Infantino’s Plan Is Dead, But His Vision For FIFA Will Remain

At the conclusion of this summer’s World Cup, FIFA boss Gianni Infantino decreed that football fans should ‘meditate, pray or watch a football match’ rather than criticise his stewardship of football’s global governing body and his lickspittle relationship with US president Donald Trump.

Just over a month later, it’s Infantino himself who should be turning to meditation and prayer.

New legal filings indicate that UEFA, European football’s governing body, is preparing criminal proceedings against Infantino for inflicting ‘direct and concrete injury on FIFA’s reputation, governance authority, and commercial relationships’ through his failed attempt to sell off FIFA’s competitions to US investors.

The proposal in question threatened to divert the commercial and operational revenue of major football tournaments to a new, for-profit subsidiary of FIFA. Stakes in the subsidiary were to be sold off for billions of dollars to private investors, including the Josh Kushner-led private investment fund, Thrive Eternal.

The plan was met with widespread outrage. UEFA declared that it would boycott FIFA tournaments, while other continental confederations also expressed serious objections. Within weeks of its arrival, the scheme was officially dead, and Infantino was forced to apologise for ‘mistakes’ made along the way.

Now, with UEFA set on punishing Infantino for his misdeeds, it appears that the FIFA president has reached the end of the road, a shockingly fast fall for a man who had been expected to win next year’s election for his third and final term as the head of global football.

On the surface, the rationale behind the whole episode is puzzling. At the time of the announcement, FIFA was basking in the glow of a record $15bn in World Cup revenue. Without a clear financial need for the federation itself, some commentators have pointed to personal avarice as the driving force behind Infantino’s actions; sources suggested that he would have been in line to earn ‘tens of millions of pounds’ from the sell-off.

But there is also a deeper logic behind this scheme to yoke football to US private finance. Despite its riches, FIFA has once again become an anachronism in a changing world. Infantino’s proposal was a crude attempt to adapt to the new economic and geopolitical order. It won’t be the last.

Changing of the Guards

When Brazilian millionaire businessman João Havelange ousted the obsolete English technocrat Sir Stanley Rous as FIFA president in 1974 (not least due to Rous’s opposition to the expulsion of apartheid South Africa), the FIFA he inherited was an archaic bureaucracy oblivious to commercial opportunities.

Unlike Rous, Havelange understood that the post-war Keynesian compact had given way to an increasingly unregulated, interconnected network of exchange driven by multinational corporate expansion. By partnering with Adidas and Coca-Cola, Havelange turned FIFA into a powerhouse in the age of neoliberal globalisation.

But with its lust for expanding its markets, its willingness to commercialise almost every aspect of the game and even its milquetoast and, in practice, highly disingenuous social liberalism, the FIFA of Havelange and his successor, Sepp Blatter, is now at odds with an emerging, post-globalisation world increasingly structured by protectionism, networks of patronage and ethno-nationalism.

Infantino, not coincidentally, was elected FIFA president the same year that Britain voted to leave the EU and Trump was first elected president of the United States. Infantino’s private finance sell-off plan marked the culmination of ten years navigating an age defined by what Jamie Merchant calls ‘a new inter-imperial competition for the global product’. Infantino clearly believes that Trump’s USA — and its imperial network — will be the winner.

Private finance, and particularly private equity, is essential to Trump’s project. Kushner, of course, is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared, and the son of Charles, the US ambassador to France and Monaco. More broadly, however, private equity and other forms of alternative finance were among the largest donors to Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and actively support kindred governments around the world. In return for their support, Trump and similarly minded officials relax financial regulations and allow these firms to access capital from life insurers and pension funds. The reward them comes back around: when private equity firms destroy healthcare, water, nursing homes and other everyday necessities by loading them up with debt, far-right politicians like Trump seize on the consequent sense of social and political breakdown to advance a politics of grievance and right-wing nationalism.

Bad as this may be, FIFA’s members have for years tolerated Infantino’s imbecilic behaviour to ingratiate himself with Trump, from his preposterous ‘I feel . . . ’ soliloquy at the 2022 World Cup, to his nauseatingly sycophantic creation of a FIFA peace prize to rectify Trump’s failure to win the Nobel and his role in the Folarin Balogun affair this summer.

Equally, FIFA’s members have long been content getting into bed with amoral actors and flogging football to the highest bidder. Just look at a list of World Cup hosts: Argentina in 1978, Franco’s Spain in 1982, the flirtation with Henry Kissinger and the ‘rock solid political stitch-up’ that led to Mexico in 1986, plus Russia, Qatar, and Trump’s United States. Saudi Arabia is slated to host in 2034.

Now, however, Infantino has crossed the line. While the deal promised extra cash up front to member associations, it threatened to significantly cut future transfers by about 20%. Perhaps this seemed like an unacceptable sacrifice at a time when the tournaments are breaking revenue records. Ego, too, has surely played a significant role. UEFA, in particular, resents not having the political power to match its financial muscle and has sensed an opportunity to assert itself.

So, the deal is defeated, and the worst may still be to come for Infantino. But as the FIFPro global union of professional football players declared, ‘withdrawing the proposal does not erase what it revealed.’ Fundamental questions remain about FIFA’s place in the world and where it goes from here.

For one, can the FIFA coalition hold with ‘America First’ as its geopolitical centre? What about as real-world conflict escalates between Trump’s rogue government and the rest of the world? For all the money it generates, the World Cup is not bullet-proof.

In addition, can the federation survive the internal tensions that this has generated? The Confederation of African Football (CAF) seems more likely to remain loyal to FIFA, which claims to have invested more than a billion dollars in African football. US Soccer, meanwhile, is going against the grain of its own government by calling for ‘meaningful change’, and the Mexican Football Federation is still supportive of Infantino, despite the heightened tensions between the Mexican government and Infantino’s puppet master Trump.

At the same time, US private equity is only getting started with global football. On the club level, they’re already in the building. Real Madrid is reportedly keen to follow neighbours Atletico Madrid in selling a stake in the club to bring in more money. The influx of cash from private equity is far from a guarantee of success. Despite Chelsea owners Clearlake Capital spending £1.5bn on players over a three-year span, the team finished tenth last season, and the owners are now notorious for having turned the club into a dysfunctional laughingstock. Investment in football clubs — these strange entities that can appreciate in value while losing money year after year — is much riskier than buying a stake in a global phenomenon like the World Cup, which always makes a profit.

Above all else, this episode signals a need for a new direction altogether. There are attempts to reform the game, but they are at nascent stages, and largely focused on domestic football-ticket prices, inconvenient kick off times and changes to supporters’ terms and conditions. FairSquare’s Reboot FIFA campaign is one that all football supporters should support, but to really create pressure on FIFA to clean up its act there must also be grassroots organising across partisan club-based lines in as many member nations as possible to pressure governments into holding the likes of Infantino to account.

The 2026 instalment of the World Cup blessed millions of people with transcendent joy, excitement and even silliness. Let it serve as a precious reminder: football can’t be something we only experience as a means of escapism, nor can it be something we leave to the elites. It must be something that we come together to shape ourselves.