What FIFA Forward Enterprise would have changed, where the FIFA President’s powers ended, why the member associations mattered and what actually stopped the proposal.
FIFA’s proposal to bring private investors into a new commercial subsidiary was widely described as a plan to “sell the World Cup” or even to “sell FIFA”. Legally, neither description was quite accurate.
The proposal concerned FIFA Forward Enterprise, known as FFE. FIFA said the new subsidiary would combine its commercial rights and the operational delivery of its tournaments. Outside investors would have been offered minority, non-controlling interests, while FIFA would have retained controlling ownership, majority board representation and authority over football governance and sporting decisions.
The distinction matters. A share in a commercial subsidiary is not the same thing as membership of FIFA, ownership of FIFA itself or the legal power to rewrite the Laws of the Game. However, an investor can obtain significant economic and contractual rights without controlling the sport’s formal rule-making bodies.
The central legal questions were therefore not simply whether FIFA could “sell” something. They were what rights could lawfully be placed in the new company, who had authority to approve the structure, what protections investors would receive and whether the proposal followed FIFA’s required governance processes.
FIFA withdrew the proposal on 31 July 2026, only days after announcing it. No court declared the plan unlawful. No regulator prohibited it. It collapsed because FIFA made majority support from its member associations a condition of proceeding, and that support was no longer realistically available.
FIFA was not proposing to sell the organisation itself. It was proposing to sell an economic interest in a subsidiary built around some of its most valuable commercial activities.
FIFA was not proposing to sell the organisation itself. It was proposing to sell an economic interest in a subsidiary built around some of its most valuable commercial activities.
What exactly was FIFA proposing?
On 28 July, FIFA announced that FFE would consolidate commercial rights covering broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing with the operational delivery of FIFA tournaments.
FIFA placed an initial equity valuation of $20 billion on the proposed business and said it intended to raise up to $4.2 billion from a geographically diverse group of long-term investors. Thrive Eternal was expected to lead the investor group, J.P. Morgan had been engaged to work with FIFA and former Liberty Media executive Greg Maffei was identified as a commercial adviser.
The proceeds were intended to support an expansion of FIFA’s development funding. The proposal paired $20 million in regular FIFA Forward funding for each member association during the 2027-2030 cycle with an optional additional $20 million in one-off funding through a new FIFA Fast Forward Programme.
FIFA said it would retain sole control of FFE, majority representation on its board and exclusive authority over competitions, the international match calendar and regulatory and sporting decisions. Investors would acquire minority interests in FFE, not membership or shares in FIFA itself.
That was the public outline. The proposed constitutional documents, shareholders’ agreement, rights-transfer agreements, valuation materials and detailed investor terms were not made public. Without those documents, it is impossible to determine the complete legal or economic effect of the structure.
FIFA is an association, not a company with shareholders
Article 1 of the FIFA Statutes states that FIFA is an association governed by Article 60 and the following provisions of the Swiss Civil Code.
This means FIFA does not have shareholders in the ordinary corporate sense. Its 211 national football associations are members. Their rights arise from FIFA’s statutes, including the right to participate in Congress and cast one vote each. Those membership rights are not pieces of equity that can be offered to an investment fund.
Swiss association law gives an association legal personality and allows it to hold assets, enter contracts and act through its governing bodies. FIFA’s statutes then distribute authority among its Congress, Council, President, general secretariat and independent committees.
FFE would have been legally different. It was intended to be a separate subsidiary capable of issuing an equity interest to investors. FIFA could therefore remain an association while holding a controlling interest in a corporate vehicle with outside shareholders.
This is why saying that “FIFA was being sold” was legally misleading. The proposed transaction would not have converted investors into FIFA members or given them votes at FIFA Congress. The real issue was the package of assets, income streams and contractual protections that would have sat inside FFE.
This is why saying that “FIFA was being sold” was legally misleading.
Who owns the World Cup’s commercial rights?
Article 59 of the FIFA Statutes is the key provision.
