Gavin Cooney: Infantino’s World Cup plot leaves him deserted by allies and with his credibility detonated

Gianni Infantino’s week began with a swaggering 15-page screed against the losers and the haters who had dared to criticise the 2026 World Cup.“Sorry you were so consumed by hate and criticism that you missed it all,” he posted, addressing “those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours.”Now, Infantino stands deserted by allies, his credibility detonated, his audacious plans to sell a stake in the World Cup to private interests in ruins, and his position as Fifa president under threat.To put it in the Fifa president’s own terms: Today, I feel like I’ve had a long week.READ MOREThe turbulence began on the pages of the London Times, with the revelation of Infantino’s plans to sell off a stake in the World Cup to private interests. He was plotting to move the commercial rights for the World Cup and other Fifa tournaments into a subsidiary company, up to 20 per cent of which would be sold off to private investors. A group called Thrive Capital would lead this investor group, whose chief executive is Joshua Kushner, brother to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared.Fifa told The Irish Times that Infantino’s fulfilling the role as commissioner of the new venture has not been discussed. It did, however, add that “the Fifa president and Fifa administration will and must have leading roles in this entity – if approved".The London Times’ bombshell sent football’s world governing body scrambling to take control of the story. Infantino wrote a five-page letter to the presidents of Fifa’s 211 member associations. The letter ballyhooed the financial benefits of signing up to the private-equity plan, saying associations had a choice to accept a new total funding package of $10 billion (€8.68 billion) or stick with the current $2.7 billion pot. Members were also given a deadline of September 19th to register their approval for the proposals in order to access a bonus payment of $20 million from January 1st next year.The proposals need a majority among all members to be adopted, but there is no proposed date for a vote. When The Irish Times asked a Fifa spokesperson whether the requested expressions of interest by September 19th would be considered as the formal vote, they said they did not know. When we asked why the September 19th deadline is necessary, they again had no answer.FAI president Paul Cooke dialled into a Zoom conference call with Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin and delegates of Uefa's other 54 member nations on Thursday. File photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho Fifa, meanwhile, kept pitching their idea, sending a presentation deck to members on Wednesday.The document, which has been seen by this writer, states that Fifa has been “undermonetised”, contrasting its annual income with the Premier League, Champions League and the major American professional leagues. It includes a breakdown of how much money is made per fan. Where Fifa extracts $1 per supporter, the NFL makes $52.80.The vast bulk of Fifa’s revenues come from the men’s World Cup. That they would benchmark their quadrennial cash cow against annual competitions showed either a profound misunderstanding of the World Cup, or else a determination to shape it in ways similar to the chosen comparisons.Fifa’s best means of putting themselves on a par with the Champions League or the NFL would be to further sweat the World Cup, be it through further expansion or resurrecting plans to stage it every two years. Demands for profits would also keep ticket prices high and make pay-per-view broadcasters more attractive.Infantino stressed that competition formats would not necessarily change. Sky News subsequently revealed that, on Thursday, Fifa had issued a tender for a feasibility study on expanding the 2030 World Cup to 64 teams, setting a deadline for its completion prior to September 19th.On the same day, Uefa’s 55 member associations gathered for a virtual meeting to formulate their response. Uefa savaged the proposals but they do not have a vote on them. That belongs to each of their 55 members, and the prospect of unified European opposition did not look promising when a figure at the Czech FA publicly stated he was receptive to Fifa’s lucrative offer.FAI president Paul Cooke received Infantino’s letter on Tuesday, but all at Abbotstown held their tongue publicly until the Uefa meeting on Thursday afternoon. The board convened on Tuesday night to discuss Fifa’s plans, and Cooke and CEO David Courell dialled in to the Uefa meeting.Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin chaired the meeting, stressing it should not focus on his broken personal relationship with Infantino but on the principles at stake. Noel Mooney, who held the role of interim CEO of the FAI for six months in 2019 on secondment from Uefa and who is now the CEO of the Welsh FA, asked whether Uefa members still had confidence in Infantino.Noel Mooney, formerly of the FAI and now CEO of the Welsh FA, asked Uefa delegates on Thursday if any of them had faith in Gianni Infantino. Photograph: Oisin Keniry/Inpho Approximately two-thirds of the associations spoke up and at the end of the meeting, Ceferin asked if anyone was not in favour of refusing to take part in Fifa competitions. No hands were raised. Thus, without actually using the word boycott, Uefa enacted a very significant boycott. Cooke and Courell signed off the Uefa meeting and convened a virtual meeting of the FAI board to brief them on the situation.Uefa hope this is a short-lived war, but senior Uefa figures have discussed the possibility of staging an additional European Championships across Spain and Portugal in 2030, should the rupture prove long-lasting and both nations lose their World Cup hosting rights.The first potential front in the boycott is the women’s Under-20 World Cup, which kicks off on September 6th. The next Irish involvement in Fifa competition is the two-legged women’s World Cup playoff against Kazakhstan on October 9th and 13th. Ireland’s preparations will continue as normal for those games in the hope the situation is resolved in time.The FAI’s leadership now find themselves in a bitterly ironic position: as things stand, they are boycotting a pair of games in the autumn that are not the men’s Nations League games against Israel. In both instances, however, the FAI are in step with Uefa consensus.North American confederation Concacaf subsequently confirmed their 41 members would also be voting against Infantino’s plans. Fifa responded with a statement