For a few weeks in the summer of 2026, global football governance looked like it might collapse into something genuinely chaotic. Uefa’s 55 member associations voted unanimously on July 30 to boycott all Fifa competitions unless president Gianni Infantino pulled a controversial plan to commercialize Fifa’s tournament rights. He did pull it. Uefa still wasn’t satisfied. Now, apparently, it is.
European national teams, including England, are expected to participate in the Fifa Under-20 Women’s World Cup in Poland, running from September 5 to 27, signaling that Uefa has stepped back from the edge of a confrontation that would have reshaped world football’s power structure.
What the fight was actually about
The plan at the center of the dispute was called Fifa Forward Enterprise, or FFE. The concept: sell minority stakes in a newly created commercial subsidiary to private investors, generating roughly $4.2 billion by monetizing the rights to major Fifa competitions, including the World Cup.
Uefa and several other confederations, including Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation, objected to both the substance and the process. The proposal appeared to advance without adequate consultation with football’s broader stakeholder community, a procedural shortcut that Fifa subsequently acknowledged with a formal apology.
