“The money of FIFA is your money.”

Gianni Infantino said it in February 2016, addressing the member associations in the hours before they elected him president of FIFA. He had campaigned on transparency and on rescuing an organisation disgraced by the Blatter years. When the votes were counted, he described the outcome as a great sign of democracy in FIFA.

Last week, UEFA quoted that line back at him.

The World Cup was valued a few days ago at twenty billion dollars. The organisation that runs it holds the same legal status as an Alpine hiking club. Between the two is every governance problem in world football, and at the end of July Infantino attempted to resolve it on his own. FIFA’s chief operating officer has since described the result as the project of one person.

The collapse took four days. On Tuesday, reports emerged of a plan to move FIFA’s commercial operations into a subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, valued at twenty billion dollars, with twenty per cent sold to private investors to raise as much as $4.2 billion. The anchor investor was to be a fund created by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Each of the 211 member associations would have received a one-off payment of twenty million dollars. By Thursday, UEFA’s fifty-five members had agreed to boycott FIFA competitions. By Friday, Infantino’s senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro had resigned, calling it a bad deal for football, and the president himself had confirmed the proposal would not proceed.

Twelve days earlier, Infantino had stood on a pitch in New Jersey presenting the FIFA World Cup trophy alongside the President of the United States, describing the tournament he had just delivered as the greatest human, social and cultural event that mankind had ever witnessed.

The events of a bad week for Gianni Infantino have been documented hour by hour, but three things have gone largely unexamined. 

The first is that the plan was in trouble under FIFA’s own constitution before anyone objected to it on principle, for reasons that have nothing to do with the corporate structure most critics have attacked. 

The second is that the most generous reading of Infantino’s judgement, the one that credits him with knowing his own congress, makes the failure more damning rather than less. 

The third is that the academics who study football’s finances do not agree that the unravelling of the FIFA President’s plans was a victory.

All of it matters beyond football, because the same legal form governs the Olympic movement, and because the pressure that produced FIFA Forward Enterprise will outlast the man who proposed it.

An association, not a company

FIFA is registered under Article 60 of the Swiss Civil Code, the same instrument used by the International Olympic Committee, by UEFA, by basketball’s and ice hockey’s world governing bodies, and by any group of Swiss residents wanting to formalise a walking club. Establishing one requires no registration and no fee. The only substantive condition is that the purpose of the association must be non-commercial.

None of which, on its own, is an objection to what Infantino proposed. Non-profit associations run commercial subsidiaries all the time. UEFA does. The IOC does. FIFA already did, which is why a vehicle called FIFA Forward Enterprise could be assembled at all. Anyone arguing that the corporate structure was itself the scandal is arguing against standard practice across world sport.

But Article 70 makes membership in a Swiss association neither transferable nor inheritable. Article 73 provides that a member who leaves has no claim on the association’s assets. FIFA’s 211 members hold no equity, could not sell it if they did, and would walk away with nothing. Infantino proposed granting permanent external equity, at twenty per cent, in the commercial engine of an organisation whose own members are legally barred from holding any. Not a subsidiary, then, but an ownership class that exists for outsiders and not for members. 

That is the part with no precedent, and it is the part nobody inside FIFA was asked about.

Infantino and the hubris question

Gianni Infantino had won every vote that mattered for a decade. He knew the arithmetic of his own congress better than his critics did, and on a straight count he was not obviously wrong: the three confederations that rejected the plan represent around ninety of 211 members. That leaves 121 who did not. A man who had spent eleven years building support among the associations that gain most from redistribution had reason to believe he could carry a room offering each of them twenty million dollars.

What he misjudged was not the count but the intensity. His opponents cared enormously; his supporters did not care enough to spend anything defending him. That is a failure of sequencing, and could have been recoverable. Consult first, publish the terms, let the confederations shape the structure, and the same proposal survives in some diminished form.

In his 2019 book Hubristic Leadership, Eugene Sadler-Smith, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Surrey Business School, draws case studies from Lehman Brothers, BP and Deepwater Horizon, NASA and the invasion of Iraq. The through-line is not stupidity, and it is not miscalculation either. Every one of those decisions was taken by capable people who had recently been proved right about something big, and who concluded that the stage of asking others could be skipped.

Sadler-Smith’s review in Leadership, written with colleagues, separates hubris understood as overconfidence, which is a trait, from hubris understood as an acquired condition with an onset and a duration. The second version is a function of time in power and of success. It is not something a leader brings to the job, but builds over time.

In Infantino’s case, he was returned unopposed in 2019 after the statutes were amended so that a vote was no longer required when only one candidate stood, telling that congress FIFA had moved on from being toxic and almost criminal. A leader who wins on democratic renewal and then removes the requirement to be voted for has stopped regarding the count as the point.

