I have written a lot about Gianni Infantino over the past few months. The halftime show. The dynamic pricing. The water bottle ban. The expanding of the World Cup to 48 teams. The closing ceremony with Tom Cruise. Each time I have tried to articulate what it feels like watching someone systematically dismantle the principles that football is supposed to be built on while simultaneously presenting the demolition as progress.
Each time I thought he had reached the limit. Each time I was wrong.
This week Infantino announced plans to sell the World Cup to private investors. Not metaphorically. Not as a figure of speech designed to dramatise a commercial decision. Literally sell it. Create a new company, value it at $20 billion, sell stakes to private investors, and hand control of the most important tournament in world football to people whose primary interest is not football but the return on their investment.
I have run out of ways to express the anger I feel about what is happening to this sport. Every article I have written about FIFA’s commercial decisions has ended with some version of the same conclusion. This is wrong. The fans deserve better. Football belongs to the people who love it, not the people who profit from it.
This one is different. This is not a halftime show or a water bottle ban or a ticket pricing model. This is the governing body of world football proposing to sell the World Cup itself to private investors with direct connections to the President of the United States. This is the line. If this happens, there is no coming back from it.
What Infantino Is Actually Proposing
Let me lay out the plan clearly because the scale of what is being proposed deserves to be understood in its full, terrifying detail.
FIFA plans to create a new company called FIFA Forward Enterprise. This company would control the commercial rights and operational delivery of the men’s World Cup, the Women’s World Cup and the Club World Cup. FIFA has valued this company at $20 billion.
FIFA then plans to sell minority, non-controlling stakes in this company to private investors, raising up to $4.2 billion in capital. The lead investor being positioned for this deal is Josh Kushner through his firm Thrive Capital. Josh Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is the son-in-law of Donald Trump, the President of the United States, the same Donald Trump who sat next to Infantino at the World Cup final three weeks ago and who admitted publicly to intervening in the suspension of US international Folarin Balogun during the tournament.
J.P. Morgan has been hired as FIFA’s strategic adviser on the deal.
Each of FIFA’s 211 member associations would receive a stake in the company and increased annual payments rising from the current $8 million to approximately $15 million.
And Infantino himself, after his FIFA presidency ends in 2031, would become commissioner of the new company on a salary comparable to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s $64 million per year.
Read that last paragraph again. The man proposing the creation of this company is also the man who would run it and be paid $64 million a year to do so. The architect of the plan is its primary beneficiary. The person asking FIFA’s member associations to approve the sale is the person who stands to gain tens of millions of dollars from its completion.
The Trump Connection
The involvement of the Kushner family in this deal cannot be separated from the political context that surrounded the 2026 World Cup, and I want to be direct about why.
During the tournament, Folarin Balogun received a red card during a match that was subsequently overturned. Trump admitted publicly that he had played a role in that decision being reversed. The President of the United States intervened in a refereeing decision at a FIFA tournament and FIFA allowed it to happen.
Infantino and Trump were visibly close throughout the tournament. They sat together at matches. They appeared together at the trophy ceremony where both were booed by the crowd. Infantino presented Trump with something called the FIFA peace prize, an award that nobody had heard of before and that appeared to have been created specifically for the occasion.
Now, weeks later, FIFA is proposing to sell stakes in the World Cup to a firm run by the President’s brother-in-law. The financial adviser on the deal is J.P. Morgan. The Trump administration is reportedly aware of the plan.
I am not a political commentator and this is a football website. But the connections between Infantino, Trump and the Kushner family in the context of a deal that would privatise the World Cup deserve to be stated plainly because they raise questions about conflicts of interest and political influence over football governance that are genuinely alarming.
A US congressman, Jamie Raskin, has already demanded that Infantino appear for an interview about what Raskin described as mounting evidence of corruption and a potential quid pro quo. Those are not words that should appear in the same sentence as the World Cup. And yet here we are.
UEFA’s Response and the Boycott Threat
UEFA’s reaction was immediate and unequivocal. The European governing body issued a statement saying the proposal crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross.
The language is significant. UEFA did not express concern. They did not ask for consultation. They said it crosses a line. That is the language of an organisation that views the proposal as a fundamental threat to the structure of world football and that is prepared to act accordingly.
Reports have emerged that European nations are considering boycotting the 2030 World Cup in protest. A World Cup without the nations of Europe, without Spain the current champions, without France, Germany, England, Italy, would not be a World Cup in any meaningful sense. It would be a diminished tournament staged for the benefit of the people who bought it rather than the people who watch it.
The threat of boycott is the most powerful weapon UEFA has. Whether they would actually follow through on it is a different question. But the fact that the conversation has reached that point within days of the announcement tells you how seriously European football is taking the proposal and how far beyond acceptable boundaries Infantino has pushed.
The $64 Million Question
I keep coming back to the salary. I cannot move past it because I think it reveals the true motivation behind the proposal more clearly than anything else.
Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, a non-profit organisation, is proposing the creation of a new commercial entity that he would subsequently run as commissioner on a salary of approximately $64 million per year.
FIFA is a non-profit. That status is not incidental. It is foundational. FIFA exists, in theory, to govern and develop football for the benefit of its member associations and the billions of people who play and watch the sport. The non-profit status reflects that mission. The revenues generated by the World Cup are supposed to be reinvested in football, not distributed as profit to shareholders or paid as compensation to executives.
The creation of FIFA Forward Enterprise would effectively separate the commercial operations of the World Cup from the non-profit structure of FIFA. The new company would be a for-profit entity. The investors would expect returns. The commissioner would be paid accordingly.
Infantino is not proposing to sell the World Cup for the benefit of football. He is proposing to create a job for himself that pays $64 million a year and that would be funded by the commercial exploitation of a tournament that belongs to every football fan in the world.
That is not the democratisation of football, which is the phrase Infantino used to describe the plan. That is the privatisation of football by a man who has positioned himself to profit from it personally.
What Private Ownership Actually Means
The assurance that investors would hold non-controlling minority stakes is meaningless in practical terms and everyone involved in the deal knows it.
Private investors do not invest $4.2 billion in a commercial entity and then sit quietly while the people running it make decisions that reduce the return on their investment. That is not how investment works. That is not how investors behave. That is not what the capital markets expect from a $20 billion company with shareholders who have contributed billions.
The investors would expect growth. Growth in the context of the World Cup means more matches, more tournaments, more broadcast rights to sell, more sponsorship inventory to create. It means the World Cup being played more frequently than every four years. It means the Club World Cup being expanded further. It means every decision about the future of the tournament being filtered through the question of whether it increases or decreases the value of the company.
Player welfare, fan experience, the integrity of the competition, the principle that the World Cup is a sporting event rather than a commercial product, all of it becomes subordinate to the financial interests of the shareholders. Not immediately and not obviously. But inevitably and completely.
The Premier League provides a useful comparison. Private ownership of English football clubs has produced enormous investment and enormous commercial growth. It has also produced ticket price inflation, fixture fragmentation, the prioritisation of broadcast revenue over match going fans, and a growing disconnect between the clubs and the communities they were built to serve.
Now imagine that model applied not to individual clubs but to the World Cup itself. The most watched, most beloved, most culturally significant sporting event on the planet, owned in part by private investors whose primary obligation is to the people who gave them money rather than the people who love football.
That is what Infantino is proposing. And the fact that he is presenting it as progress tells you everything about how far the gap between FIFA’s leadership and football’s supporters has grown.
The Pattern Is Complete
I have written about the halftime show. About dynamic pricing. About the water bottle ban. About the 48 team expansion. About the Club World Cup. About every decision Infantino has made that prioritised commercial revenue over the experience and welfare of the people whose passion for football generates that revenue.
Each of those decisions was a step. Each one pushed football further from its principles and closer to a purely commercial model where the sport exists to generate returns rather than to serve the people who love it.
The proposal to sell the World Cup to private investors is not another step. It is the destination. It is where every previous decision was leading. The halftime show commercialised the interval. Dynamic pricing commercialised the tickets. The 48 team format commercialised the fixture list. And now the entire tournament, the commercial rights, the operational control, the future direction of the World Cup itself, is being offered to private investors for $4.2 billion.
The pattern is complete. Every piece of the World Cup that could be sold has been sold or is now being offered for sale. The only thing remaining is the football itself and I am no longer confident that Infantino would not find a way to monetise that too if someone offered him enough money.
The Line That Cannot Be Crossed
UEFA said this crosses a line. They are right. But the line was crossed a long time ago. It was crossed when Qatar was awarded a World Cup in conditions that required the tournament to be moved to winter. It was crossed when the Club World Cup was expanded against the wishes of every major domestic league. It was crossed when Trump intervened in a refereeing decision and FIFA allowed it. It was crossed when water bottles were banned to protect a sponsorship deal.
The proposal to sell the World Cup is not the crossing of a line. It is the arrival at the logical conclusion of every line that has already been crossed.
Football is not for sale. The World Cup is not for sale. These are not commercial products to be valued at $20 billion and offered to private investors whose connection to the sport begins and ends with the return on their capital.
The World Cup belongs to the fans who watch it, the players who compete in it, the nations whose identities are expressed through it. It belongs to the kid watching the final on a television in Lagos and the family saving for two years to attend a group stage match and the supporter who paints their face in their national colours and stands in a crowd of strangers who all care about the same thing at the same time.
It does not belong to Gianni Infantino. It does not belong to Josh Kushner. It does not belong to J.P. Morgan. And it certainly does not belong to Donald Trump.
UEFA needs to follow through on their threat. The member associations need to reject the proposal. The fans need to make their voices heard in every way available to them. And the people who love football need to understand that what is being proposed this week is not a commercial restructuring.
It is the end of football as we know it.
If we let it happen.
