Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell stakes in the World Cup appears to be finished after the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) sided with UEFA and CONCACAF against the proposal, while two senior figures inside FIFA turned on the organisation’s president.
Carlos Cordeiro, a retired American investment banker who served as a senior adviser to Infantino, resigned from his role at FIFA, becoming the first internal figure to do so. FIFA’s chief operating officer Kevin Lamour then publicly broke with the president, stopping short of resigning but saying he was willing to lose his job over the matter.
The combined opposition now exceeds the threshold needed to block the plan. A total of 135 FIFA member associations are publicly against the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal, more than the 106 required to defeat it.
Resignations and warnings from within
Cordeiro, who also served on the White House task force for the 2026 World Cup, said he had no involvement in the proposal and opposed it entirely. He called it a bad deal for FIFA’s member associations, for football, and for the long-term future of the game, and urged colleagues still inside FIFA to speak up.
Lamour told the Associated Press that the project belonged to one person and that it must not go ahead. He said football’s political leaders needed to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions, adding that if speaking out cost him his position he would understand and respect that outcome.
FIFA issued a statement on Friday doubling down on the plan, blaming incorrect media reports for disrupting its consultation process and insisting that nobody was selling football. The governing body said the proposal was intended to give all member associations a meaningful stake in football’s commercial opportunity in their own countries. Infantino had offered member associations a 30 million pound incentive to support the deal.
Confederations line up against the proposal
UEFA had already announced that its 55 member associations would boycott all FIFA competitions for as long as the proposals remained on the table. The confederation said no part of the World Cup should ever be surrendered to private investors, and described the way the plan had been developed in secret as an abdication of FIFA’s duty as custodian of world football.
CONCACAF, representing 41 member associations across North America, Central America and the Caribbean, rejected the proposal outright. The confederation questioned why private equity investment was needed following what it described as the most profitable FIFA World Cup in history, and criticised the short deadline imposed on members to respond.
The AFC, in its statement, said the proposal could not realistically achieve the broad consensus needed to move forward. The confederation warned that any plan risking the unity of the World Cup must be reconsidered, and called on FIFA to urgently review its governance and decision-making framework.
South American body CONMEBOL said it would seek more information from FIFA before taking a position.
Political voices join the opposition
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter also weighed in, writing on social media that FIFA is not a private equity fund and has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the global game. Blatter said money matters but must never become everything.
Andy Burnham, the British Prime Minister, told GiveMeSport the situation was not sustainable and that when UEFA and CONCACAF could not have confidence in FIFA’s leadership, that represented a large portion of world football saying the situation was unacceptable. Burnham said he had been prepared to give Infantino’s era the benefit of the doubt until this point.
One international football insider told the Daily Mail that UEFA’s response was at the nuclear button end of the spectrum, and that Infantino had overreached this time. Infantino is seeking a fourth term as FIFA president next year.
The core proposed investor in the FFE scheme was a New York investment firm created by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, who is Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
