the FIFA Council and operated by fiat, and frames the proposed sell-off of World Cup revenue as the most egregious example, questioning why such a plan was kept from senior staff, given members only 53 days to consider it, and accompanied by offers of a cash bonus, hydration breaks, a half-time show in the final and disciplinary overrides to ensure particular players would be on the field.
Those implicated in the deal are described as connected to the Trump family, specifically Joshua Kushner, and the article cites the financial terms that prompted outrage: selling 21% of all future revenues for only 28% of what this World Cup made. UEFA responded with a robust, united threat to boycott FIFA tournaments; the plan is described as dead “for now” after an emergency meeting in Rabat where Infantino rallied some senior FIFA staff, though the chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour — one of two members of the five-man inner council who voted against the plan when informed the day before the World Cup final — was not present.
The piece records immediate political fallout: plans to accelerate an expansion of the World Cup to 64 teams, the withdrawal of letters of support that once suggested Infantino might run unopposed, and the Confederation of African Football pledging support alongside Mexico, Argentina, Qatar, the UAE, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. UEFA has vowed to “paralyse” FIFA until Infantino is gone, and the first tournament that might be subject to boycott pressure is the Under-20 Women’s World Cup, which begins in Poland on 5 September — a tournament Poland has invested in and whose federation the article says would be unlikely to step outside the UEFA bloc.
An election is scheduled for next March; the report records that questions remain about whether Infantino can muster a majority among FIFA’s 211 members as the organisation confronts the immediate test of Poland’s Under-20 Women’s World Cup and wider calls for institutional change.