issued shortly after 4am Irish time on Friday, standing by their plans and rounding on media reports for interrupting their consultation process. This consultation process certainly was not very far advanced given, for instance, German FA president and Fifa board member Bernd Neuendorf said he first heard about the proposal through the media on Tuesday.Infantino was, meanwhile, in Morocco, celebrating Throne Day and the anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s accession. But the man Donald Trump has called “the king of soccer” awoke on Friday morning to a series of body blows. The Asian Football Confederation, which includes past and future World Cup hosts Qatar and Saudi Arabia, announced all of their members rejected the proposals, leaving Infantino without the numbers needed to pass them.Within hours, Infantino’s close adviser Carlos Cordeiro, a retired investment banker, resigned in protest saying he did not know about the plans. He questioned why Fifa would need private equity at all, considering they sit on billions of dollars in reserves and have no debt.“Selling a permanent stake in football’s most valuable asset to raise $4.2 billion makes little sense. It is mortgaging football’s future without any compelling justification,” said Cordeiro, adding that the lack of clarity and the 53-day deadline to sign up “is not a responsible way to determine the future of the world’s game”.Fifa president Gianni Infantino with US president Donald Trump at the trophy presentation following Spain's victory in the World Cup final at the New York-New Jersey Stadium on July 19th. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA Wire Infantino now faces a fight not only to save his private-equity plans but also his future as Fifa president. Currently unopposed for the election next March, the damage of this week may persuade a rival to emerge.An extraordinarily turbulent week begs two questions.How did a proposal of this magnitude advance to within 53 days of its deadline for acceptance without the knowledge of so many of the game’s stakeholders, including other Fifa board members and even an American investment banker within Infantino’s close circle of advisers?And how did Infantino, the man elected as Fifa’s reform candidate in the aftermath of the corruption scandal that ended the reign of Sepp Blatter, become the man at the heart of these machinations?David Bernstein, former chairman of the English FA, this week told the BBC he believes Infantino has become “carried away with the power Fifa gives him”.When Infantino was elected in 2016, he pointed to the presence of corporate governance expert Miguel Maduro as chairman of Fifa’s governance and review committee as proof of Fifa’s commitment to reform.Maduro, however, was sacked from the position a year later. He subsequently testified before a House of Commons select committee that Infantino tried to influence his committee’s decision to block Russian deputy prime minister Vitaly Mutko from joining Fifa’s board under statutes pertaining to political neutrality. (At the time, Fifa said Maduro’s assertion was “factually incorrect” and that “the independence of Fifa’s committees and the success of Fifa’s reform process will only be measured by the decisions taken in the future and not by personal opinions”.)Maduro today points to structural issues, and says Infantino’s private-equity plan is in keeping with the awarding of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia and a Fifa Peace Prize to Donald Trump.(From left) Fifa president Gianni Infantino with US president Donald Trump, US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Fifa's Carlos Cordeiro, at the White House last November. Cordeiro has resigned from his position in opposition to Infantino's plans to sell a stake in the World Cup. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images “This is all a result of a system and the governance model that is based on an extremely high concentration of power in the president of Fifa,” says Maduro. Fifa’s chief governance model affords each member an equal vote, and sports-focused NGO Fair Square criticise this for fostering “a model of patronage that disincentivises ethical conduct”.“The system of incentives in place at Fifa promotes that kind of imperial presidency,” he says. “Everybody was saying, well, ‘It was Havelange’ and then came Blatter.“Then we got rid of Blatter and people said, ‘Now things will be different with Infantino’. Now everybody is saying we need to get rid of Infantino. I say we need to reform Fifa, reform Uefa and reform sports governing bodies. “Reform will only happen if it’s imposed from the outside by public authorities. If not, then we might get rid of Mr Infantino, but the person that will succeed him will be someone similar to him. Political actors have so far been resistant to act and to do what is necessary.”Antoine Duval, head of the Asser International Sports Law Centre, points to the non-starter European Super League as an example of a similar, unpopular commercial overreach in football. Among its legacies, he adds, was the introduction of an independent football regulator in the UK.The outcry to Infantino’s sell-off plans heightened scrutiny on Fifa at EU level this week. Irish MEP Barry Andrews is issuing an invite to Fifa to appear before a joint committee of the European Parliament, while the EU’s commissioner for sport posted on X that “enough is enough”.Duval points to colleagues’ proposal of an EU Sports Act, whereby sports governing bodies would be forced to comply with certain regulations or risk significant fines, similar to the Digital Services Act which empowers the EU to impose fines on giant American tech companies.The EU has so far stopped short of regulating sport under competition law as they do other commercial practices. This is largely because of an article in the EU constitution that enshrines sport as a separate entity and a common good. Fifa owe their status as football’s global governing body to the power to sanction any member who might want to breakaway to a separate organisation. This is a monopoly position the EU allows because it is done in the name of sport and not commerce.Infantino’s private-equity plans risk fundamentally changing Fifa’s status, because as Duval explains, it proposed introducing shareholders to Fifa’s structure. “The day you do that,” he says, “the special status that Fifa, Uefa and sports governing bodies in general enjoy under EU internal market law would not be maintained.”The shelving of Infantino’s plans may ultimately lead to change at the top of Fifa and far-reaching reform.