Who Owns the World Cup? Why FIFA's Plan to Sell a Stake Collapsed in Under Ten Days

Table of Contents

Key Points

・On July 28, 2026, FIFA announced a plan to move the commercial and operational side of all its competitions into a new company and open it to outside investors. European associations said they would not play in any FIFA tournament, and the plan was withdrawn.

・FIFA draws the large majority of its income from the men’s World Cup alone. The proposal was framed as a way to fund an increase in development money for its 211 member associations to more than 10 billion dollars.

・What finally sank the plan was the absence of any consensus behind it. The episode restated an old principle: the World Cup is a global public good that FIFA holds in trust rather than an asset it owns.

▼ Watch this article as a video

A New Company for the World Cup, Announced and Then Withdrawn

FIFA announced on July 28, 2026 that it intended to expand development funding for its 211 member associations to more than 10 billion dollars. To pay for it, the governing body proposed consolidating the commercialisation and organisation of all FIFA competitions, along with sponsorship, broadcast, licensing and new ventures, into a new company called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), and opening that company to outside investment.

FIFA said the plan would require the support of a majority of member associations and the relevant approvals of the FIFA Council.

The new company would be valued at about 20 billion dollars, with a partial sale of shares raising up to 4.2 billion dollars, Bloomberg and other outlets reported the same day.

FIFA has never published those figures. On July 31 it rejected the reporting, saying nobody was selling football and that its consultation process had been disrupted by inaccurate media reports.

UEFA and Europe’s 55 associations issued a joint statement on July 30. It said the World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product and that FIFA carries a duty as the custodian of world football. Unless the proposal was abandoned in its entirety, the statement said, no European national team would take part in any FIFA competition.

The day before, on July 29, both the Asian Football Confederation and CONCACAF had issued statements in their own names expressing disappointment that a proposal of such significance had entered the public domain without consultation.

President Gianni Infantino said on July 31 that he would not pursue the plan because it had caused division. FIFA also said that day that the consultation process itself would continue, which left it unclear whether the plan was fully dead. The answer came in a joint letter from the president and the secretary general, sent to all member associations late on August 5 and into August 6. That document confirmed that the FFE proposal had been withdrawn and was no longer being pursued, acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the process, and apologised.

Between August 6 and 7, UEFA said withdrawal alone did not meet its conditions and that its refusal to participate stood. The executive committee of the Confederation of African Football, meanwhile, unanimously reconfirmed its support for the president, and the Mexican and Argentine associations declared their support in turn.

A World Cup Red Card, Suspended: The USMNT’s Balogun Case and FIFA’s Article 27 Precedent

Why Japan Fell Short Again: Brazil Defeat Shows the Final Margins at World Cup Level

Where FIFA’s Money Comes From, and What the Plan Actually Covered

One tournament pays for 211 associations

FIFA’s revenue is heavily skewed toward the men’s World Cup, and the distribution of the money that tournament generates keeps its 211 member associations running.

The structure has three layers. FIFA sits at the top, the six continental confederations below it, and the 211 national and territorial associations below them. FIFA holds the commercial rights to its competitions, and money flows downward from there.

Across the 2023 to 2026 cycle, FIFA’s total revenue is reported to be in the region of 13 billion dollars. Press estimates put around 70 percent of that figure down to the 2026 men’s World Cup alone. Both broadcast and sponsorship income depend on a single event.

The mechanism that distributes it is called FIFA Forward. It is the existing programme that channels World Cup money into the development and administration of each association. The FFE plan was designed to raise outside capital through a new company in order to increase Forward payments.

In the current cycle, from 2023 to 2026, Forward provides up to 8 million dollars per association. Measured against the development programmes that existed before 2016, that is close to a sevenfold increase.

The same 8 million means entirely different things in different places. For a European association operating on a budget of tens of millions a year it is a top-up. For a small association it determines whether the national team can travel, whether youth development happens, and whether pitches get built.

What FFE was designed to do

FFE would have carved out FIFA’s revenue-generating functions into a company and placed a minority of its shares in outside hands. The press called it selling the World Cup, but the design did not transfer the tournament itself.

Commercial activities covering sponsorship, broadcast and licensing would move into the new company. FIFA would own and control that company permanently, and investors would be minority shareholders receiving a share of profits with no role in running the game. That was FIFA’s account of it.

What FIFA never published was the valuation of about 20 billion dollars, the figure of up to 4.2 billion dollars in proceeds, or the terms on which investors would take their returns. Every number remained a press number while member associations were being asked to decide.

The upside offered to associations was substantial. Forward payments would rise in stages from the current 8 million dollars per association to more than 20 million from 2027. If the plan went ahead, a one-off additional fund would be layered on top, taking the potential total to 40 million dollars per association.

Associations were given a seven-week window to consider it, with a reported deadline of September 19.

