How FIFA Tried (and Failed) to Sell the Soul of Football

The World Cup was a $15 billion jackpot. Then FIFA president Gianni Infantino overplayed his hand, with a secret plot to allegedly enrich the extended Trump family — and himself. The Athletic's Adam Crafton explains the NFL-inspired motives, political naïveté and potential downfall of the man who would be king of sport. • More from The Athletic: Inside the Week That Shook Gianni Infantino, FIFA and the Football World https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7485172/2026/08/02/fifa-world-cup-stake-sale-inside/ • Previously on PTFO: America Signed Up for the World Cup. FIFA Stuck You with the Tab. https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NmEyYTA2YmFiYzM2ZTVjYzAxNDYzMDYx • Subscribe to "The Athletic FC Podcast" with Adam Crafton https://pod.link/1488521447 • Subscribe to The Athletic https://theathletic.onelink.me/eNRy/ptfo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 2:23Pablo Torre?

  Let's begin with the exhale, because you've been working, I presume. More after the World Cup, Adam Craft, and then you thought you were gonna have to. How are you feeling?

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I was moving apartments this week, so it was really fun.

• 2:37Pablo Torre?

  Oh.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  But no, I mean, it's an amazing kind of development in some ways. It's also, it's like the most predictable.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Amazing development, you know, in the sense of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president's proximity to the Trump family has, you know, ultimately, possibly brought about his downfall. I may be speaking too soon in that, or may not be speaking soon enough. It is moving at an extraordinary pace.

• 3:05Pablo Torre?

  How this all got out into the open and where it started? How do you sort of tell that story?

• 3:14Speaker 04

  I suppose if we just go back two or three weekends, it's the World Cup final.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Five weeks now into this tournament, 36 days of competition, down to two survivors, Argentina and Spain. Argentina.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  By the time of that World Cup final, for all of the scandals, I think four or five investigations by attorney generals across America into FIFA's ticketing practices.

• 3:40Speaker 06

  There is now an investigation into FIFA's ticket practices and those soaring prices. Some fans feeling like they were deceived.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  The visa scandal with the referee not being allowed into the country.

• 3:53Speaker 07

  This week, the US found itself at the center of more controversy when a Somali referee was barred from entering the United States despite having a valid visa and all valid credentials.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  The phone call, of course, that happened with Trump that then kind of subsequently Balligan, the US forward, was then allowed to play the game.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  Tonight, the stunning reversal reverberating through the soccer world as FIFA reinstates star striker, Lafarun Balligan, slated to sit out tomorrow's game against Belgium.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  For all of that, FIFA ended the tournament, celebrating what they deemed to be a huge success. You know, they upscaled their revenue projection from, I think, $11 to $13 billion up to $15 billion. So for all of the uneasiness and the criticism that people may have of Infantino and his leadership style in all these different federations, that money had a muzzling effect. Until.

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Infantino has given football associations until the 19th of September to back his plan to sell off part of FIFA to private investors. I think that Infantino has overplayed his hand personally.

• 5:08Speaker 07

  I think we're reaching the point where I think Gianni Infantino is just pushing his luck.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I'm hearing of a determined effort at the top of European football to ensure that Gianni Infantino leaves the FIFA presidency. It's now seemingly perhaps just a matter of how it ends.

• 5:25Speaker 07

  I think we've got to the stage with Gianni Infantino where the ordinary fan looks at him and says he's motivated by power, money, and then football. Football does not appear to be his main priority.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  FIFA are not in distress. And FIFA are not short of cash. So if you've just made $15 billion in cash revenue from a tournament and you have billions in reserves, why do you need to give away a stake? Why would you mortgage your future returns and take that risk when you have all of it there already? You don't need to do it. So that is the question that was on everyone's lips.

• 6:30Pablo Torre?

