The 56-year-old Swiss had planned to privatize the World Cup and sell part of the commercial rights to investors from Donald Trump’s circle – the family business of Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law.
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According to G. Infantino’s plan, a FIFA subsidiary called “FIFA Forward Enterprise” was to be established, which would consolidate commercial rights and tournament organization. More than 50% of this company would be owned by FIFA, about 20% would be distributed among the 211 FIFA members, and 20-30% sold to private investors. The company’s value was planned to be around 20 billion US dollars.
This week, in a letter-offer received from FIFA, the Lithuanian Football Federation (LFF) also found information about money – if it agreed to the new proposal, it would receive a 20 million dollar injection over four years, i.e., 5 million dollars per year, or twice as much as it currently receives.
“For smaller countries’ federations, an annual increase of 2.5 million dollars would be significant and noticeable,” LFF president Edgaras Stankevičius told 15min. “However, in this case, the issue is not really about money. It’s not like ‘vote the way we want and we will shower you with money.’ No.
Although we respect that FIFA managed to earn 15 billion, we are all convinced that this money must return to football through federations, through the entire football industry. Why is there a need for some new entity for that money to partially go there and flow differently to federations? Those schemes sound quite ridiculous.”
Such FIFA plans met huge resistance, primarily from Europe. Initially, UEFA, the organization governing European football, and later the football governing bodies of North America and the Caribbean (CONCACAF) and Asia (CAF) rose up and declared they would boycott FIFA-organized tournaments, including the U-20 Women’s World Cup scheduled for September, if G. Infantino’s plan was implemented.
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“UEFA set a rather strict tone, and we – the European national federations – support it. I think other confederations will be just as categorical,” said the LFF president resolutely.
The pressure that arose led the Swiss to finally withdraw.
“After carefully listening to all opinions, it became clear to us that this project created such a division that, despite the level of support, no longer meets the originally set goal,” said the FIFA president in a statement.
This decision was made after opposition to the proposal also arose within the FIFA organization – as a result, one of the president’s advisors resigned on Friday, and another stated that many FIFA employees disagree with G. Infantino’s plans.
“This is a one-man project. This project should not be approved, and football’s political leaders should ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions,” said FIFA’s chief operations officer Kevin Lamour.
It is believed that this situation may also affect G. Infantino’s future – the FIFA president, re-elected without opposition in 2019 and 2023, was thought to face no problems in the elections scheduled for early next year, but now it is likely that other candidates will try to take advantage of the Swiss’s unpopularity.
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