Europe’s 55 football associations are being pulled into an emergency virtual meeting this week to weigh boycotting future World Cups.
The trigger is FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s proposal to raise as much as $4.2bn by selling equity in a new commercial subsidiary that would hold the rights to the men’s and women’s tournaments.
UEFA’s opening statement was unusually blunt.
“None of us owns football. It is not for FIFA to sell it.”
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The confederation said the proposal “crosses a line that the institutions governing football should never cross” and that “the soul and governance of football are not assets to be traded.”
The FIFA Forward Enterprise plan
Infantino wants to fold FIFA’s commercial and event operations, including future World Cups, into a new company called FIFA Forward Enterprise.
The subsidiary carries an initial valuation of around $20bn. FIFA would retain majority control and offer a minority stake of roughly 20 per cent to outside investors, with JP Morgan advising the sale.
The investor group is expected to be led by Thrive Eternal, a fund created by Thrive Capital, the venture firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
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Infantino framed the move as reinvestment rather than a sale.
“Football is the world’s most popular sport and an extraordinary engine of human and social development,” he said in FIFA’s announcement, describing the venture as a way to “unleash the commercial potential” the World Cup has demonstrated.
“You have sold out”
Political opposition arrived within hours. UK prime minister Andy Burnham issued a statement attacking the plan directly.
“The World Cup is not a product. It is the greatest competition in world sport, and it was never anyone’s to sell.”
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“Dress the deal up however you like. Once you have sold a piece of it, you have sold out.”
Burnham argued that football “belongs to the people who fill the stands and who stand on the touchline week in, week out, rain or shine.”
Ceferin has blocked Infantino before
UEFA has form on facing FIFA down. In 2021, Infantino dropped a plan to stage the World Cup every two years after UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin publicly warned that European nations would refuse to take part.
The threat worked because Europe supplies the men’s tournament with most of its strongest teams, its biggest broadcast markets and a decisive share of its sponsorship value.
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The equity plan needs approval from the FIFA Congress, where all 211 member associations vote.
UEFA’s 55 members form the largest single bloc. If they hold together, and if a handful of confederations join them, the deal never reaches Kushner’s fund.
That is the calculation Ceferin will put to his members this week.
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