  This is my vantage point as I'm watching all of this, right? You were on the show, we were tracking the before, how America got into business with FIFA, how at the local level, people were wanting in on all of the windfall that was in excess, it turns out. And it feels like as everyone was maybe biting their tongue because they knew, wait a minute, this is all gonna work out, we're all gonna make money off of this, this is the biggest, richest World Cup ever. It takes us to when the news breaks in public and it's Tuesday, it's July 28th, and this thing that has been happening in sports broadly seems to now be arriving at the doorstep of, yes, the most popular sport in the world.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, is actually a proposal, an offer. It's part of a democratic process, a consultation process. And above all, it is an opportunity.

• 7:30Speaker 06

  His proposal creates a subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise to run commercial operations, everything from broadcast rights to ticket sales. Infantino says it would raise $20 billion for FIFA, but 20% of it would be owned by private investors. The main investing firm would be one headed by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  These conversations between Infantino and Thrive Capital, which is owned, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, I think they've been going on for quite some time. I mean, we're talking about like almost a year, really, sort of clandestinely. FIFA as a nonprofit couldn't just give 20% of its revenues to a private investor. So what they were proposing was that they spin off the kind of commercial revenues of its competitions, its events, its licensing, all the stuff that makes money would be spun off into this commercial venture.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  You take in the investment, I think it was around 20%, 21%, of which Thrive would be the lead investor, and then you have returns. But that being more of a commercial venture enables you to return profits.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  It would simply commercialize and organize all FIFA-owned competitions, along with sponsorship, broadcast licensing, and new venture for the benefit of FIFA's 211 member associations. However.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Unlocking previously uncaptured commercial value.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  They claim the idea was in terms of accelerating the development of soccer globally. So we've just had a World Cup where you expand the number of teams from thirty two to forty eight, which has enabled you to bring in more nations that wouldn't ordinarily have a chance to compete at that top table. It means they gain more revenues. It means that soccer can develop more in those countries. Now, what they also want to do is make sure that the amount of money that goes to each federation gets higher. And they wanted to bring that to, I think there was going to be one-off payments of twenty million, and then they would also increase to, I think, four or five million a year, year in, year out. And the idea there is that means more grassroots fields.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  It means better opportunities in school soccer, women's soccer, all those things that you'd want FIFA to be worried about, that you'd want the global game to be working towards. But the question again is, you can do that anyway.

• 10:18Pablo Torre?

  Right, right.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  You have the money. If you want to spend the money on that, you go to the FIFA Council, you talk to everyone who has a vote, you say, we've got this money that we've made by exploiting fans in the United States. We can spend it on this if we want to. But what they've instead done is do a secret deal in a very clandestine way, without consulting most of FIFA's management or executive team or any of the confederations, presented it almost as a fait accompli just to be signed off, not done an open process. So they've just decided it would be a Kushner company and not an open process as well on valuation.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Now, the other bit of this is, I think around four point two billion, does that actually undervalue FIFA? If you're going to do it, at least get the best price for it. At least do an open process, at least do an auction.

• 11:20Pablo Torre?

  Well, this brings us to the question of what's in it for Gianni Infantino as this is the deal as described, right? So the name, by the way, that they come up with, the funding scheme that we can all participate in, it's the FIFA Fast Forward Program, the FFFP, just rolls off the tongue. And it's just funny that as we had seen in the World Cup, like Freddie L A seven, like discovered the cultural cross coastal exchange of Buc-E's and Scotland is sort of falling in love with New England. Maybe the actual cross-cultural exchange that we should have been focusing on was Gianni Infantino realizing, wait a minute, why can't we get some of that Americanness with us?

