Gianni Infantino, the embattled president of soccer’s governing body FIFA, has abandoned his controversial plan to create a $20 billion company, FIFA Forward Enterprise, that will control the industrial rights to its events, principally the World Cup.
In an announcement released late Friday, Infantino said it had “change into clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, whatever the level of support, aren’t any longer within the interest of the target set out in the primary place.”
The survival of Infantino, who’s up for re-election for a fourth term as president on the FIFA Congress in March, is now unsure.
Infantino said, “Our purpose has all the time been – and can all the time be – to unite and improve. Moving forward, my intent is to bring all interested parties back together in the approaching days and weeks within the spirit of shared interest in our game.”
The climbdown by Infantino follows a threat by European countries, represented by the continent’s soccer governing body UEFA, to boycott all FIFA events, including the World Cup, if the plan moved forward.
Opposition to Infantino’s plan had also come from Concacaf, which governs soccer in North, Central America and the Caribbean, and the game’s governing body in Asia, the Asian Football Confederation.
Resistance to the plan had also come from inside FIFA. Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino’s senior adviser on global strategy and governance, resigned over the difficulty, saying the proposal was “a foul deal” for soccer and would “mortgage” its future.
Then on Friday, the organization’s chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said its own administration had been “deceived” concerning the project. Lamour described the plan as “the project of 1 person,” and said, “the time has now come for [soccer’s] political leaders to ask themselves the best questions and make the best decisions.”
Lamour added that he had an obligation of loyalty to “certain values” and supporting his colleagues. “If which means I lose my job, then so be it. I’ll understand and respect that call. At the least I’ll sleep well tonight.”
Under Infantino’s proposal, each FIFA member country would have received an initial payment of $20 million and a doubling of their annual stipend to $5 million. This could have been partially funded by the sale of a roughly 20% stake in FIFA Forward Enterprise to an investor group led by Thrive Everlasting. Thrive Everlasting is run by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is married to President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.