FIFA has formally abandoned its plan to sell a stake in the commercial rights to the World Cup, ONE reports, ending weeks of turmoil that saw a senior adviser to president Gianni Infantino resign and Europe's governing body threaten to boycott FIFA tournaments altogether.
The scheme, built around a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, would have seen FIFA sell up to 20% of the company — which was to control commercial rights linked to the men's and women's World Cups and Club World Cups — to outside investors. JP Morgan had valued the vehicle at roughly $20 billion.
FIFA said in a statement that the project had "created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place," and confirmed the proposal "will not advance."
The climbdown followed a rapid collapse in support among FIFA's member confederations. UEFA formally voted to boycott future FIFA competitions if the plan went ahead, warning that "no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive." CONCACAF and, most damagingly for Infantino, the Asian Football Confederation joined the opposition in the plan's final days.
The pressure was compounded by the resignation of Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino and a trusted figure inside FIFA's leadership, who quit on Friday calling the sell-off "a bad deal for FIFA's Member Associations, a bad deal for football, and a bad deal for the long-term future of the game."
Infantino had defended the idea as it first emerged, insisting "nobody is selling football" and that a full sale was something FIFA "wouldn't even consider." But the structure on the table would still have handed a fifth of the new commercial entity to private investors, reportedly including a New York investment firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner.
FIFA had tried to win over sceptical member associations by offering each of them roughly $53 million in support of the plan, but the money failed to blunt the backlash from national federations and continental bodies that saw the move as ceding control of the sport's flagship event to outside capital.
There is no Israeli angle to the story directly, but the outcome matters for every federation, including the Israel Football Association, whose future World Cup revenue distributions were bound up in how FIFA's commercial rights are ultimately structured.
For now, FIFA's existing commercial model for the World Cup remains unchanged, and Infantino's office has given no indication of a revised proposal in the immediate future.
