Gianni Infantino is facing the deepest crisis of his FIFA presidency after abandoning a plan to sell a stake in future World Cup profits to private investors, with UEFA declaring it has lost confidence in his leadership, ONE reports.

The Israeli outlet's report, headlined "Infantino has lost control, he must resign," reflects a week of open revolt inside world football's governing body that culminated in FIFA scrapping the scheme on Friday.

The plan, known internally as FIFA Forward Enterprise, would have sold roughly a 20 percent stake in World Cup commercial profits to a group of private investors led by Joshua Kushner's Thrive Eternal, based on a valuation of around $20 billion and designed to raise about $4.2 billion for FIFA.

In exchange, member federations were promised $20 million each upfront, doubling their existing $10 million commitments, rising to $22 million through 2034 and $24 million through 2038, according to reporting on the proposal's terms.

UEFA led the resistance, voting 55-0 among its member associations to boycott all FIFA competitions, including the World Cup itself, if the sale went ahead. "Some things are simply too important to sell," the European body said. "The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will."

UEFA went further this week, stating plainly that "the current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA's confidence but also that of many other members of the football family" — language read across Europe as a direct call for Infantino to step aside or face a formal no-confidence vote.

The pressure has been compounded from inside FIFA's own Zurich headquarters. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino's senior adviser and a former Goldman Sachs banker who had represented FIFA on the White House task force for the 2026 World Cup, resigned in protest, saying: "I cannot stand by while FIFA considers selling a stake in the World Cup."

FIFA's chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, then issued his own extraordinary statement to the Associated Press, saying staff had been "deceived" by the secrecy around the deal and describing it as "the project of one person." Lamour did not resign but said the moment called for football's political leaders "to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions," adding: "if that means I lose my job then so be it."

CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation also issued statements rejecting the investment plan, though neither went as far as UEFA's boycott threat, leaving Infantino more isolated among the continental confederations that underpin his political base.

Infantino confirmed on Friday that FIFA was dropping the proposal, saying the divisions it had caused had become counterproductive. He has not resigned and has given no public indication that he intends to, instead signalling a wish to keep working with his critics.

His position is not immediately at legal risk: the next FIFA presidential election is scheduled for March 19, 2027 in Rabat, Morocco, with the deadline for rival candidacies falling on November 18 this year. Any move by UEFA to force him out before then would likely require an extraordinary congress or a formal no-confidence mechanism that has never previously been tested against a sitting FIFA president.

For now, the episode has left Infantino's authority visibly diminished less than three weeks after he presided over the conclusion of the 2026 World Cup — and has handed UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin, long a rival power centre within world football's governance, a rare position of open leverage over FIFA's leadership.