Football's member associations have managed something they rarely do: acting together, they stopped their own governing body from selling a share of the World Cup. In a statement issued overnight, FIFA president Gianni Infantino confirmed that the plan to bring outside investors into the organisation's competitions "will not proceed".
What was on the table was a commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, that would have held the rights to FIFA's main events, including the men's and women's World Cups. Around 20 percent of it was to be sold to minority, non-controlling investors, raising as much as $4.2bn and implying a valuation of roughly $20bn for the new business. According to the BBC, each of the 211 member associations was offered $40m for backing the proposal, with a deadline of 19 September to sign up. A simple majority – 106 of 211 – would have been enough to push it through.
That majority never came close. UEFA called an emergency meeting and voted to boycott, declaring that no European national team would take part in any FIFA competition while the proposals stood. "Nobody has the moral right to sell something they merely hold in trust for the next generation," European football's governing body said. Concacaf, which runs the game in North and Central America and the Caribbean, said its members rejected the plan; the Asian Football Confederation declared its solidarity with both. CONMEBOL withheld a verdict and asked FIFA for clarification on the scope, structure and governance of the scheme.
The arithmetic behind the reversal
Between them, UEFA (55 votes), the AFC (46) and Concacaf (35) control 136 of the 211 votes – enough to bury the proposal outright if their members followed their confederations. Opposition also surfaced inside FIFA itself: Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino and a former banker, resigned over the plan, writing that it was "a bad deal for football" and would "mortgage football's future".
Infantino, announcing the withdrawal, said the project had "created divisions" that were "no longer in the interest" of the goal he had set out to achieve, and that he intends to bring the parties back together in the coming weeks. AFC president Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa welcomed the decision, saying the future of global football "must always be shaped through proper consultation, collective dialogue and respect for the established governance structures of our game".
The practical outcome is that commercial control of the World Cup stays where it was: with the associations that collectively own it. The wider lesson is that football's much-criticised governance structure, when its members actually use it, still works.