By The Navarro Report Staff | ZURICH
FIFA President Gianni Infantino spent Wednesday’s crisis meeting in Rabat, Morocco, doing what he has spent the past week doing everywhere else: apologizing. FIFA acknowledged it had made mistakes in how Infantino tried, and failed, to sell a fifth of the World Cup’s commercial rights to outside investors, according to a statement issued after the gathering. Senior staff who attended, the federation said, reaffirmed their full support for his presidency — a carefully worded assurance that did little to settle the question hanging over world soccer’s governing body: how close did the collapsed deal come to putting a slice of the sport’s crown jewel in the hands of people connected to the president of the United States?
The stakes were real. FIFA’s 2026 World Cup — expanded for the first time to 48 teams and co-hosted across the United States, Mexico and Canada — generated record commercial revenue for the federation, by its own estimates. That success is precisely what made the sell-off plan puzzling to many inside the sport: a federation coming off its most profitable tournament ever moved almost immediately to sell off a piece of its future earnings to outside investors, rather than banking the windfall outright.
The plan, unveiled July 28, would have created a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise and sold roughly 20% of it to private investors at a $20 billion valuation, raising an estimated $4.2 billion for the federation. FIFA insisted it would retain majority board representation and exclusive authority over football governance, competitions, the international match calendar and all regulatory and sporting decisions, but the framing didn’t survive contact with soccer’s confederations, which said they learned about the proposal the same way the public did. UEFA, representing all 55 of its member federations, voted within 48 hours to threaten a boycott of FIFA competitions, calling the process irresponsible and indefensible.
By Friday, Infantino had scrapped it entirely. “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,” he said in a statement. The reversal came only after two of his own senior lieutenants broke ranks. Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker who had been advising Infantino, resigned and said he could not stand by while FIFA considered selling a stake in the World Cup. FIFA’s chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, went further, telling the Associated Press that staff had been deceived by Infantino’s secrecy over the months he spent developing the plan and that it was the project of one person that must not go ahead.
What made the proposal combustible wasn’t just its scale — it was who stood to benefit. The lead investor identified in FIFA’s proposal was Thrive Eternal, a permanent holding company founded by venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, whose brother, Jared Kushner, is married to Ivanka Trump and served as a senior adviser during President Trump’s first term. Unlike typical private-equity buyers who target a five-to-10-year exit, Thrive Eternal’s model is built around indefinite ownership — meaning any FIFA stake sold to the Kushner-linked vehicle was designed to be permanent, not a passing investment.
That detail collided directly with a relationship that has been unusually visible over the past year. Trump and Infantino appeared together throughout the 2026 World Cup, and the bond was cemented in December 2025 when Infantino presented Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize — making the president the award’s first-ever recipient. The two stood side by side again at the tournament final on July 19, and Infantino has made a point of keeping the White House close, including a November 2025 Oval Office meeting alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Asked directly at Camp David on July 31 whether Infantino had briefed him on the sell-off plan before it went public, Trump said flatly, “No, I never spoke to him.” It was a notable answer — not a denial that he supported the idea, but a denial that he’d been consulted on it at all, even as investors tied to his own family circle were positioned to be the ones writing the check. Trump has not said whether he supports the underlying concept of privatizing part of the World Cup, only that he wasn’t part of the planning.
The distancing hasn’t stopped Infantino from trying to close the gap. The New York Post reported this week, citing people familiar with the matter, that Infantino repeatedly tried and failed to reach Trump by phone in the days after the plan collapsed, and that the FIFA president has described himself as feeling isolated amid the wave of negative coverage. A White House official told the outlet the administration is not part of the plan to save his job — a distinction that leaves Infantino to navigate the fallout largely on his own, even as he prepares to stand for what was expected to be an uncontested fourth term running through 2031.
England’s Football Association has already said it will withdraw its backing for that reelection bid in an attempt to force Infantino out, and the sell-off episode has given critics who were previously reluctant to challenge him a concrete grievance to organize around: that soccer’s most consequential financial decision in a generation was negotiated in secret, with a vehicle tied to the sitting U.S. president’s family, and unveiled to the sport’s own confederations only after the fact.
The abandoned plan is only the latest chapter in a presidency The Navarro Report has tracked closely. Our earlier investigation into Infantino’s decade at FIFA’s helm cataloged a pattern of unilateral moves that bypassed the federation’s own governance structures — from the compressed and controversial award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, to a broader shift toward centralizing revenue decisions in the president’s office rather than the confederations that generate the money on the ground. The sell-off plan fits that pattern: a proposal that would have reshaped how the World Cup is owned, developed without consulting a single confederation, and unveiled as a fait accompli.
For now, Infantino keeps his job, propped up by a statement of support extracted from his own staff at a hastily arranged meeting in Morocco. But the question that Wednesday’s apology didn’t answer — whether the World Cup’s governance can be trusted to a leadership team willing to negotiate away a fifth of it without telling anyone, to buyers with a direct line into the American presidency — is very much still open. FIFA said the proposal will not proceed. It did not say whether a version of it might resurface once the noise dies down, or whether Thrive Eternal, or a similarly positioned buyer, will be back at the table when it does.
This article was produced under The Navarro Report’s Human-Directed AI Journalism model