FIFA has scrapped its proposal to sell a stake in its World Cup business empire to private investors, President Gianni Infantino confirmed on Friday, after the plan triggered fierce resistance from member associations across the sport.
Infantino had proposed creating a $20 billion company to run the World Cup alongside private backers, reportedly including the Kushner family. Announced on Tuesday, the plan drew mounting opposition each day until its abandonment four days later.
“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. “Our purpose has always been — and will always be — to unite and improve. As a result, this proposal will not proceed.”
The reversal followed a rapid escalation in opposition. UEFA’s 55 member nations agreed on Thursday to boycott the World Cup and all other FIFA competitions if the sale went ahead, while North America’s CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation also voiced their opposition.
“Some things are simply too important to sell,” UEFA said. “The FIFA World Cup belongs to football. It always will. And so long as Europe has a voice, it will never be for sale.”
The proposal had already drawn significant criticism from confederations, an escalating dispute that earlier saw multiple football bodies push back against the private investment scheme in the days after its announcement.
Pressure intensified further when Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s senior adviser and a former Goldman Sachs banker who represented the governing body on the White House Task Force for the World Cup, resigned on Friday. Cordeiro urged other senior FIFA staff to speak out against the initiative.
The plan would have marked an unprecedented shift for the sport’s flagship tournament, opening its commercial rights to outside equity for the first time. Critics argued it risked ceding control of football’s most valuable asset to financial interests.
The abandonment represents a rare public retreat for Infantino, who has led FIFA since 2016 and overseen an aggressive commercial expansion of the organisation’s tournaments and revenues.
With the plan now shelved, attention turns to the 2026 World Cup, jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, and how FIFA will address the governance tensions the episode exposed among its confederations.