I read UEFA’s statement twice because I assumed I’d missed the part where FIFA denied it. They didn’t. Gianni Infantino wants to sell a piece of the World Cup, the actual tournament, not a broadcast package, to a fund run by the president’s son-in-law’s brother, weeks after UEFA accused him of bending World Cup officiating for a call from that same president. Two hundred and eleven national federations are about to find out what “development funding” buys when the man setting the number is also the man courting the buyers.
Here’s what FIFA actually filed. FIFA is building a new commercial subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, which will hold the commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups plus the Club World Cup at an initial valuation of $20 billion. FIFA wants to sell a stake in the World Cup, reportedly somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of it (nobody in the reporting will commit to one number), and raise up to $4.2 billion doing it. JPMorgan is structuring the sale. That’s not a rumor. That’s the pitch.
The presumed lead investor is Thrive Eternal, a fund Joshua Kushner launched in April. Thrive Capital, run by Joshua Kushner, is the parent shop, and Joshua Kushner happens to be Jared Kushner’s brother. Jared Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump. Follow that slowly, because FIFA would rather you didn’t: the sitting president’s daughter is married to a man whose brother’s fund is the presumed buyer of a piece of soccer’s biggest event. Nobody at FIFA has explained why that particular shop, out of every private equity fund on earth salivating over the most-watched sporting property alive, ended up first in line.
It matters because of what happened three weeks before this story broke. In early July, Trump called Infantino and asked him to review Folarin Balogun’s red card from the USMNT’s win over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The suspension got waived, the first time since 1962 a World Cup red card didn’t carry one, and Balogun played in the Round of 16 against Belgium. Infantino said publicly that FIFA’s judicial bodies are independent and that he had no influence over anything, the kind of sentence an executive says specifically because the honest version would be a goddamn confession. UEFA called the reversal “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and said it crossed a red line, and it’s the same Balogun red card reversal that UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin was still furious about when he skipped the World Cup final in protest a couple weeks later.
FIFA’s selective enforcement around that same red card didn’t help its case either.
So here’s the pattern: access first, then ownership.
A phone call bends an outcome in July. A fund tied to the caller’s family shows up bidding on the event three weeks later. UEFA’s actual statement, released July 28th, is worth reading in full, and it reads like a press release written by someone who was still mad when they hit send.
https://twitter.com/JacobsBen/status/2082114910658469986
“None of us are the owners of football,” UEFA said. FIFA’s board apparently missed that memo, because national federations go from $8 million to $20 million in the new 2027-2030 distribution cycle, climbing to $22 million and then $24 million through 2038, a raise set unilaterally by the same body now asking 211 federations to approve the deal that funds it. That’s the actual scandal hiding under the soft language: FIFA buying yes votes with a number it invented itself, on its way to answering to Joshua Kushner’s fund instead of the federations casting those votes.
FIFA calls this “democratisation of football worldwide,” which is a hell of a phrase for a deal that hands 211 federations a bigger allowance while handing FIFA a landlord. FIFA insists it retains sole control of governance, competitions, and the match calendar, and that outside investment stays contained inside the subsidiary. Ask any federation exec whether the guy who just set your allowance answers to you or to the fund that bought a piece of his org’s biggest asset, and watch how fast “sole control” starts sounding like marketing copy instead of a fact.
UEFA is weighing legal options and put a boycott on the table at an emergency meeting of its 55 members, which is the diplomatic version of standing up from the table without leaving the room. Nothing’s decided yet. What’s decided is that Infantino found language soft enough to make selling equity in the World Cup sound like generosity: a subsidiary, a valuation, a distribution schedule, all of it dressed up around the plain fact that he’s monetizing the exact access he got caught using for free three weeks earlier. UEFA calls it selling the soul of football. I’d have called it something with fewer syllables and a lot more swearing.