Ten years of the Infantino presidency

Infantino took office as the face of reform after the corruption scandal, and the decade that followed was built on expanding tournaments and increasing payments to member associations.

– 2015: The FIFA corruption scandal breaks and president Sepp Blatter steps down

– February 2016: Infantino is elected president at an extraordinary congress in Zurich, promising expansion for everyone and more money for the growth of the game

– 2018: A plan for new competitions backed by an investor consortium worth a reported 25 billion dollars surfaces and then collapses amid objections to the opacity of the talks

– November 2022: He is re-elected unopposed to a third term

– 2025: The Club World Cup expands to 32 teams and is staged in the United States

– 2026: The World Cup expands to 48 nations, co-hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada

– March 2027: The next FIFA presidential election is scheduled

One line runs through the decade: make the tournaments bigger, raise revenue, push the increase out to the associations. FFE extended that same logic into financial engineering, and in purpose it was continuous with everything that came before.

There is also the matter of where the presidency started. A leadership brought in to rebuild transparency and process after a corruption scandal was attacked for a failure of due process. That is part of why the reaction ran as hot as it did.

Why a Case for Redistribution Fell Apart in Ten Days

The problem FIFA identified is a real one

FIFA’s argument that it needs to redistribute more to the wider world has a track record behind it. Development investment through FIFA Forward has grown substantially over a decade, and for smaller associations it now shapes not only travel costs for the national team but domestic leagues, women’s football, youth systems, facilities and the running of the association itself.

At the same time, the wealth of world football is concentrated in Europe. Talented players from everywhere gather in the Premier League and La Liga, and broadcast and sponsorship income accumulates around European club football.

That concentration is also a large part of what fans value. Because the best players in the world meet each other in Europe every year, the standard and the storylines exist at all, and because those same players are reassembled by nationality once every four years, the World Cup becomes the event it is.

The real question, then, is how the enormous value created by that concentration flows back to the countries and regions that supply the players. Taken in that form, FIFA’s premise is persuasive.

FIFA’s framing also had answers ready. Capitalise future revenue now to front-load development investment; retain control permanently; require majority support from member associations; make participation in the immediate funding voluntary. The proposal was not designed as an unconditional sale.

What lingered was a different question: why outside capital, specifically. In its post-withdrawal statement UEFA noted that FIFA still holds reserves of more than 5 billion dollars. CONCACAF asked in its official statement why external capital was needed to fund development immediately after the most profitable World Cup in history. No explanation of why equity beat borrowing or reserves was ever offered.

UEFA’s objection was about trusteeship, not commerce

What the joint statement from UEFA’s 55 associations attacked was governance rather than commercialisation. It called FIFA the custodian of world football and declared that the World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product and is not for sale.

Once outside investors hold a claim on future revenue, unwinding that arrangement is not simple. Who receives a slice of value generated by tournaments decades away, at what price, through what process? FIFA denied the reported valuation of about 20 billion dollars but offered no alternative figure and no investment terms, which left member associations with nothing to verify. No independent valuation and no schedule of the assets involved was published.

UEFA is hardly a bystander in commercialisation. It expanded the Champions League and created the Nations League and the Conference League, adding fixtures across Europe. Any criticism of commercialisation as such lands on UEFA too.

UEFA also already owns an enormous revenue engine in the Champions League. A larger Club World Cup consumes European club calendars and competes commercially. Its opposition therefore contains both a principle about holding the game in trust and an interest in defending its own market.

UEFA’s instrument was likewise raw power. At a stage where consultation had barely begun, it applied the maximum available pressure by threatening withdrawal from every FIFA competition, foreclosing the proposal before any deliberative body could examine it. There is power politics on that side of the argument as well.

Outside shareholders change the direction of pressure

What changes when external shareholders arrive is not how the tournament looks but which way the pressure runs inside decision-making. Investors do not provide capital as charity; they expect returns. Once an obligation to grow revenue is built into the institution, pressure can emerge on broadcast pricing, sponsorship inventory, ticket prices, and the number and size of tournaments. FIFA said it would not surrender governance, but nothing was published about board composition or investor rights, the mechanisms that would contain that pressure.

Players absorb that pressure most directly. FIFPRO and the European Leagues filed a complaint against FIFA with the European Commission in 2024, arguing that the international match calendar had passed the point of saturation.

The core of that complaint is that FIFA writes the regulations and also stages and profits from the tournaments, and that the combination amounts to an abuse of a dominant position. It is a claim by an interested party rather than a finding by the Commission, but it is where the players’ wariness is rooted.

FFE reproduced that same 2024 argument about a regulator doubling as a commercial operator, on a far larger scale. When FIFPRO said after the withdrawal that FFE was gone but the abuse of power that produced it was not, it was pointing at that continuity.

European club football offers precedents. La Liga accepted about 2 billion euros from the investment fund CVC in 2021, handing over a share of broadcast and other revenue for 50 years, over the objections of leading clubs including Real Madrid.

