Aleksander Ceferin was not ready to declare the war over. Two months after Gianni Infantino abandoned a plan to sell 20 percent of FIFA’s commercial rights to private investors, UEFA’s president told a Portuguese football summit on 23 September that dropping the deal had not repaired what it broke.

“Trust in our sport rests on three pillars: unity, transparency, and governance that serves the many, not the few,” Ceferin said in a video address to the Portugal Football Summit in Lisbon, according to Al Jazeera.

“The project that shattered the unity of world football may be abolished, but the trust it broke has not returned, and repairing it is our work now.”

Ceferin did not name Infantino directly.

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“In recent times, all three were disregarded by people who had sworn to protect them,” he said, adding that “not everyone places the game above their own ambitions.”

The $4.2 billion deal Infantino dropped in August

The project was FIFA Forward Enterprise, a new subsidiary that would have absorbed commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup. Thrive Capital Management, the investment firm founded by Joshua Kushner, was lined up as the anchor investor, reportedly paying $4.2 billion for a 20 percent stake.

The plan collapsed in days. UEFA, the Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF each came out against it, and Infantino pulled the proposal on 1 August. This week, he tried to reopen the conversation. In a letter sent on Monday to FIFA Council members and the 211 member associations, Infantino offered to commission an external, independent review of FIFA’s governance framework for major strategic initiatives.

UEFA readies a Swiss criminal complaint

The governance climbdown does not close the legal front. UEFA’s lawyers have signalled that they are “contemplating a Swiss criminal proceeding against Infantino and possibly other FIFA officials for criminal mismanagement under Article 158 of the Swiss Criminal Code,” according to court filings reported by NBC News in late August.

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The same filings suggest that the $4.2 billion valuation could represent, in the lawyers’ words, “a fraudulently off-market price promoted by Infantino for his own benefit.” UEFA has also filed discovery requests in courts in Manhattan and Southern Florida seeking documents from Thrive Capital and from FIFA’s Miami-area offices.

“Football is not for sale.”

The next test comes on 18 November, the deadline for any candidate who wants to challenge Infantino at the FIFA presidential election. The vote is set for the 77th FIFA Congress in Rabat on 18 March 2027.

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