• 12:01Speaker 04

  And it's interesting, we'll maybe get on to the kind of the JP Morgan deck that was prepared. That talks about, relative to the eyeballs that it drives globally, FIFA or the World Cup has been, in their eyes, undermonetized. You know, if you compare it to the NFL, the NBA, the Premier Leagues to a certain extent, that there were these gaps in terms of what could be made revenue wise. But what you're saying is right, that people, investors, realized even more that this thing is super popular, it's global, that even at highly exploitative prices, ticket prices, the stadiums were still full, that this is so important to so many people

• 12:46Speaker 04

  that you can really maximize value and returns. And I don't think it's a secret that Gianni Infantino has probably been looking at some of these US sports leagues and looking at some of these commissioners and looking at people like Roger Goodell and thinking, hang on a minute, I'm the king of soccer, right? And the king of soccer should have a bigger salary than this little, I'm teasing here, this little parochial American sport, NFL.

• 13:14Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  And he may not be wrong in that.

• 13:17Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  But when you're already earning sort of six million dollars a year from a nonprofit, it's hard to make the argument that that should go to you know, towards twenty to forty, sixty. Now FIFA have denied that there was ever an intention to have a commissioner or anything like that, or that it was about Infantino's salary. They say it was all about accelerating the growth of global soccer. But I think there's another possibility, which is, you know, if you create this spinco, if Gianni maybe only has another four years as FIFA president, if he was to win next year, because his term is up, you know, end of this year, maybe he spins off to be a commissioner, whatever you give the job title of this commercial venture, which he's helped set up

• 14:02Speaker 04

  and he's got the relationship with the investors and all of that kind of stuff. So I think those are sort of some of the theories behind it. And it might just be because he really wants to develop soccer in Montserrat. That could be all it is.

• 14:14Pablo Torre?

  Well, hold on though, because UEFA, right? And I get that everybody is sort of fighting on some financial terrain perpetually when it comes to world football. But there is this philosophical argument that I have seen in Europe. And of course, when you refer to the idea that, look, institutional investing, foreign ownership, American ownership coming to world football, we've seen that before and most memorably, I mean, we saw it with what happened to the Super League.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  A super league in the planning for years crumbled in less than two days as every corner of football united against it. This ugly episode in the beautiful game has exposed deep rifts between some of the biggest clubs, their smaller rivals and the sports governing body in Europe, UEFA.

• 14:58Pablo Torre?

  And that was, for me, as an American, very eye-opening. The idea that, wait a minute, there's a philosophical argument that people will go to the barricades for and revolt over. It's what I thought of when I saw that UEFA said in their statement, quote, that the soul and governance of football are not assets to trade. Could you just give us sort of the context for how popular a sentiment that is? How apart are they?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  I think there are a lot of people who feel that way, for sure. But there's also a lot of people who feel that, you know, Manchester United, for example, should never have been the subject of a highly leveraged takeover by the Glazer family who owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL. There's a lot of people who feel that Paris Saint-Germain shouldn't essentially be owned by Qatar, that Newcastle shouldn't be owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. So we shouldn't pretend here that Europe hasn't sold out in many ways at certain points, whether it's to US private equity, whether it's to, as we say, leveraged takeovers, whether it's to sovereign wealth funds.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  This isn't a question, and I think this is something that media sometimes allows it to become. It becomes good for evil. And actually, I think in this case, it is almost very bad against quite bad, right? And, you know, or highly flawed against very flawed. You know, those are the grades that we're looking at here. But what FIFA have done is they've kind of, they've just taken it that step further. You know, they've taken it in the same way as the Super League took it one step further. And I think when it comes to kind of FIFA and the World Cup, I think it's just the idea, like, it's almost just the tackiness, really.

• 16:46Pablo Torre?

  Oh, well, this is, this is what's so funny to me is that like, there is no purity left in sports and certainly not in world football at the highest levels. You just tacked off a bunch of the sovereign wealth funds and the Petro states that are certainly staining everything. But it's so interesting that there is a threshold beyond which this seems gross.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:10Pablo Torre?