It says FIFA, its member associations and the confederations are the original owners of the rights arising from competitions and events under their respective jurisdiction. Those rights include financial, audiovisual, broadcasting, multimedia, marketing, promotional, emblem and copyright-related rights.
For competitions under FIFA’s jurisdiction, including the FIFA World Cup, FIFA therefore has an express statutory claim to the relevant commercial rights. This is not the same as owning the sport of football in a cultural or moral sense. It is a legal allocation of the exploitable rights created by FIFA’s competitions.
Article 59 goes further. It says the FIFA Council decides how and to what extent those rights are used. It may decide that they are exploited exclusively by FIFA, jointly with a third party or entirely through a third party.
That language appears broad enough to provide a legal route for a commercial subsidiary to exploit FIFA’s rights. It also weakens the argument that any third-party involvement would automatically be prohibited by FIFA’s constitution.
However, the exact legal mechanism still mattered. FIFA could have licensed rights to FFE for a fixed period, assigned certain rights to it, entered a services agreement or combined several arrangements. The duration, exclusivity, termination provisions and treatment of future tournaments would have determined how much control FIFA retained in practice.
Could Gianni Infantino approve the transaction alone?
No. The FIFA President has significant influence, but the statutes do not give the office-holder a personal power to approve a transaction of this kind.
Article 35 says the President represents FIFA, protects and implements the mission and policies defined by the Council, chairs Congress and Council meetings and maintains relationships with football and public bodies. The President has no vote at Congress and only one ordinary vote on the 37-member FIFA Council.
The Council is FIFA’s strategic and oversight body. Under Article 34, it defines FIFA’s business and financial policies, including the standards and procedures for commercial contracts, development grants, operating costs and other financial matters. It also oversees the general secretariat.
The general secretariat is FIFA’s executive, operational and administrative body. Article 36 assigns it responsibility for negotiating, executing and performing commercial contracts in accordance with the Council’s standards and decisions.
The legal chain of authority is therefore important:
- The President could advocate, present and help direct the proposal.
- The Council had the relevant strategic, commercial and oversight authority.
- The general secretariat would negotiate and implement approved contractual arrangements.
- FIFA’s independent governance bodies had oversight functions in relation to financial, governance and compliance matters.
FIFA’s own announcement recognised this structure. It said FFE would require the relevant approvals of the Council and that any required regulatory updates would have to be approved before launch.
Did the 211 member associations legally have to approve it?
This requires a careful distinction.
FIFA’s statutes identify Congress as the supreme and legislative body, while Article 59 specifically gives the Council authority to decide how competition rights are exploited. The publicly available statutes do not contain a simple rule saying that every commercial subsidiary or minority investment must be approved by a vote of all 211 member associations.
FIFA nevertheless made majority member support an express condition of this proposal. Its announcement said FFE would launch only with support from a majority of the member associations and the relevant Council approvals. In its subsequent clarification, FIFA repeated that FFE would not be established without majority support.
That commitment was legally and politically important, even if it went beyond the minimum wording of Article 59. Once announced, FIFA could not credibly treat the consultation as irrelevant and proceed through the Council alone.
There was still uncertainty about the intended form of the member decision. FIFA referred to a consultation and a vote, but the public documents did not fully explain whether approval would occur at a formally convened Congress, through another permitted voting process or as a non-binding consultation followed by a Council resolution.
If changes to the FIFA Statutes themselves had become necessary, Congress would have been indispensable. Article 29 reserves statutory amendments to Congress and generally requires a three-quarter majority of the member associations present and eligible to vote. FIFA’s announcement referred instead to regulatory updates approved by the Council, suggesting that it did not publicly anticipate a statutory amendment.
What did “minority” and “non-controlling” really mean?
FIFA said outside investors would hold no more than approximately 20%, would have no operational role and would not control FFE. Those protections would have been significant, but the share percentage would not have answered every control question.
Minority investors commonly negotiate rights designed to protect the value of their investment. These may include board representation, information rights, consent rights over major transactions, restrictions on new debt, anti-dilution protection, minimum distribution policies, exit rights, buyback rights or vetoes over changes to the business.
