Gianni Infantino's World Cup Gamble: From Triumph to Turmoil
Gianni Infantino sat alongside Donald Trump at MetLife Stadium less than two weeks ago looking every inch the “King of Football” the US president likes to call him. The World Cup trophy glittered, the confetti fell, and the boos that greeted their walk across the turf felt like background noise to a man cruising towards another coronation.
That night’s 104th and final match of the expanded World Cup was sold as vindication. Record revenues. Record audiences. A tournament widely hailed as a success on the pitch and a financial windfall off it. Infantino left New York with letters of support from about 200 of FIFA’s 211 member federations in his pocket and a clear runway to re-election next March.
Less than a fortnight later, that triumphal tableau already feels like a relic.
The “King of Football” has triggered a revolt.
From coronation to crisis
The turning point came with a plan that cut to the heart of what the World Cup represents: Infantino’s push to invite private investors into the game’s most sacred cash register.
The project, built around a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), would have hived off the money-making side of FIFA’s work – World Cups and other tournaments, broadcasting and sponsorship rights, ticketing, hospitality – into a vehicle part-owned by outside capital. Private equity and sovereign wealth funds, normalised in European club football, were now being courted for the global game’s ultimate prize.
At the centre of the proposal stood Thrive Eternal, an investment vehicle launched by Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The numbers were vast. FIFA pitched an equity valuation of $20bn, offering around 20 percent of FFE in exchange for $4.2bn. The 211 member federations, already the de facto owners of FIFA under Swiss law, were promised $20m each if they signed up by a September 19 deadline.
For many, that was life-changing money. FIFA’s existing cycle already guarantees $10m per federation over four years, funded largely by record revenue of $15bn from 2023-26, anchored by the World Cup that has just finished. Under FFE, FIFA said that figure would double immediately to $20m per federation, then rise to $22m through 2034 and $24m through 2038.
For micro-federations such as Andorra, Montserrat or Papua New Guinea, those sums reshape entire football ecosystems. For giants like England, Spain or France, the calculation is different: competitive balance, calendar congestion, and control of the sport matter more than another cheque.
Infantino gambled that the money would talk loudly enough. Instead, the backlash roared.
A president suddenly isolated
By Friday, Infantino was forced into a public retreat. In a statement announcing the plan’s abandonment, he admitted the project had “created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place”.
The climbdown came only after resistance hardened into open revolt.
Some of FIFA’s own vice presidents and senior executives lined up against the project. European federations united in opposition. The confederations of Asia and North America also resisted. Britain’s prime minister weighed in. The world’s domestic leagues joined the chorus. Fans, already suspicious of FIFA’s motives, saw the World Cup being sliced up for investors.
In short: almost everyone.
The pressure intensified when two of Infantino’s closest lieutenants broke ranks. Carlos Cordeiro, his senior adviser and a former Goldman Sachs banker, resigned and branded the deal “bad”. FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour issued a blistering statement defending staff and implicitly questioning the president’s judgment, a public intervention that would render most presidencies untenable.
Then came the decisive move. UEFA pledged on Thursday to boycott all FIFA competitions if the plan went ahead.
That threat cut straight to FIFA’s financial jugular. European teams dominate the men’s World Cup and the Club World Cup, the organisation’s prime revenue engines. Their absence would shred the value of any future tournament and, by extension, any stake investors might buy.
The fear in Europe and beyond was clear: once private capital came in, it would demand more games, bigger competitions, and new formats to maximise returns. That would strain an already overloaded calendar, push elite players further to their limits, and erode the status of club competitions, including the UEFA Champions League.
Broadcasters and sponsors do not have bottomless budgets. Something would have to give.
What infuriated many inside and outside FIFA was not only the content of the plan, but the way it was pursued. Infantino is accused of driving the project in near-secrecy over the past year, consulting few stakeholders while spending conspicuous time in Trump’s orbit. Even Trump, speaking on Friday, said he had not discussed with Infantino the idea of selling stakes in the World Cup.
The image of a FIFA president sketching out the game’s future in the company of political powerbrokers, while federations and confederations were left in the dark, crystallised long-standing unease about his style.
Money, power and a game up for sale
At the heart of the fury lies a simple question: who owns football’s biggest stage?
