Why Infantino's Plan to Sell a Stake in the World Cup Collapsed: A Legal Analysis
In the final days of July 2026, FIFA president Gianni Infantino put forward a plan that, had it gone ahead, would for the first time in football history have given private investors an ownership stake in World Cup revenues: a newly created subsidiary valued at roughly $20 billion, with up to 20 percent of its shares offered to outside investors. The plan survived less than a week. A wave of opposition from the confederations, threats by European members to boycott the World Cup, and a protest resignation at the top of FIFA itself forced Infantino to retreat. Yet the legal question at the heart of the affair remains very much alive: was a "sale of the World Cup" legally possible at all? This note answers that question by examining FIFA's legal status under Swiss law, the statutory rules governing the commercial rights to its competitions, and comparable experiments elsewhere in world football.
What Happened: From Announcement to Retreat in a Matter of Days
The FIFA World Cup; FIFA's plan targeted the sale of up to 20 percent of the shares in the company that would exploit the tournament's revenues
According to reports by outlets including ESPN and Sky Sports, the plan — presented under the name "FIFA Forward Enterprise" — rested on a clear structure: the commercial exploitation of the men's and women's World Cups and FIFA's other events would be transferred to a newly formed subsidiary valued at approximately $20 billion, and up to 20 percent of that company's shares would then be sold to outside investors, raising around $4 billion. The rights covered by the plan, per the same reports, spanned FIFA's four main revenue pillars: broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing.
The timeline itself reveals the depth of the crisis. The plan was announced on Tuesday, 29 July 2026. The following day, Infantino defended it against mounting criticism, calling it "an opportunity, not an obligation" and insisting that the governance of football would remain in FIFA's hands without external interference. Just two days later, on 1 August, the same man announced the plan's demise:
"Having listened carefully to all views, it became clear that this project has created divisions which, regardless of the level of support for it, are no longer compatible with its original purpose."
ESPN also reported that the principal investor in negotiations was Joshua Kushner's investment firm — a claim FIFA never officially confirmed, and which should be cited only as media reporting, with caution. What is beyond doubt, however, is how the plan was pushed through: the continental confederations said they had been blindsided, and the process had been run confidentially, without consulting football's stakeholders. FIFA had even set a deadline for national federations to sign up — 19 September 2026 — warning them that those who declined would "miss out" on the plan's benefits.
FIFA's Legal Status: A Non-Profit Association Under Swiss Law
To understand why the plan caused such an uproar, one must start with FIFA's legal nature. Contrary to popular perception, FIFA is not a multinational commercial company. Legally, it is an "association" registered in Zurich, governed by the provisions on associations in the Swiss Civil Code (Articles 60 et seq.). This is the same legal form used by local sports clubs and small Swiss charities — except that this particular association has a turnover in the billions.
FIFA's Statutes define its objectives as developing and promoting football worldwide, regulating the game and organising international competitions, and its character is non-profit: revenues must serve those objectives — specifically the development of football — rather than being distributed as profit among shareholders. Indeed, an association has no shareholders among whom profit could be distributed. The associative form does not, however, preclude large-scale economic activity; Swiss law allows an association to engage in commercial activity in pursuit of its objectives, and FIFA has for decades earned billions of dollars from selling broadcasting rights and sponsorship. What this legal form constrains is not the earning of revenue but its destination: the revenue cycle must flow back into football.
Alongside this, the division of powers among FIFA's organs matters: the Congress — the assembly of all member associations — is FIFA's supreme legislative body; the FIFA Council sets strategic direction; and the president represents FIFA and implements the decisions of its organs. This division of competence, as we shall see, was one of the central knots of the recent affair: which organ has the authority to decide the fate of FIFA's most valuable asset?
Who Owns the World Cup's Commercial Rights Under the FIFA Statutes
The FIFA Statutes settle the question of ownership clearly. In the editions of the Statutes cited by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its Super League ruling (Articles 67 and 68), they provide:
"FIFA, its member associations and the confederations are the original owners of all of the rights emanating from competitions and other events coming under their respective jurisdiction, including, among others, every kind of financial rights, audiovisual recording, reproduction and broadcasting rights, multimedia rights, marketing and promotional rights and incorporeal rights such as emblems and rights arising under copyright law."