Such provisions do not necessarily amount to control. Many are normal minority protections. However, sufficiently broad vetoes can produce meaningful influence, sometimes described as negative control, even where the investor cannot direct day-to-day operations.
The missing documents therefore mattered. A neutral legal assessment would need to examine:
- the exact rights transferred or licensed to FFE;
- the length and exclusivity of those arrangements;
- the composition and voting rules of the FFE board;
- all matters requiring investor consent;
- the policy for distributing profits or reinvesting them in football;
- the investors’ exit, sale and buyback rights;
- any security granted over commercial assets or future revenue; and
- what would happen if FIFA and the investors disagreed.
Without that information, neither FIFA’s assurance of sole control nor the claim that investors would effectively own part of the World Cup could be tested fully.
A 20% investor does not normally control a company. But percentage ownership and contractual influence are not always the same thing.
A 20% investor does not normally control a company. But percentage ownership and contractual influence are not always the same thing.
What governance duties were relevant?
The most serious legal questions concerned process, information and institutional responsibility.
Article 33 of the FIFA Statutes requires every Council member to act faithfully, loyally and independently in the best interests of FIFA and the global development of football. The FIFA Code of Ethics also requires officials to perform their responsibilities diligently, particularly in financial matters, and imposes duties of loyalty and conflict disclosure.
Article 43 gives the Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee responsibility for advising, assisting and overseeing the Council on financial, governance and compliance matters. It also monitors development-related funding and reviews related-party declarations.
These rules did not make private investment unlawful. They required the relevant decision-makers to act through the correct bodies, obtain sufficient information, assess the long-term interests of FIFA and disclose any conflict that could affect independent judgment.
The core governance questions included:
- Who commissioned and developed the proposal?
- What instructions and approvals had been given before it was publicly announced?
- How was the $20 billion valuation reached?
- What alternatives to an equity sale were considered?
- How were the proposed lead investor and advisers selected?
- What fees, commissions or other economic benefits would advisers or intermediaries receive?
- Were all relevant interests and relationships disclosed?
- Did Council members and member associations receive enough information and time to make an informed decision?
- Was the proposed use of long-term commercial value proportionate to the short-term capital being raised?
Concacaf publicly invoked these governance concerns, referring to a lack of due process, a short deadline and the absence of prior review or approval by the relevant FIFA bodies. The AFC also said it had not been consulted before the proposal entered the public domain. FIFA responded that inaccurate reporting had disrupted a planned open and democratic consultation.
Those are competing accounts of process. They are not judicial findings. As of 1 August, no court, arbitral tribunal, regulator or FIFA judicial body had found that Infantino or any other official breached a legal or ethical duty in relation to FFE.
Was the proposed investor relationship itself a conflict of interest?
Not automatically.
FIFA identified Thrive Eternal as the expected lead investor. Public or political connections surrounding an investor may create scrutiny, but they do not by themselves establish a legal conflict of interest.
Under Article 20 of the FIFA Code of Ethics, the relevant question is whether a decision-maker had a secondary personal or related-party interest that could influence, or appear to influence, the independent performance of their duties. If such an interest existed, it would need to be disclosed and the person should not participate in the affected decision.
No publicly available evidence or official finding has established such a personal interest in the FFE proposal. It would therefore be wrong to state that a conflict existed as a fact. The legally proper question is whether all relationships, financial interests and expected benefits were identified, disclosed and managed through FIFA’s governance procedures.
What power did UEFA, Concacaf and the AFC use?
The confederations did not exercise a veto granted by Swiss law. Nor does a confederation itself cast a vote at FIFA Congress. Under Article 26 of the FIFA Statutes, each member association has one vote, while confederation delegates attend as observers without voting rights.
Their power came from coordination. UEFA’s 55 associations unanimously rejected the proposal and threatened to boycott FIFA competitions. Concacaf’s 41 associations rejected it, and the AFC, representing 47 associations, later stood with UEFA and Concacaf. Together those confederations contain 143 of FIFA’s 211 members.
Because FIFA had conditioned FFE on support from a majority of member associations, coordinated opposition made the required majority politically unattainable if those positions held.
