Gianni Infantino’s attempt to draw a line under the FIFA Forward Enterprise affair collapsed inside the room where he delivered it.

The FIFA president spent part of a three-and-a-half-hour Council meeting in Zurich on Thursday saying sorry for the “communication and consultation process” around the aborted plan to sell a stake in FIFA’s commercial rights to outside investors. The European federation presidents left saying he had answered nothing.

“The man has to answer those questions, and if he doesn’t answer those questions, no, he’s not fit to be FIFA president,” said Debbie Hewitt, chair of the English Football Association and a FIFA vice-president.

Bernd Neuendorf, president of the German football federation, said no satisfactory answers had been provided and that reform of the old administration was “not possible with Gianni.”

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He told The National that FIFA needed “a complete restart, I think, a political restart.”

What the FFE actually was

The FIFA Forward Enterprise project was launched and dropped in July 2026. According to ESPN, the structure would have carved FIFA’s commercial rights into a subsidiary, with at least a 20% stake going to a group of outside investors led by US investor Joshua Kushner. The total being raised was reported at $4.2bn.

Infantino told the Council the project had been “a proposal and in no way a done deal” and announced it had now been permanently withdrawn. Council members had asked for the underlying documents. They were not handed over, with FIFA citing ongoing US legal proceedings.

Hewitt called those papers “a crucial next part” of understanding whether any criminal proceedings were warranted.

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$6.35bn and the November 18 deadline

Infantino arrived in Zurich with a concession attached. A FIFA Surplus Solidarity Program would distribute $6.35bn to the 211 member associations across the 2027-2030 cycle, with roughly $25m going to each federation, a sharp increase on the $10m-per-association level that preceded it.

European opposition was not the whole room. UEFA and the English FA are leading the pressure, but FIFA has 211 member associations and each one casts its own ballot at Congress.

That Congress is in Rabat, Morocco, on 18 March 2027, and it will choose FIFA’s next president. Any challenger must be formally nominated, with written backing from five member associations, by 18 November 2026, barely a month away. No rival candidate has been declared.

The next FIFA Council meeting is in Doha on 16 December 2026.

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