Wednesday 29 July 2026 2:59 pm
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 29: Standing next to the FIFA World Cup Trophy, FIFA President Gianni Infantino addresses the winter meeting of The U.S. Conference of Mayors on January 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. Infantino promoted the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, highlighting its potential benefits for host cities and communities. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Ignore the outcry, Fifa’s plans to sell a minority stake in the World Cup will make international football more transparent and accountable and raise huge sums to develop the game, says Chad TeixeiraFootball’s governing bodies agree on almost nothing, so when UEFA announces that the World Cup “isn’t Fifas to sell”, it’s worth asking who the status quo has been working out for. Historically, the answer is administrators. Whenever they close ranks this quickly around a principle, it’s usually worth checking whether the principle has an office and a car allowance.I spent time consulting for Fifa’s commercial and gaming operations a few years ago, and the thing I remember most clearly is the sheer volume of good ideas that walked into a meeting room and never walked out again. Nothing was ever killed outright. It was more of a gentle smothering, carried out by a process that answered to nobody in particular and therefore had no reason to move at any particular speed. That is the actual problem here, and it happens to be the one thing private capital is reliably good at fixing.Gianni Infantino’s proposal to sell 20 to 30 per cent of a new commercial entity running the World Cup and Club World Cup is being covered as an asset-stripping raid, which I think flatters it. It is a minority stake sale. It is the least interesting document a corporate lawyer will draft all year. The only novel thing about it is that it is happening to an organisation that has spent most of a century treating financial discipline as an optional extra, like travel insurance.The structure, once you strip the outrage out of it, is almost boring. Fifa keeps majority control. Outside investors, reportedly including JPMorgan and Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Eternal, buy in at a proposed $20bn valuation, raising up to $4.2bn. The 211 member associations share a further slice, each guaranteed a stake reported at around $20m, which they can hold or cash out immediately. Place your bets on which way that goes. Development funding to those same associations climbs from $8m to $20m per cycle, and higher again after that. Whatever you make of the politics, that is real money arriving at federations who have spent decades explaining, at length, that they have none.