  UEFA, what they decide in their own, again, not, not, not with a halo over their head, but with just sort of a sense of like, this is too much. They threaten a total European boycott of the World Cup and all FIFA competitions. The Union of European Football Associations has told Infantino to go UEFA yourself. No UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition

• 17:38Speaker 04

  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. UEFA has used this kind of threat of boycott before when Infantino tried to make the World Cup an every-two-year competition rather than every-four-year competition. And it's a very powerful threat because many of the past, of the most recent past winners, if you go back nine, ten competitions, have been from Europe. And they have most of the best players. A lot of the value of the competition

• 18:22Speaker 04

  is derived from the European nations, European fans, European players. Not all, not to be entitled, but that's just reality, right? You've got Mbappe, Bellingham, all those great players. The kind of secondary layer to this is, I don't think you can underestimate, it's not just the content of the plan, it's the how. It's the fact Infantino didn't tell anyone, right? And they all found out, they only found out because it was reported brilliantly by The Times of London and also The Financial Times. And because they found out in that way and you're caught on the hop and you're not consulted. It calls into questions, you know, all sorts of questions about governance,

• 19:05Speaker 04

  transparency, opacity. You know, if you were a CEO of a major company and you'd done something like that without the permission of your board or anybody that you report to, you know, Infantino is, he reports to an electorate. He is elected, he is not a kink, you know? So he has to be transparent about what he's up to. And he failed in all those respects. So I think when you tack that on to the previous opacity, even something like the FIFA Peace Prize, where they didn't consult with any of the vice presidents or the FIFA Council, it's just the latest example. And I don't think you can underestimate the accumulation

• 19:46Speaker 04

  of things. And also, you know, on top of it, you then look at who the investor is, the surname's Kushner, and it's like, for God's sake, Gianni, right? Like, I mean, help yourself here, right?

• 19:57Pablo Torre?

  But now you're echoing what lots of us here in America say about this presidential administration.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Every day.

• 20:06Pablo Torre?

  Every [bleep] day. It's like, what was the end game? Was there a plan? Is this malice or incompetence? It is the question of our time. And it's also perhaps a useless exercise, because at a certain point, if you're in charge of something, the difference is vanishing, because your responsibility is to make sure that you don't crash the car. What's interesting is that Donald Trump, at some point in the last several days, gets asked himself about the plan, and did he know about it?

• 20:38Speaker 07

  Proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup. And is that something you support? About who? Did FIFA or Mr. Infantino speak to you about their proposal to sell a stake? No, I never spoke to him.

• 20:50Pablo Torre?

  And in the world of Donald Trump, when he gives very short answers, the person who's the protagonist of that question, um, yeah, you should probably be a bit worried.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  He just said no, one word. I think some viewers will kind of roll their eyes at this. And I think even I'm about to roll my eyes at what I'm saying. But I kind of asked a few people about Joshua Kushner, because I hadn't heard much about him.

• 21:20Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  You know, price this investment. Obviously, everyone knows a lot about Jared, and Jared's got a very longstanding relationship with Infantino. Goes back to the World Cup bid in 2018. He was very key to getting some of the votes for the US at the time, during Trump's first presidency. He was very key, actually, to getting the World Cup final to MetLife Stadium, convening a dinner of business leaders and local politicians. And it was ultimately Infantino who made that call. So that relationship is very longstanding. Joshua Kushner, you know, according to the people who kind of represent him, isn't much of a Trump guy, right?

• 21:59Pablo Torre?

  Oh, he is, this is where it's funny. I mean, so he's the good one, Adam.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  It's a bit like that. Is it the good Kushner?

• 22:07Pablo Torre?

  Well, I should say, like, I have known about him because we went to college together.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 22:15Pablo Torre?

  And look, he graduated the year after me, but we're about the same age. But just to add to the reputation, he's married to Karlie Kloss, the supermodel, and they both have threaded this needle this entire time. They've been dancing between the raindrops of that stain. And they have emerged as like, look, he has a healthcare company, Oscar Health, which is this wildly successful thing. Thrive Capital is a winner, people consider him very smart. It's just interesting that this thing has now connected him to Trump world, and it's sort of operating prime directives in a way that is new in his story, just to add to what you were getting at.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And it was a bit like you say, that was kind of the description given to me, that he is kind of a pretty smart guy, a little bit more liberal, et cetera. I mean, ultimately, it doesn't really matter, because the opposition to the plan is far more than whether it's to a connection to the Trump family or not. It's just the optics.

