FIFA‘s push to sell off a piece of its tournament business has done something rare in world football: united UEFA and CONCACAF, angered the European Union, drawn a rebuke from a sitting prime minister, and now put the World Cup itself at risk of a boycott by some of the sport’s biggest nations.
The global governing body of the world’s most popular sport confirmed this week that it intends to raise $4.2 billion by selling minority, non-controlling stakes in a new semi-private entity called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), which would house the commercial operations of the World Cup and FIFA’s other competitions. FIFA says it would keep a majority share and retain sole authority over football governance, competitions, the match calendar, and all regulatory and sporting decisions. The body is targeting an initial equity valuation of $20 billion for the new entity.
Each of FIFA’s 211 member associations would be offered a one-off stake of $20 million in FFE—a modest 0.1 percent of the total, but a meaningful sum for smaller federations. FIFA has also floated payouts exceeding $80 million to each member association between now and 2037, and says the scheme could push its total development funding past $10 billion over the next four years.
The effort is reportedly being bankrolled by Thrive Capital, the investment firm run by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner and brother-in-law to US President Donald Trump, alongside an arm of JP Morgan Chase. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the same bank that once tried to finance the failed European Super League breakaway. British newspapers The Times and The Financial Times, citing leaked details, also reported that FIFA president Gianni Infantino could stand to become commissioner of FFE once his current term ends in 2031. FIFA has denied that possibility was ever discussed.
For the plan to proceed, it still needs approval from FIFA’s 38-member council and a majority of its 211 member associations, with FIFA setting a September 19 deadline for that vote.
FIFA Plan Receives Backlash
The reaction was immediate and largely hostile. UEFA, European football’s governing body, said the plan crossed a line that football’s institutions should never cross, arguing that the game’s governance isn’t FIFA’s to trade away. The European Union’s sport commissioner, Glenn Micallef, was blunter still, posting simply that investors should keep their “hands off our game.”
CONCACAF, which governs North and Central American football, said it was troubled by the lack of due process behind the plan, noting that the details had been made public before any real consultation with football’s governing bodies. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, an Everton supporter, added his own rebuke, arguing that the World Cup belongs to the fans who fill the stands, not to investors.
The Asian Football Confederation, traditionally a reliable base of support for Infantino, broke ranks too. AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, who lost the 2016 FIFA presidential election to Infantino but has largely remained an ally since, wrote to the confederation’s 46 members warning that FIFA’s actions risked undermining the foundations of continental football, and cautioned that the plan would not succeed without support from all the confederations, support that currently doesn’t exist.
The Boycott
By Thursday, the opposition had escalated into something far more serious than statements. Following an emergency virtual meeting in which more than 50 of its member associations spoke, UEFA’s full 55-nation membership voted to boycott all FIFA competitions—including the men’s and women’s World Cups—for as long as the sell-off plan remains active. That would keep major footballing nations such as Germany, France, England, and reigning world champions Spain out of future tournaments. UEFA said the World Cup belongs to football itself and will never be for sale, and separately called FIFA’s lack of consultation nothing short of a failure of leadership.
The stance immediately raises the stakes for the next global tournament on the calendar, the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil, with women’s football now at risk of becoming caught up in the standoff. The first real test comes in September, when Poland is set to host the Women’s Under-20 World Cup.
CONCACAF followed later Thursday, with its 41 members formally rejecting the proposal after voicing concerns over the lack of due process, the tight deadline imposed, and the absence of any governance review. CONCACAF’s membership includes the United States, Canada, and Mexico—co-hosts of the 2026 World Cup—and the US Soccer Federation publicly backed the confederation’s position on social media.
The Bigger Picture
The dispute lands in the middle of a broader pattern of Infantino aligning himself with figures close to Trump, from the creation of a FIFA peace prize to Trump’s involvement in the process that saw American forward Folarin Balogun cleared to play for the United States at the 2026 FIFA World Cup even after receiving a red card, and now a proposed 12-year ownership arrangement tied to Kushner’s investment firm.
It isn’t the first time Infantino has pushed for outside investment in FIFA’s competitions. A 2019 proposal backed by Infantino to secure $25 billion in private investment for an expanded Club World Cup—reportedly involving Japan’s SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund—was rejected by a FIFA stakeholders’ committee at the time. FIFA nonetheless went ahead and expanded the Club World Cup from 7 to 32 teams in 2025. FIFA has also been burned by outside commercial partnerships before: its collapse of a deal with marketing agency ISL in 2001 is estimated to have cost the federation between $30 million and $115 million.
The political fallout now threatens Infantino’s own position. His 11-year hold on the FIFA presidency looks less secure than it has in years, with three of the sport’s six continental confederations now expressing open frustration. FIFA has set a November 18 deadline for presidential candidates to declare themselves ahead of a vote scheduled for March in Rabat, Morocco.
For now, FIFA says it intends to bring the FFE proposal before its council soon. Whether it survives that meeting—let alone a vote of all 211 member associations—is very much in question.
