FIFA Wants to Sell the World Cup to Trump's In-Laws

The Scheme, Explained in Full Absurdity

Here is what FIFA is actually proposing. According to The Guardian, the plan involves creating a new $20 billion company called FIFA Forward Enterprise, which would purchase all of FIFA's commercial rights, including ticketing, and take operational control of World Cup delivery. Investors buy in. Profits flow out. Football, presumably, cries softly in a corner.

To sweeten the deal for national associations that might otherwise object, FIFA is dangling a $30 million windfall for each of them. That's not a bribe, that's just a number that happens to change people's votes. Very different thing.

Infantino announced none of this with a formal press release or a governance document. He announced it by publishing a 15-page Instagram rant, according to The Guardian, in which he complained about "hate and false rumours" surrounding the recent men's World Cup. The man responsible for stewarding the global game is workshopping grievances on social media like a scorned influencer who just lost a brand deal.

The Kushner Connection Everyone Is Pretending Is Normal

Joshua Kushner is one of the potential investors named in the plan. If you're having trouble placing him: his brother Jared Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump, making him the brother-in-law of the daughter of the sitting U.S. President, who himself already injected the White House into this summer's World Cup by interfering in a refereeing controversy, per The Guardian's reporting.

So to recap the conflict web: FIFA is in bed with the Trump administration, the World Cup was just held in the United States, Trump personally involved himself in tournament decisions, and now a member of the extended Trump family circle is being floated as a potential investor in the commercial rights to the world's most valuable sporting property. This is either the most brazen corruption play in sports history or an elaborate performance art piece. The difference matters less than you'd think.

The Guardian notes that "members of the extended Trump family do not generally contemplate business ventures out of a desire to spread joy and happiness in the world." Which is, in polished British editorial language, the equivalent of screaming.

What Private Ownership Actually Means for the Game

Private investors buying into the World Cup's commercial operations would not be doing so because they love football. They would be doing so because football is a machine that prints money and they want the machine. The Guardian lays out what accelerated monetisation looks like in practice: more tournaments, bigger tournaments, a distorted international calendar that grinds domestic leagues into dust.

Remember the hydration breaks during this summer's World Cup? Those weren't primarily about player welfare. They broke games into four quarters, US-style, creating additional advertising slots. The Guardian reports that Infantino has already signaled he'd be open to expanding tournaments further, despite objections from UEFA, even as innovations like the hydration breaks drew widespread fury from supporters.

This is also exactly the trajectory the failed European Super League was heading down before fans across the continent successfully torched it in 2021. The people who watched that revolt happen, The Guardian notes, include the very investors now eyeing FIFA's commercial rights. They saw the backlash. They watched the Super League collapse. And they are here anyway, because the money on offer is extraordinary enough to make them believe this time will be different.

The Opposition Is Real, and Infantino Doesn't Care

UEFA and CONCACAF, the governing bodies for European and North and Central American football respectively, have both come out in angry opposition to the privatisation plans, according to The Guardian. That's a remarkable coalition of objectors. UEFA has the money and political weight to make Infantino's life genuinely difficult. CONCACAF controls the region where the last World Cup was just held, the one that made everyone involved very, very rich.

Infantino's response to this institutional opposition appears to be continuing unimpeded. His entire tenure has been characterised by what The Guardian describes as "tireless self-promotion, and shameless efforts to curry favour with the Trump administration." The man has spent years cultivating Donald Trump like a difficult houseplant. Selling the World Cup to Trump-adjacent investors is not a departure from that strategy. It is the strategy arriving at its logical conclusion.

Jules Rimet Is Spinning in His Grave

Jules Rimet, the French football administrator who created the World Cup in 1930, envisioned the tournament as a vehicle for international unity and solidarity between nations. The Guardian references this founding vision, not as a sentimental detail but as a direct indictment. Infantino invokes Rimet-style idealism constantly, including in the Instagram rant, while methodically dismantling everything that idealism was built on.

The World Cup works as a cultural phenomenon precisely because it feels, at least nominally, like it belongs to everybody. Every country competes. The poorest football nation on earth and the wealthiest play in the same tournament. Private capital does not do "belongs to everybody." Private capital does yield maximisation, which is a different thing entirely, and one that has a very clear endpoint if you follow the logic far enough down the road.