A comparable plan in the Bundesliga was abandoned in 2024 after supporter protests. The shape and scale of the transactions differ from FFE, but the common thread is that when long-term commercial revenue is opened to outside capital, the argument turns on internal legitimacy rather than on economic terms.

The value of the World Cup rests on wide collaboration in the first place. Players, and the clubs and domestic leagues that develop them; host countries and cities that stage it; broadcasters and sponsors; and the fans who watch. FIFA holds the rights legally, but the co-authors of the value are that numerous.

The question of who owns it bites because nobody disclosed who took part in the early design, and no formal route was offered for players, clubs or supporters to be heard. Member associations held final approval, but there was no consultation before the design existed.

Process, not substance, forced the retreat

The direct cause of a retreat inside ten days was the reaction to procedure rather than to the merits. CONCACAF stated publicly that it learned of the plan from media reports. The September 19 deadline was criticised as artificially short. The information and the time needed to assess the plan were missing before assessment could begin, and that is where the confederations concentrated their objections.

The distribution of money also drew suspicion. Associations that supported the plan stood to receive up to 40 million dollars. A structure in which the parties granting approval themselves collect large payments cannot be called a purchase of votes, but it cannot avoid looking like a conflict of interest either.

Defections came from inside FIFA. A senior adviser who had served as the link to the White House resigned, saying he could not stand by while FIFA considered selling a stake in the World Cup, and a serving executive publicly described the plan as the project of one person.

The identity of the investors sharpened the scrutiny. The founder of Thrive Capital, reported to be leading the investment, is the brother of the president’s son-in-law. There is no evidence of collusion, and President Trump has said he was not consulted in advance. Still, the emergence of an investor politically close to the FIFA president, with no competitive process and no independent valuation, made the opacity of the decision harder to overlook.

Behind that reaction lay a closeness between President Trump and the FIFA president that had been on display throughout the 2026 tournament, including the unusual suspension-in-limbo of United States forward Folarin Balogun, which we covered in a separate article.

Part of Europe also received the plan as an extension of wider tensions with Washington. UEFA’s statement welcoming the withdrawal went out of its way to thank the many prime ministers and heads of state who had spoken against the scheme, a sign that in Europe the episode was being handled at a political level beyond football.

The apology Infantino sent to member associations in early August confined the admitted errors to the process and to the handling of the situation after the leak. FIFPRO criticised that as converting a governance problem into a communications problem.

The split is now about confidence in the president

After the withdrawal, the axis of the dispute moved from the merits of the plan to confidence in the Infantino presidency. UEFA declared that it had lost that confidence and has maintained its refusal to take part in FIFA competitions even after the plan was dropped.

UEFA has also notified FIFA through lawyers that it is considering legal action, and is reported to have written to 18 officials asking them to preserve relevant documents and data. The objective has shifted from blocking a plan to changing a leadership.

Africa and Latin America went the other way. CAF unanimously reconfirmed its support, and CONMEBOL warned that it would not back moves to remove the president outside proper institutional procedure. The Mexican and Argentine associations declared their support as well.

The striking detail is that Mexico, a member of the CONCACAF that opposed the plan as an organisation, individually sided with the president. Confederation positions and national association positions are beginning to diverge, which makes this more than a contest between regions.

At the end of the tug of war stands the presidential election at the FIFA Congress in Morocco in March 2027. Nominations close on November 18, 2026. Infantino is expected to seek a fourth term, and the declarations of support from confederations can be read partly as camps forming ahead of a vote.

Whether UEFA reaches that nomination deadline still refusing to participate, and whether a challenger emerges, will test the governance structure of world football over the next few months.

The World Cup Is a Global Public Good

A custodian’s authority rests on the consent of the world

Who owns the World Cup? The answer this episode surfaced is that it belongs neither to the president of FIFA nor to the European football that rebelled against him. It is the summit of the world’s largest sport, built up by generations of players and clubs, host nations and supporters, and FIFA’s position is to manage that value responsibly on behalf of the world. The World Cup is a global public good held in trust.

FIFA has a duty to return the wealth the tournament generates to the wider game, and it needs to grow in order to do so. The principle of redistribution the plan invoked was genuine and backed by a record. But moving the future value of a public good requires the consent of the people who built that value together. Statutes can grant the authority to manage; only consent can create the legitimacy to sell. That is what ten days demonstrated.

What remains is a question about whether the custody of this public good can stay with the same leadership. Ahead of the presidential election in March 2027, will the report to the FIFA Council, the rebuilt consultation process and the disclosure mechanisms for handling outside capital that FIFA promised actually materialise? The answer world football arrives at will not be only about sport. It is also material for thinking about what governance means for any institution holding an asset that belongs to everyone.

Who Owns the World Cup? Why FIFA’s Plan to Sell a Stake Collapsed in Under Ten Days

Key Points

A New Company for the World Cup, Announced and Then Withdrawn

Related Articles