The same Statutes specify that FIFA may exploit these rights alone, jointly with third parties, or entirely through third parties, and may grant licences for that purpose. So the "commercialisation" of World Cup rights is neither prohibited nor new; FIFA's established practice has run on exactly this track for decades: selling broadcasting rights to networks, granting sponsorship packages to brands, and licensing merchandise.
The key legal distinction lies here: there is a fundamental difference between granting an exploitation licence for a defined period — FIFA's standing practice with broadcasters and sponsors — and selling shares in the entity that owns the rights, which gives a private investor a permanent, proprietary claim on a share of the revenues of every future edition of the World Cup. A licensee walks away when the contract ends; a shareholder stays, and holds a stake in every future commercial decision. The July 2026 plan crossed precisely from the first territory into the second.
Was Selling a Stake in the World Cup Legally Possible?
From a legal-engineering standpoint, FIFA's proposed structure was cleverly designed: since the association itself has no shares to sell, the commercial rights would be transferred to a commercial subsidiary, and a minority stake in that company would then be sold to investors. This is the classic mechanism for working around the inherent constraints of a non-profit association: the association remains untouched, and the transaction takes place in the corporate layer below it.
Those defending the plan's feasibility relied on three points: the stake being sold was a minority one, with FIFA retaining 80 percent and full control of the company; the association's legal personality and governance organs would remain intact; and raising outside capital to develop FIFA's events — women's football in particular — could be construed as consistent with the statutory objectives. Infantino's defence on 30 July leaned on precisely this "governance preserved" argument.
But the counter-arguments carried more weight. First, the conflict with the non-profit statutory purpose: a subsidiary's profits must inevitably be distributed among its shareholders, and a private shareholder means a permanent outflow of part of football's revenues from football's own cycle. Second, the risk of conflicts of interest: FIFA officials owe fiduciary duties to football, but the subsidiary's directors would also owe duties to the private investor — and those two sets of duties do not always point the same way. Third, the question of competence: can the president, or even the FIFA Council, decide the fate of FIFA's most valuable asset without the approval of the Congress? Tellingly, the very process FIFA designed — deadlines for federations to consent, financial incentives to join — showed that FIFA itself knew the plan could go nowhere without its members' agreement.
Key takeaway: the plan's principal obstacle was not any absolute legal impossibility. It was a combination of statutory barriers (the non-profit purpose), competence barriers (the Congress's position) and legitimacy barriers (member consensus). In sports law, the technical feasibility of a legal structure is never separable from the legitimacy of its governance.
Historical Precedents: From the ISL Collapse to the CVC Deals
Football has tasted the consequences of tying its commercial rights to private entities before. The classic example is ISL, the company that for decades held a monopoly on FIFA's marketing. Its bankruptcy in 2001 triggered one of the biggest financial crises in FIFA's history and later spawned corruption cases and revelations of hidden payments. The lesson of ISL was clear: when football's revenue artery runs through a private entity, the sport's financial fate is chained to that entity's health and survival.
In recent years, the wave of private equity money flowing into European club football has produced a new version of the same knot. La Liga's deal with CVC — ceding a share of the league's commercial revenues in exchange for liquidity — met opposition and litigation from Spain's biggest clubs. France's Ligue 1 tried a similar structure with the same fund, and the debate over its long-term cost continues. And in Germany, the Bundesliga's comparable plan was abandoned under relentless pressure from supporters, who saw it as selling football's soul.
A comparative reading of these episodes converges on a single point: in every case the core knot is the same — selling a share of tomorrow's revenue for cash today, and the question of who has the right to decide over a sport's common heritage. FIFA's plan raised that same question, this time not at the level of a national league but at the level of the world's most popular sporting event.
The Competition-Law Angle: The Super League Ruling's Shadow
The affair has a further dimension in EU competition law. In December 2023, in the European Super League case, the Court of Justice of the European Union held that FIFA and UEFA, in the commercial exploitation of competitions, qualify as "undertakings" in a dominant position, and that the exercise of their powers — from authorising competitions to exploiting commercial rights — must be subject to a framework that is transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate.
