UEFA has told FIFA president Gianni Infantino it is actively weighing legal action against him personally and against world football's governing body, in a dramatic escalation of the fallout from FIFA's abandoned plan to sell a stake in its own commercial rights to outside investors.
A letter sent by UEFA to Infantino, disclosed by The Telegraph and reported in Israel by ONE, states that European football's governing body is "actively considering legal steps, arbitration procedures and/or filing regulatory complaints" over the collapsed venture known as FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE.
FFE was unveiled by FIFA on July 28 as a new commercial subsidiary that would take over the sale of marketing and broadcast rights for FIFA's flagship events, including the World Cup and the Club World Cup. The plan envisaged selling roughly a fifth of the new entity to private investors, with FIFA reportedly pitching a valuation of around $20 billion and seeking to raise as much as $4.2 billion.
The proposed lead investor was Thrive Eternal, a firm launched earlier this year by businessman Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, with JPMorgan Chase working alongside FIFA to structure the deal.
The scheme triggered an almost immediate revolt. UEFA, CONCACAF and Asian football's governing body all voiced fierce opposition, and a wave of national federations effectively threatened to boycott the project, arguing FIFA was moving to privatize control over the sport's biggest prize without proper consultation.
Facing that backlash, Infantino reversed course and shelved the plan over the weekend, just a day before UEFA's letter became public. But the retreat has not repaired the damage to FIFA's relationship with its European counterpart.
UEFA's letter goes further than simply objecting to the now-scrapped scheme: it explicitly instructs FIFA and Infantino to preserve every document and piece of electronic correspondence relating to FFE, a standard pre-litigation step aimed at guarding against the destruction of evidence that could be used in future proceedings.
UEFA did not stop at Infantino. According to the reporting, it sent similarly worded warning letters to some of the people and institutions involved in the deal on the investment side, naming Joshua Kushner, TripAdvisor chairman Greg Maffei and JPMorgan directly, along with the firm Open Economics.
The episode marks one of the most serious public ruptures between FIFA and UEFA in years, with Aleksander Čeferin's organization signalling it no longer trusts Infantino's leadership even after he abandoned the privatization plan. ONE's report, sourced to The Telegraph, frames it as a story still unfolding, with UEFA's next formal steps yet to be announced.