Private equity and petrostate wealth have already reshaped European club football, from ownership models to transfer markets. But for many within the game, the World Cup remains a different category – a global festival of national teams that, in theory, belongs to the sport and its supporters, not to a balance sheet.
Infantino’s FFE project challenged that notion head-on. By carving out the “money-making parts” of FIFA into a vehicle partly owned by outside investors, he was asking the sport to accept that the World Cup is not just a tournament, but an asset to be leveraged.
FIFA tried to sweeten the pill with hard cash. The pitch was brutally straightforward: sign up and your federation’s income doubles, then keeps rising for more than a decade. For nations where $20m transforms infrastructure, youth development and basic facilities, that offer was always going to be tempting.
Yet the political map did not break the way Infantino needed.
Africa, his traditional power base with 54 votes, stayed largely neutral, weighing the lure of “game-changing money” against the risks. South America’s 10-member CONMEBOL said on Friday it had received the proposal and would study it “with the rigour it demands”. Its president, Paraguay’s Alejandro Dominguez, is also a FIFA vice president and has his own stake in Infantino’s future: he is counting on the 2030 World Cup being expanded to 64 teams, which would hand more matches to minority co-hosts Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, currently slated for just one game each of the 104, with the rest in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
But neutrality and caution are not the same as support. As the week unfolded, it became clear that Infantino’s earlier tally of around 200 pledges for re-election did not automatically translate into backing for FFE.
The project was scrapped. The political damage remains.
A presidency on the brink
Infantino left New York last week seemingly untouchable. Today, his grip on power looks fragile.
Even after he killed the investment scheme, his support is, at best, murky. The question now is not whether FFE goes ahead – it will not – but whether the fallout has permanently weakened the man who tried to push it through.
The stakes are high. FIFA’s statutes allow Infantino one more four-year term, with the next presidential vote set for March 19 in Rabat, Morocco, FIFA’s African headquarters. The deadline for candidates to declare is November 18, exactly four months before the election.
Until this week, the idea of a serious challenger felt fanciful. Infantino was re-elected unopposed in 2019 in Paris and again in 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda. His power seemed baked into FIFA’s structures, underpinned by development money and political alliances across continents.
The FFE plan hinted at an even longer horizon. By spinning off FIFA’s commercial arm, Infantino could have carved out a commissioner-style role for himself beyond 2031, detached from term limits and likely far more lucrative than his current package, worth more than $6m a year in salary and bonuses.
That vision now lies in ruins. In its place, a more immediate calculation takes shape: can he still muster the 106 votes needed for a majority in a contested election?
Continents rarely vote in perfect blocs, but the arithmetic is suddenly intriguing. If most of Europe’s 55 federations, CONCACAF’s 35 and Asia’s 46 lean towards change, a formidable coalition emerges. The old certainties about Infantino’s dominance no longer hold.
Names that once circulated only in whispers now appear in open speculation. Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, a powerful Qatari figure at the heart of European club politics, is frequently mentioned. So is Canadian FIFA vice president Victor Montagliani, a key player in North and Central American football. Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, the long-serving AFC president who narrowly lost to Infantino in the 2016 FIFA election, may feel the moment has come to try again.
What was once idle gossip has hardened into real conversation.
After the revolt, what next?
The UEFA-led resistance has achieved its immediate goal: the sell-off of World Cup revenues is off the table. But victory brings a new dilemma for Infantino’s opponents.
Is stopping FFE enough? Or has the past week exposed a deeper problem – a president whose style, secrecy and ambitions no longer command the trust required to run the global game?
The interventions from Cordeiro and Lamour cut to that issue. When a senior adviser resigns in protest and a chief operating officer publicly challenges the direction of travel, any leader’s authority is shaken. For an organisation as historically sensitive to scandal and power plays as FIFA, it is a warning flare.
Infantino still has time. He can tour federations, rebuild alliances, and argue that the project’s failure shows he listens and adapts. He can lean on the development money that has long underpinned his support in regions hungry for investment.
But the aura of invincibility has gone. The man who watched the World Cup final beside a US president, hailed by many as the architect of football’s biggest-ever show, now faces the most serious challenge of his tenure.
In a sport where power rarely stays vacant for long, the only real question is this: will the game’s next great contest be played not on the pitch, but in the ballot rooms of Rabat next March?
