FIFA Wants Outside Money. It Just Isn’t Willing to Give Up Anything for It.

On July 28, FIFA confirmed a plan to create a new commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, that would sell a stake of up to 20 percent in the commercial rights to the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to outside investors. The deal is being pitched at an initial equity valuation of $20 billion, with FIFA aiming to raise up to $4.2 billion this year. Thrive Eternal, a fund founded by Joshua Kushner, is expected to lead the investor group, with J.P. Morgan advising FIFA on the structure. FIFA's 211 member federations have been told they stand to receive up to $40 million each if they accept the arrangement before the September 19 deadline, against as little as $10 million if they do not, a gap large enough to function as pressure rather than a neutral incentive.

Two days later, UEFA's 55 member associations voted unanimously to boycott the World Cup and every other FIFA competition until the plan is withdrawn entirely. That is not a symbolic gesture. Poland is due to host the Women's U20 World Cup in September, the British federations are FIFA's only bidder for the 2035 Women's World Cup, and UEFA represents six of the ten top-ranked national teams in the world. A boycott by that bloc may not be dispositive, but it would be felt immediately.

The situation has moved quickly since. By Friday, Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino's senior adviser and FIFA's own representative on the White House World Cup Task Force, resigned in protest, saying he could not stand by while FIFA considered selling a stake in the World Cup and calling the plan a bad deal for football. Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker, made a point of noting that FIFA already sits on billions of dollars in reserves with no debt, and that raising $4.2 billion by selling a permanent stake in the sport's most valuable asset is hard to justify on the numbers alone. On the same day, FIFA's chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, said staff had been deceived by Infantino's secrecy in putting the plan together and described FFE plainly as the project of one person. The Asian Football Confederation then joined UEFA and CONCACAF in opposition, calling on FIFA to undertake what it termed an urgent review of its own governance and decision-making framework.

Most of the coverage this week has focused on the money and the politics: the size of the valuation, the Kushner family's proximity to the Trump administration, whether a federation payment of up to $40 million is enough to buy consent by the September 19 deadline. Those are fair questions, and Cordeiro's resignation adds a real one to the list: if FIFA's own finances don't obviously require this raise, what is FFE actually solving for? But the detail that should matter most to anyone who has watched FIFA's compliance history is a single sentence buried in FIFA's own announcement, one that Lamour's comment about "the project of one person" now reads less like a legal formality and more like a plain description of what happened: that FIFA would retain sole control of FFE and exclusive authority over football governance, competitions, the match calendar, and all regulatory and sporting decisions.

That sentence is doing a lot of work, and it deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

What "sole control" actually means here

FIFA is not proposing a sale in any conventional sense. It is proposing to bring in outside capital while keeping every lever of authority over the thing that capital is buying into. Investors would hold non-controlling, minority interests in the commercial subsidiary. FIFA would continue to decide who hosts, how competitions are scheduled, what the disciplinary code looks like, and how disputes are resolved. In other words, the people writing the cheques would have financial exposure to FIFA's decisions without any structural mechanism to influence, question, or check those decisions.

That arrangement inverts how most institutions think about bringing in outside capital. Ordinarily, an equity stake comes with some proportional claim on governance, whether through board seats, voting rights, or disclosure obligations. Here, FIFA has designed a structure where the capital and the governance are deliberately kept apart, and FIFA sits on both sides of that separation. It is the party inviting the investment and the party that alone decides how the underlying asset is run.

For an organization with FIFA's compliance history, that is not a neutral design choice. It is the precise arrangement that a functioning governance structure exists to prevent.

A pattern: this organization has been here before

FIFA's reform era formally began after the 2015 indictments, when US prosecutors charged more than a dozen senior officials with racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering tied to bribes for media and marketing rights. The scandal reached back further, to the collapse of FIFA's former marketing agency ISL in 2001 and the bribery findings that followed it. The response, at the time, was an attempt at structural reform: an independent governance committee, new ethics rules, term limits, and public commitments from incoming leadership that the old culture of concentrated, unaccountable decision-making was over.

FFE reproduces that same structural problem in a new form. FIFA is once again the party proposing an arrangement, defining the terms of oversight, and retaining final authority over how it operates, with no independent body positioned to test whether "sole control" is being exercised responsibly once the money has changed hands, even with investors holding up to a 20 percent stake in the subsidiary.

The Asian Football Confederation made close to this exact argument on Friday, when it called on FIFA to undertake an urgent review of its own governance and decision-making framework rather than simply defending the terms of the deal. That is a confederation that has generally been aligned with Infantino, not an adversary looking for a reason to break with him, which makes the substance of its objection harder to wave off as politics. It is also, notably, not a complaint about valuation or ownership percentage. It is a complaint about process, which is the same complaint the reform era of the last decade was supposed to have settled, but of course never did.

The question FIFA has not answered

There is also a more basic question here that has received less attention than it should. Thrive Eternal is founded by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is a son-in-law and former adviser to President Trump. FIFA has reportedly consulted the Trump administration on the plan, and Bloomberg has reported that the idea originated in private conversations between Infantino and Kushner well before any formal process began. Joshua Kushner himself is not reported to hold any political role or direct tie to the administration.

None of this establishes wrongdoing on anyone's part. But it does raise an obvious question that FIFA has simply not addressed: why was this arrangement worked out privately between FIFA's president and an investor with that kind of family proximity to political power, before any of FIFA's 211 members had a chance to weigh-in, and why does the answer to that question matter less to FIFA than hitting a September deadline? A deal reached that way, and then presented to members as close to a done decision with a hard deadline attached, deserves more explanation than FIFA has given it, regardless of whether anything improper actually happened. The explanation FIFA owes its members is straightforward: who was consulted and when, what the actual ownership structure behind Thrive Eternal's investor group looks like, and why the terms were set before members had any real opportunity to shape them.

As of this writing, none of that has been offered. What has been offered is a per-federation payment and a deadline.

What would actually resolve this

If FIFA wants to demonstrate that FFE is what it claims to be, a genuine long-term investment in the game rather than a repeat of the pattern that produced the 2015 scandal, there is a straightforward way to do it. Publish full beneficial ownership information for every entity in the investor group. Commission an independent review of how the deal was originated and by whom, and release it before the September 19 deadline rather than after. Build a real structural firewall between FFE's commercial decisions and FIFA's regulatory functions, one that does not depend on FIFA's own good faith to hold. And extend to member federations something closer to the disclosure a shareholder would be entitled to, given that federations are effectively being asked to accept payment in exchange for a stake in an arrangement they have no ability to oversee.

None of that has happened yet. What has happened instead, in the space of a single week, is that UEFA, CONCACAF, and the AFC have all lined up against the same arrangement, and two of FIFA's own senior figures have said publicly that it was built in secret by one person and sold to staff and members as something closer to a finished decision than a proposal.

That is not the reaction of an organization that miscommunicated a good deal. It is the reaction of an organization whose own people and closest allies looked at the same sentence about sole control and concluded there was nothing behind it worth trusting. Given FIFA's history, that conclusion did not require much of a leap, and it is the institution's own reform era, and its own repeated assurances that the culture behind that history was over, that made the leap this short.

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