With Vita Akstinaite, Vice President of ISM University of Management and Economics and Graham Robinson, Visiting Senior Fellow at Surrey Business School, Sadler-Smith has analysed executive speech for measurable markers, published in the Journal of Business Ethics and later extended using machine learning. The markers include the ratio of “we” to “I”, the frequency of first-person singular pronouns, and the density of vocabulary around certainty, money and power. What makes them useful is that they evolve.

In the analysis of former UK prime minister, Tony Blair, the shift from “we” towards “I” tracked his years in office and sharpened around the military interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. The markers correlate with time in the job, not with personality.

Set the two Infantino quotations against each other. In 2016, the money of FIFA was your money. In 2026, the tournament was the greatest event mankind had ever witnessed, delivered by a president standing alongside a president. The subject of the sentence had changed.

FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, in post since 2024, told the Associated Press that the vice-presidents, the FIFA Council, the confederations, the federations, the players, the leagues, the clubs and the fans were all ignored, and that FIFA’s own administration was deceived. 

He described a lie by omission sustained over months. UEFA called the plan a shabby, back room, opaque deal and now says it has lost confidence in the FIFA leadership. In Britain, the current prime minister called Infantino the wrong man for the job.

Nine years after telling the members that FIFA’s money was theirs, he did not ask them.

Was this a FIFA stakeholder victory?

Borja García, Reader in Sport Policy and Governance at Loughborough University has been documenting this dynamic for two decades. His work in Public Administration, written with Henk Erik Meier, professor for the social sciences of sport at the Institute of Sport Science at Münster University, examined how FIFA has historically protected its private transnational authority against intervention by national governments. It has been very good at resisting pressure from outside. What it has rarely faced is coordinated pressure from within.

Working with Supporters Direct Europe, García helped develop the arguments that led both UEFA and the European Parliament to recognise supporters formally as legitimate stakeholders in football governance. That is the substance of last week, applied one level up. A group with no equity, no legal claim on assets and no formal veto discovered it had standing anyway, and used it.

Simon Chadwick, a professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School in France reads the same week differently. Reviewing the tournament shortly after the final with World Football Summit, he argued that “a US-style operating model is now programmed into FIFA’s DNA.”

“FIFA realizes the global sports market is changing fast and becoming intensely competitive, with properties like the NBA expanding into Europe, Africa, the Gulf, India, and China,” Chadwick explains. “In response, FIFA and its President are being much more bullish in asserting football’s position in an increasingly crowded marketplace.”

He believes this involves pursuing revenues from new opportunities, such as different broadcasting models and digital developments. “Moving forward, there will be an expectation of exponential commercial revenue growth across subsequent World Cups.”

On that account the members have won a battle over method while losing the war over direction. Revenue expectations for 2030 and 2034 will be set against what was achieved this summer, and the associations that just blocked the sale are the same associations that will expect their payments to keep rising. Refusing outside capital does not reduce the appetite that made outside capital attractive.

Stefan Szymanski of the University of Michigan, co-author of Soccernomics and among the few economists to have made international sports federations a sustained object of study, would add that refusing capital is not automatically prudent. His paper for the International Journal of Sport Finance shows Germany as the cautionary case rather than the model: the DFL abandoned a billion-euro deal in February 2024 after supporters made matches unplayable, and its own chairman said afterwards that the rejection was bad for the league, which continues to trail the Premier League in media revenue by a widening margin.

What twenty billion buys in football

Set the governance question aside and look at the arithmetic, which is stranger than it first appears. FIFA proposed raising up to $4.2 billion by selling a fifth of its commercial future. It also proposed paying each of its 211 members twenty million dollars. Those are very nearly the same figure. Multiply the payment by the membership and the total comes to $4.22 billion, which means the entire proceeds of a permanent equity sale would have left the building immediately in a single round of one-off payments, with nothing retained for the football development the sale was supposed to fund.

That structure tells you what the money was for. Twenty million dollars was a flat sum, identical for the Faroe Islands and for Brazil, which is the form a payment takes rather than a dividend.

Then there is the exit. Private equity requires one and there is none here, no listing route and no secondary market. Even LaLiga’s arrangement with CVC, the one European precedent that survived, was a fifty-year concession rather than permanent equity, and it still cost the league its three largest clubs.

This is the territory that SDA Bocconi’s Football Business Forum, convened by Professor of Corporate Finance, Gimede Gigante with La Gazzetta dello Sport, was established to examine: the argument that football’s future depends on the quality of its governance at least as much as on its access to capital.

The school’s dean, Stefano Caselli, put it more plainly at the last edition, describing management in sport as the ability to combine value with values. FIFA Forward Enterprise had a great deal of the first. The second was never put to anybody.

The Infantino proposal has been withdrawn. The pressure that produced it has not, and there is a presidential election in March 2027. FIFA runs a nine-billion-dollar business through a legal form designed for a Swiss hiking club, and its President just been reminded that the hikers still get a vote. 

They get another one in March.

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