In an unprecedented show of unity, UEFA's 55 member federations voted unanimously on Thursday to boycott FIFA's competitions, including the World Cup, unless FIFA president Gianni Infantino abandons his plan to sell a stake in football's global showcase to private investors. ONE reports that other confederations are now weighing whether to line up alongside European football's governing body against Infantino.
The trigger is a proposal, revealed this week, to spin off FIFA's commercial operations into a new entity valued at roughly €17.5 billion ($20 billion), with a minority stake to be sold to outside investors reportedly including American financier Josh Kushner and the bank JPMorgan.
FIFA has offered its 211 member federations as much as $40 million each to sign off on the plan by a September 19 deadline, part of a $10 billion incentive package due to become available from January 2027. Federations that reject the proposal would instead share a far smaller $2.7 billion pool, roughly $10 million apiece, underlining how directly Infantino has tied the money to compliance.
UEFA's response, issued after an emergency virtual meeting of all 55 associations, was blunt. "No UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership," the confederation said, adding: "Some things are simply too important to sell."
It is the first time a FIFA confederation has moved to boycott the World Cup itself, and the scale of the vote, unanimous across all 55 members, was designed to signal that Infantino cannot simply wait out European resistance.
According to ONE, that question now hangs over the rest of world football: whether Asia, Africa and the Americas follow Europe's lead. The Asian Football Confederation has already sent the clearest signal. AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa wrote to his 47 member federations branding FIFA's failure to consult member associations "totally unacceptable," and warned that Infantino's plan "will not succeed without the support of all the confederations, which is not the case now."
CONCACAF, the governing body for North and Central America and the Caribbean, added its own rebuke, saying it was "deeply concerned by the lack of due process" after the plan's details were shared publicly before any discussion with member federations. It has not, however, indicated it is ready to join a boycott.
The Confederation of African Football is due to convene its executive committee next week specifically to evaluate the proposal, a meeting that could determine whether Infantino ends up facing organised resistance from three confederations rather than one.
The dispute lands roughly a year before FIFA's next presidential election and adds to years of friction between Infantino and UEFA over calendar congestion, the expanded Club World Cup and the enlarged 48-team World Cup format. A confederation-wide boycott, if it held, would strip any private investor's stake of much of its value, since a World Cup without European teams is close to unthinkable commercially.
For now, the Israel Football Association's national team and clubs are implicated only as one of UEFA's 55 members, but the outcome of the standoff will help decide which FIFA tournaments, the World Cup among them, Israel and every other UEFA nation are able to enter in the years ahead.