The link between that ruling and the recent plan is direct: once FIFA transfers commercial exploitation to a company with private shareholders, fresh questions arise about abuse of dominance, discrimination in the allocation of rights, and conflicts of interest in regulation. FIFA is at once world football's regulator and its vendor; the Super League ruling insists precisely on keeping those two roles separable and their conflicts contained. The proposed structure would have blurred the line between FIFA's regulatory role and its commercial role — the very line the European court insisted must be defended — and could have exposed FIFA to a fresh round of competition litigation. An investor with a stake in World Cup revenues would also be a hidden stakeholder in regulatory decisions affecting the calendar, format and exclusivity of competitions — exactly the configuration to which European competition law has become sensitised.
The Backlash and the Governance Crisis: Why the Plan Fell Apart
It was the reactions that determined how fast the plan crumbled. UEFA described it as a "profound failure of leadership" and a dereliction of FIFA's duties, drawing its battle line with the statement that "some things are simply too important to be sold"; European members voted to boycott the World Cup and all FIFA competitions if the plan went ahead, and CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation joined the opposition. Inside FIFA, the rift became public: Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino's senior adviser and FIFA's representative on the 2026 World Cup task force, resigned in protest:
"I cannot stand by and watch as FIFA considers selling a stake in the World Cup. This is a bad deal for the member associations, bad for football, and bad for the long-term future of the game."
FIFA's chief operating officer likewise called the scheme "one man's project" and criticised the secrecy of the process and the exclusion of the organisation's own staff. Cordeiro also made a simple financial argument: why would an institution holding billions of dollars in reserves, with zero debt, need to sell its most valuable asset?
From a legal-governance perspective, these reactions mean more than political protest. The confederations and federations demonstrated, in effect, that a decision over the fate of the World Cup taken without member consensus lacks both legitimacy and enforceability — even if, on paper, a legal route for it has been engineered. Infantino's climbdown statement is also worth reading closely from this angle: he announced the end of this plan, not a permanent renunciation of private capital; the phrase "no longer compatible with its original purpose" locates the problem, in his view, in the divisions the plan created — not in the idea itself.
What It Means for the Future of Football Governance
The first consequence is political: Infantino's position has been visibly weakened, and UEFA has openly voiced its loss of confidence in his leadership ahead of the next FIFA elections. Whether that distrust hardens into a serious electoral challenge remains to be seen; but the political capital of a president forced to withdraw the biggest financial initiative of his tenure within three days has undoubtedly been damaged.
Second, the idea is likely to return in softer forms: project-based partnerships around specific events, long-term sales of rights for defined periods rather than equity transfers, or structures put to the Congress for approval from the outset. Any future plan will have to pass four legal tests to survive: transparency of process from the start; approval by the competent organ — the Congress — for a decision of this magnitude; compatibility with the non-profit purpose and the return of revenues to football; and a clear mechanism for managing the conflict between FIFA's regulatory and commercial roles.
Third, the lesson for federations and sports governing bodies everywhere is plain: a sports organisation's core asset is neither its broadcasting rights nor the brand of its competitions — it is the trust of its members. Commercialisation, however profitable, is unsustainable if pursued without proper statutory process and without persuading the organisation's own organs, and it can turn into a legitimacy crisis within days. FIFA's experience showed that even the most powerful sports body in the world cannot bypass this rule.
Conclusion
The answer to the question this note opened with is clear: selling a share of the World Cup's commercial rights through a subsidiary was technically capable of legal design — the FIFA Statutes permit the commercialisation of rights, and corporate engineering could work around the constraints of the associative form. But the plan collided with three fundamental barriers: FIFA's non-profit character and statutory objectives, which cannot accommodate a permanent diversion of football's revenues to a private shareholder; the competence of FIFA's organs and the necessity of member consensus for a decision of this scale; and governance legitimacy, which was forfeited by a confidential, non-consultative process. Those three barriers stopped the plan in under a week. The clear result is that, within the current legal framework, the World Cup is not "for sale" — unless FIFA's members themselves, through the statutory process and in the competent organ, choose such a transformation. And the events of July 2026 showed that, at least for now, no such will exists.