The boycott threat raised a separate legal issue. Article 14 of the FIFA Statutes obliges member associations to take part in FIFA competitions, and violations can lead to sanctions. A serious breach can potentially lead to temporary suspension by the Council under Article 16, subject to the statutory process and later confirmation requirements.
It is therefore not certain that a boycott could have been carried out without legal or disciplinary consequences. Any attempted sanction would also have created a major dispute about proportionality, collective action and the available appeal routes. Because FIFA withdrew FFE before a boycott occurred, none of those issues was tested.
Did UEFA’s loss of confidence remove Infantino?
No. UEFA’s statement on 1 August that the current FIFA leadership had lost its confidence was politically significant, but it had no automatic legal effect on the FIFA presidency.
UEFA cannot unilaterally remove a FIFA President. FIFA Congress is the body that elects and, under the statutes, may dismiss the President through FIFA’s formal governance procedures. A public declaration of no confidence may influence member associations, Council members or a future election, but it is not itself a dismissal resolution.
Could the proposal have been challenged in court?
Potentially, if a binding decision had been adopted.
Article 75 of the Swiss Civil Code allows an association member to challenge a decision that breaches the law or the association’s statutes, generally within one month of learning of it. The precise forum and route could depend on the nature of the decision and the interaction between Swiss law, FIFA’s arbitration provisions and the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
A member might have argued that an approval was adopted by the wrong body, without required procedure or contrary to FIFA’s statutory purposes. FIFA could have relied on the broad authority given to the Council by Articles 34 and 59.
That dispute never materialised. No final transaction was approved, no investor acquired an interest and no court had to decide how far Article 59 extended.
What actually stopped the proposal?
The decisive restraint was internal governance and collective member power, not an external legal prohibition.
On 31 July, Infantino said that the project had created divisions that were no longer compatible with its original objective and confirmed that the proposal would not proceed. FIFA’s withdrawal statement did not concede illegality or a breach of the statutes.
This distinction is important. A proposal can be legally possible in principle but institutionally impossible to approve. It can also be abandoned before its legal boundaries are tested.
FIFA appears to have had a plausible statutory route to create a subsidiary and involve third parties in exploiting commercial rights. The unresolved controversy was whether this particular structure, with these investors, this valuation, these rights and this process, would have met FIFA’s governance obligations and protected its long-term interests.
The decisive restraint was internal governance and collective member power, not an external legal prohibition.
The legal position in one sentence
FIFA was not proposing to sell itself or formally transfer sporting government to private investors, but it was considering a significant long-term commercial restructuring that required proper Council authority, informed member support, conflict management and detailed safeguards against outside influence.
Conclusion
The FFE episode shows why legal ownership, commercial exploitation and sporting control should not be treated as interchangeable.
FIFA owns the commercial rights arising from its competitions under its statutes. The Council has broad authority to decide whether those rights are exploited directly or through third parties. This makes a commercial subsidiary with minority investors legally conceivable.
At the same time, the President could not approve the proposal alone. The Council, general secretariat and oversight structures each had defined roles. FIFA also chose to make majority support from its 211 member associations a condition of launch. Once coordinated opposition accounted for well over half of those associations, the proposal had no viable route forward.
The withdrawal does not prove that FFE was unlawful, and there has been no official finding of wrongdoing. It does show that formal control is only one part of football governance. Transparency, informed consent, institutional process and the contractual details of economic influence are equally important when the asset at the centre of a transaction is the commercial future of the World Cup.
The withdrawal does not prove that FFE was unlawful, and there has been no official finding of wrongdoing. It does show that formal control is only one part of football governance.
Key sources
- FIFA Statutes, 2024 edition
- FIFA’s FFE announcement, 28 July 2026
- FIFA’s clarification, 31 July 2026
- FIFA’s withdrawal statement, 31 July 2026
- UEFA’s response to the withdrawal, 1 August 2026
- Concacaf statement on the proposal
- AFC statement on the proposal
- Reuters report on the withdrawal and member opposition
- Swiss Civil Code, Articles 60 onwards