After 10 years spent wringing every dollar and cent out of his organisation’s intellectual property, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has destroyed his absolute job security in the space of 10 days.
Infantino’s plan to spin off FIFA’s commercial interests into an investable vehicle could go down as one of the biggest sports governance blunders of all time if it leads to his demise as president next March.
The now-scrapped FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) tried to bulldoze the financialisation of the World Cup through confederations, member associations and FIFA’s own internal checks and balances, entirely in keeping with Infantino’s stream of boundary-pushing, money-making ideas.
His 2026 World Cup ticketing plan, though widely condemned, worked. His Club World Cup, met with indifference by many, could have failed if not for a bailout broadcast deal with DAZN, which took investment from Saudi Arabia’s SURJ Sports Investment shortly afterwards.
Somehow, Infantino has always managed to get what he wanted. So one can imagine his confusion that privatising the World Cup and driving the tournament to subscription platforms – as hypothesised in an SVG Europe article a month ago – was the final straw.
FFE sounds crazy in hindsight, now that so many of FIFA’s own member associations have revolted. But it didn’t come from nowhere. Infantino has been watching leagues, federations and governing bodies cash in on private equity interest for almost his entire tenure as president. It stands to reason that he thought FIFA should join the club.
On paper, FFE had a very familiar structure. FIFA would move its broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing and event operations into a separate commercial company, retain majority control and sell up to 20% to outside investors. The company would be valued at around $20bn and the proposed sale could have raised about $4bn. FIFA would continue governing football while a separate business concentrated on making more money from it.
This structure has become entirely common in the 21st century sports industry. Private equity group CVC was its pioneers, investing in rugby union’s Premiership and Six Nations, as well as LaLiga in Spain and Ligue 1 in France. The model is now so well established for CVC that it had to spin off an entirely separate vehicle to house all of its sports investments.
There was also nothing new in a global governing body spinning off a commercial subsidiary. In 2021, the International Volleyball Federation created Volleyball World with CVC, which followed a similar structure to FIFA’s FFE plan. Volleyball World looks after the governing body’s commercial operations, while the FIVB retained majority ownership and regulatory control of the sport.
In the US, the NFL and NBA have opened up their franchises to institutional capital, allowing approved private equity funds to acquire passive stakes, with the NBA loosening its rules to allow funds to acquire stakes in up to eight separate teams.
FFE was nothing new, by sport’s standards. Infantino saw governing bodies and leagues separating regulation from commerce and assumed FIFA could do the same thing.
Though fans and media recoiled in horror, Infantino’s mistake was the lack of consultation with FIFA’s advisors, commercial team or member associations.
The execution of the plan – not the plan itself – led to Infantino being turned on by confederations and associations that had previously stuck by him through a variety of other PR battles.
Concacaf complained that the proposal had received no review or approval from the relevant FIFA bodies. The Asian Football Confederation said it had not been consulted. European Leagues chief Claudius Schaefer said even the FIFA Council had not known about it.
Inside FIFA, chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said staff had been “deceived” and described FFE as the “project of one person”. Carlos Cordeiro resigned as Infantino’s senior adviser and called the proposal “a bad deal for football”.
Meanwhile, Uefa smells blood. Its 55 associations continue to threaten a boycott of FIFA competitions, seeing an opportunity to force regime change at the next FIFA Congress in March 2027.
The truth is that none of these organisations can credibly present themselves as opponents of the commercialisation or financialisation of football. Uefa, currently FIFA’s biggest critic, has been the most commercially successful confederation of the past 30 years, mostly thanks to moving football away from free-to-air television and onto pay-television platforms.
Uefa has also fought off insurgent commercial threats before. The European Super League’s financial ambitions were hardly foreign to European football, as the clubs behind it had spent decades being given more revenue and greater protection inside Uefa competitions. Much like Infantino, they made a mistake in trying to finish the job themselves, overnight, rather than continuing on a slow but successful mission to boil the frog.
Uefa also has good reason to be wary of a more commercially dynamic FIFA, armed with billions of dollars in outside investment. The ability to offer greater prize money to clubs and distribute much larger sums directly to its members would have strengthened the global governing body’s power over the calendar. Confederations could lose influence, while clubs and leagues would have to deal with an increasingly ambitious competitor for player access, calendar space, broadcasters and sponsors.
FFE has been scrapped, but the wider movement of private capital into sport continues unabated. CVC alone now holds interests across eight leagues and competitions through its Global Sport Group. Italy’s Serie A continues to hunt for investors, while clubs Germany’s Bundesliga continues a perpetual search for an institutional capital injection.
Infantino is unlikely to come away from the FFE episode believing that private equity is a bad idea for FIFA. If he learns anything at all, it will be that there are limits to how much power he can grab during a single turn at the board.
