The Swiss criminal complaint UEFA is drafting against Gianni Infantino has done what a summer of political pressure could not. On Monday, the FIFA president wrote to the Council and all 211 member associations and offered to hand over FIFA’s biggest decisions to an external, independent review.
The proposal, sent ahead of the next Council meeting on 15 October, is a direct response to the collapse of FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), the plan to sell private investors a permanent stake in the commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup.
“I will ask the Council whether it wishes to commission an external, independent assessment of FIFA’s current governance framework for major strategic initiatives and to recommend potential improvements,” Infantino wrote in the letter.
He proposed alongside it “a direct, structured, and time-bound consultation with the confederations and member associations on how to further strengthen FIFA’s decision-making processes,” and framed the collapse of FFE as a communication failure rather than a substantive one.
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“The proposal entered the public domain before FIFA’s planned institutional process had been completed and before it could be presented in full to the Council and the member associations,” Infantino wrote.
“I recognize that, without full context, this caused concern and created the impression that decisions had already been taken. They had not.”
The $4.2bn plan that leaked
FFE was unveiled by Infantino in July, when he announced that FIFA had lined up a permanent equity investor for its commercial rights: Thrive Eternal, the vehicle controlled by Joshua Kushner. According to UEFA’s later court filings in Florida, the syndicate was to acquire its stake for $4.2bn against a total valuation of roughly $20bn.
Once details of the negotiations leaked, the reaction was severe. UEFA alleged that Infantino had developed the plan in secret with a small circle of advisers over more than a year, without consulting the FIFA Council, the regional confederations or the 211 members, and had then pushed it through an emergency meeting.
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By August, UEFA had begun drafting criminal proceedings in Switzerland under Article 158 of the country’s criminal code, which covers criminal mismanagement. It also filed an ex parte application in a US federal court in Florida for the release of FIFA documents.
“UEFA and other interested parties are preparing to bring criminal claims in Switzerland against Infantino and possibly other FIFA officials and advisors for criminal mismanagement,” the European body wrote in its filing.
UEFA suspended a threatened boycott on a provisional basis after Infantino withdrew the plan.
The Congress vote is six months away
Infantino, 56, is seeking a fourth term as FIFA president at Congress in March 2027, and the nomination deadline for rival candidates is 18 November. UEFA and CONCACAF have both been publicly critical, but confederations do not control how their member associations vote; each of FIFA’s 211 members casts its own ballot.
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“Withdrawing this proposal does not diminish our ambition or our responsibility to reinvest a greater share of the fruits of FIFA’s success into football,” Infantino wrote in Monday’s letter.
“What changes is not the ambition, but the strength of the process.”
The Council decides on 15 October whether to commission the review.
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