Gianni Infantino's Rapid Fall from Power in FIFA
Gianni Infantino’s fall from his MetLife throne has been brutal and fast.
Less than a fortnight ago, the FIFA president sat alongside US President Donald Trump in New Jersey, basking in the glow of a World Cup final that had delivered everything he craved: drama on the pitch, record revenues off it, and the aura of a leader presiding over football’s golden age. Trump calls him the “King of Football”. That night, it did not feel like an exaggeration.
There were boos when the pair walked out to hand medals to Spain and Argentina on July 19, but they were drowned out by the noise of a 104-game marathon that had ended as a commercial and sporting triumph. Infantino left the United States with letters of support from around 200 of FIFA’s 211 member federations in his briefcase and a clear runway to what looked like a coronation in Rabat next March.
Now, that same project – his World Cup investment plan – has dragged him to the edge of the cliff.
From masterstroke to mutiny
The idea, on paper, was simple and staggering in scale.
Infantino wanted to carve out a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), to house the money-making engine of world football: the World Cup and other FIFA tournaments, plus the sale of broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and hospitality rights. A not-for-profit body would suddenly have a profit-driven arm, with private investors buying in.
FIFA pitched an equity valuation of $20bn. Investors would stump up $4.2bn for roughly 20 percent of FFE. The anchor investor was to be Thrive Eternal, a vehicle launched by Joshua Kushner – whose brother Jared Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law.
In return, FIFA’s 211 national associations, the nominal owners of the organisation under Swiss law, would receive $20m each if they signed up by September 19. They are already due $10m each over the 2023-26 cycle, funded by FIFA’s record $15bn revenue from the World Cup that has just finished. Under FFE, that would double to $20m, then climb to $22m through 2034 and $24m to 2038.
For tiny federations in Andorra, Montserrat or Papua New Guinea, that is transformational money. For England, Spain or France, it is a rounding error compared with domestic priorities.
Infantino thought he had found the lever to tighten his grip on power: flood the game’s poorest members with cash and lock in loyalty for years.
Instead, he triggered a global revolt.
‘A bad deal’ and a broken trust
The reaction was ferocious and almost universal.
Some FIFA vice presidents turned on the plan. Senior executives rebelled. Every European federation opposed it. Football bodies in Asia and North America lined up against it. Britain’s prime minister weighed in. The global group of national leagues objected. Fans, already suspicious of creeping commercialisation, saw the ultimate prize being carved up.
By Friday, Infantino looked isolated.
His senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker, resigned and branded the proposal a bad deal. FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, issued a blistering public defence of his colleagues that read like an invitation to be sacked, and a direct challenge to his boss’s authority.
Then came the move that changed everything. UEFA, Europe’s governing body, pledged to boycott all FIFA competitions unless Infantino backed down.
That was the pressure point. European teams dominate FIFA’s flagship events, from the men’s World Cup to the Club World Cup. They are the main drivers of the very revenue streams Infantino wanted to sell a slice of. Without Europe, the numbers collapse.
European officials feared what private equity and sovereign wealth investors would inevitably demand: more games, bigger tournaments, expanded calendars, all to squeeze extra value from their stake. That would threaten the balance between club and country, undermine competitions like the UEFA Champions League and push already exhausted elite players beyond breaking point.
Broadcast and sponsor money is not infinite. Fixture lists are already jammed. The warning lights have been flashing for years. To many, FFE looked like the moment the system would finally crack.
What angered people just as much was the way it had been done. Senior figures say Infantino barely consulted anyone while building the project over the past year, preferring instead to orbit Trump’s political and business circle. Even Trump, speaking on Friday, said he had not discussed the plan to sell stakes in FIFA tournaments with Infantino.
For a president already viewed with suspicion in some quarters, it was a fatal breach of trust.
The climbdown
By the end of the week, the “King of Football” had no choice but to retreat.
“Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place,” Infantino said in a statement, announcing that the FFE plan was dead.
The wording tried to salvage authority: a leader listening, adjusting, moving on. The reality was starker. UEFA’s boycott threat, the internal revolt, the political noise – all of it combined to make the project untenable.
Killing FFE has not killed the questions.
Infantino left New York with those 200 letters of support. How many of them still stand after a week in which his judgment, transparency and motives have been attacked from inside his own house?
His traditional power base in Africa, with 54 votes, had been notably cautious. For many African federations, the money on offer was game-changing. Yet even there, enthusiasm has been muted rather than vocal.
In South America, CONMEBOL confirmed it had received the proposal and would examine it “with the rigour it demands”. The confederation is led by Alejandro Dominguez, FIFA’s vice president from Paraguay, who has his own stake in Infantino’s future. He is counting on the president to deliver an expanded 64-team World Cup in 2030, which would hand more matches to minority co-hosts Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. As it stands, they are due just one game each of the 104, with the rest in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
The money, the politics, the promises – everything is intertwined.
A presidency in play
The calendar now sharpens the focus.
November 18 is the deadline for candidates to enter the next FIFA presidential race. The vote takes place on March 19 in Rabat, where FIFA maintains its African headquarters. Infantino, re-elected unopposed in 2019 in Paris and 2023 in Kigali, is entitled under the statutes to one more four-year term.
Until this week, the idea of a serious challenger felt remote. There has long been unease about Infantino’s style and his attempts to ram through unpopular reforms, but his command of the voting blocs – especially in Africa, parts of Asia and the Caribbean – made a contest look fanciful.
Not anymore.
The numbers are clear. It takes 106 votes to secure a majority in a contested election. Continental confederations do not vote as monoliths, but if most of UEFA’s 55 members, CONCACAF’s 35 and Asia’s 46 lined up behind an alternative, that would form a formidable base.
Names are already circulating. Nasser Al-Khelaifi, Paris Saint-Germain’s Qatari president, is often mentioned. So is Victor Montagliani, the Canadian FIFA vice president with deep roots in CONCACAF. Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, the long-serving AFC president from Bahrain, narrowly lost to Infantino in 2016 and could be tempted to run again.
What makes this moment different is that such talk no longer feels like idle gossip in hotel lobbies. After the FFE debacle, it sounds like preparation.
Beyond 2031 – and beyond Infantino?
The abandoned spinoff carried another subtext that has not been lost on FIFA insiders.
FFE would not just have restructured FIFA’s commercial arm; it would likely have created a commissioner-style role for Infantino beyond 2031, when his final term as president must end. That position, tethered to a $20bn enterprise, would almost certainly have dwarfed his current $6m-plus salary and bonus package.
The plan looked, to many, like a way to keep Infantino at the centre of world football’s money and power long after his official mandate expired.
That vision lies in ruins. The question is whether his presidency goes with it.
Infantino has survived storms before. This one is different. It has united his critics across continents, emboldened internal opponents, and exposed the limits of his authority when Europe decides it has had enough.
He walked into MetLife Stadium as the self-styled king of a booming global game. He walks into the next FIFA Council meeting knowing that, for the first time since 2016, the throne itself is up for grabs.
