It took less than four days for his grand plan to sell off football’s crown jewel to private investors for £3.1billion to go up in smoke, from the bombshell news breaking at lunchtime on Tuesday to Infantino’s humiliating statement in the early hours of Saturday confirming it has been scrapped in the face of widespread opposition. At the end of a seismic week for world football, it is hard to see how he can survive after leading confederations and even senior executives at FIFA turned on the embattled president, and UEFA made the first move towards removing him from office with a vote of no confidence on Saturday morning.
The grand announcement was supposed to come on the eve of the World Cup final at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, when FIFA president Gianni Infantino planned to unveil his plan to sell a stake in its competitions to private investors, including Joshua Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared. Private investors would have been able to buy stakes in FFE through a group led by Thrive Eternal, a US venture capital company founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared. The 211 member associations were offered a £30m cut if they agreed with the proposals by September 19. The World Cup may have been mired in the scandals of rejected visas, Trump interference and numerous statewide investigations into FIFA’s ticketing practices, but it yielded $15billion (£11bn) in revenues, which had a muzzling effect on those who were uneasy with Infantino’s leadership. He was so confident in his position that he ended the tournament without the customary closing press conference.
UEFA were the first to voice their opposition with a strongly worded statement agreed unanimously and co-signed by the English FA and Europe’s other 54 associations. Uefa’s statement that European national teams would not “participate in any Fifa competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that Fifa will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership”, was a bold, necessary and effective declaration of war against the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino. UEFA, accusing him of a “shabby, backroom deal,” wants him gone, saying the FIFA leadership “has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.”