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It’s unclear if Gianni Infantino will stick around as FIFA president or whether he’ll be ousted by some sort of vote of no confidence in the coming months, or lose the elections next March or withdraw his candidacy. My ESPN colleague Mark Ogden does a fine job rounding up the various scenarios here.
This time last week, you would have wagered that he was going to stay, because he understands the simple political equation better than most. He answers to FIFA’s 211 member associations; many of whom would not exist — or would exist only in skeleton form — without FIFA cash. And in the 10 years Infantino has been in charge, he has managed to more than quadruple the funding every member nation gets, while also recording a seven-fold increase in the total investment in soccer-related projects around the world.
Many of his voters — the folks who run FAs around the world — care more about the flow of FIFA money to their backyards than they do issues of governance, autocratic decision-making, sucking up to divisive world leaders, suspending USMNT striker Folarin Balogun’s ban for being sent off midway through the 2026 World Cup, inventing a FIFA Peace Prize out of thin air, awarding the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia without a proper bidding process, or any of the many gripes his critics (mostly in the Western media) throw his way.
Infantino keeps the lights on, sends them more money every four-year cycle and just delivered the most lucrative sporting event in history … so why mess with that?
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But that was before news was leaked that Infantino planned to spin off a commercial subsidiary of FIFA and sell a 20% stake to private investors. This provoked intense backlash from Asia, Concacaf and UEFA, as well as resignations from within FIFA, such as chief operating officer Kevin Lamour and senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro. (Both were likely on their way out anyway, but both took the opportunity to vent their anger before they slammed the door.)
UEFA even went so far as to threaten to pull its 55 member nations out of FIFA competitions (making them just about economically worthless), and Infantino had little choice but to shelve the project on Friday night.
UEFA’s statement neatly summed up why Infantino’s proposal was ethically absurd and inappropriate for a governing body when it reported: “The moment external investors acquire ownership interests in FIFA competitions, football changes forever. Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation. Investor expectations become a daily pressure.”
It’s why we don’t sell equity stakes in, say, the military. Investors rightly seek returns, governments rightly serve their citizens. Those incentives sometimes aren’t aligned, which is why some things shouldn’t be governed by the bottom line but rather by elected officials.
But even if you don’t care about all that — and I can see why if you’re a tiny federation from a poor nation entirely reliant on FIFA to field a national side you might not — or even if you just want FIFA to be monetized to the maximum, there’s another reason why Infantino’s proposal should have been dead in the water.
It simply made no sense.
You don’t need a Wharton degree (or even a passing familiarity with “Shark Tank,” or its U.K. equivalent, “Dragons’ Den”) to know that there are two reasons why a company might want to sell an equity stake in its business.
The first is if it needs cash and access to capital to grow and scale its business. That’s not the case with FIFA, which was sitting on around $2.7 billion of cash reserves before the bonanza that was the 2026 World Cup. And even without dipping into the reserves, with a halfway decent business plan and their sterling credit rating, they could finance whatever they might need to scale and grow their business without handing over equity.
The other reason you might give up a slice of your business is to bring in strategic investors, partners with know-how who are experts at growing and scaling a business. Leaving aside the obvious point — that with all that cash they could just hire whatever clever experts they might need — FIFA just delivered the most financially successful World Cup ever. Does it really need Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital to find other strategic partners? It can’t do it itself?
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There are two other hugely problematic aspects. The first is the Sept. 19 deadline by which FIFA members had to approve the deal. Why the rush? Would the investors suddenly think it was a bad deal on Sept. 20? If it’s a business deal, it benefits both parties. If your investors are only interested if the deal gets done by a certain date, maybe they’re not as interested as you think, or maybe it’s not such a great deal?
The other is that, if you’re going to do this, why not have a proper tender. The Thrive Capital deal reportedly valued FIFA at $20 billion (funny, how it’s always nice round numbers.) OK, maybe some other investors might value it more than that and maybe if you allowed investors to pitch FIFA on their plan and make offers you could come away with the best possible deal? There’s a reason no-bid contracts are almost always a stupid idea.
Even the most self-serving, money-hungry (or money-desperate) member associations should be able to see this. Even somebody who is so foolish that they think it’s better to have $20 million now and share future revenues with Kushner’s investors than to grow FIFA organically ought to be able to understand that if you’re going to sell out, you do it to the highest bidder — not someone who negotiated a deal behind closed doors.
This is what doesn’t add up to me when it comes to Infantino. Even if this were, somehow, a desirable idea, even if simply maximizing profits were FIFA’s sole mission statement, this would be a foolish deal.
But it doesn’t end there. If you’re going to introduce something that you know will generate a backlash and will require all your political savvy and chutzpah to ram through, why would you do it now, just a few months shy of the next election, with nominations still open? Why not sit tight, revel in the glory of all the money you made for FIFA in 2026, get reelected in a landslide and then push this through when you can claim a mandate from voters?
Infantino has gambled unsuccessfully on questionable ideas before (from the SoftBank deal to the biennial World Cup) absorbed the defeats and moved on. The difference is that those were potentially transformational changes that made the juice worth the squeeze, even if his attempts failed.
This wasn’t. This was ham-fisted and delusional from both a business and political perspective. Two decades of Infantino-watching — from his days as UEFA’s head of legal to now that he’s in the big chair — had me believing that he was a smart, canny operator.
Not anymore.
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