• 23:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Even if he is this great guy. I mean, can't be that. I would also question his senses as well, because, and unfortunately, we've seen this time and time again from US investors, where there is this naivety to how the world of soccer and soccer fans will react to ideas that they have for the sport. And what's amazing about this is it is once again JP Morgan, who are involved, as they were in the Super League. They apologized after the Super League, and they've done it again. And there is this kind of incredible naivety that just keeps repeating itself. And I'm sure there would have been advice

• 24:02Speaker 04

  from some people involved saying, hey, this is dangerous territory. There was a level of political naivety, actually, from Infantino as well. Because actually, I think if he'd have workshopped this idea with some of his allies in certain confederations, possibly Africa, South America, Asia to a certain extent, I don't know if they'd have gone through it, but they may have been more predisposed towards it. UEFA were never going to go for it. Some of CONCACAF might have gone through it. You know, we've seen Mexico come out with a slightly different statement to what the overall CONCACAF statement was. And for some of these federations, it's a lot of money. And of course, you know, they wouldn't be

• 24:43Speaker 04

  doing their job to their members, actually, to not think about it and to have a conversation about it. But by keeping it as secret as he did, and then losing control of the messaging, I mean, he was actually meant to announce it the day before the World Cup final. That was when it was meant to be announced. But for some reason, either he or the Kushner side wanted to do a bit more work on it, and it got pushed back. And the way I'm told, Gianni kept sort of slightly gossiping about it with his rich friends. And that widened the web of people who knew about it. And that then led, you know, obviously to it leaking. So it was kind of his own hubris that has kind of caused this possible downfall.

• 25:34Pablo Torre?

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• 27:09Pablo Torre?

  Gianni Infantino, by the way, just as a political operator, I just want to sort of speak to one of the most viral clips from his oeuvre, in which he is speaking to wanting to be a president for all people.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Today I feel African.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Today I feel gay.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Today I feel disabled.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  I think what it gives you a sense of is, I think he does view himself as a king, to be blunt. You know, you look at the way that he travels via private jet, which I think was secured via Qatar Airways FIFA sponsorship for the president to use, the security escorts that he got throughout police motorcade. And the fact he doesn't really do press conferences. You know, he did one at the start of the tournament. He does about one every four years these days. He doesn't take questions. He doesn't take questions from us. He doesn't take questions from his own confederation president. All gives the sense of someone who thought they were invincible, impregnable.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  I mean, this week started with the most extraordinary rant on Instagram.

• 28:29Pablo Torre?

  Yes, it's amazing. This is him on Instagram, going at his critics, the people who had now emerged in full-throatedness in public. And he's telling them to, quote, "meditate, pray, or watch a football match instead of spending their time and energy hating us." There are 15 slides. And he's talking about how, you know, we just had the best show in the world. And he's saying, "those behind their screen spreading hate and false rumors." You know, he's defending football itself against the haters, Adam.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it was the most ridiculous statement. It was just like the kind of ramblings of insanity, to be honest. And that was the day before all of this then came. And I think that he knew something was coming, and he was gearing up for a fight. And it's a shame because it was a great show. You know, it's always a great show. It's the World Cup. And there'll be a lot of people at FIFA who have put in an incredible amount of work only to basically see it all go up in flames, you know, within two, two, three weeks of the tournament ending. And it's very, very hard to see how they would ever again want to work for this man.

• 29:42Pablo Torre?

  This now just brings me to the FIFA side of things, their historical pattern of corruption. Like, how do you just explain how it is that Set Bladder, the predecessor to Gianni Infantino as the head of FIFA, is now getting to say, "Actually, this too is beyond the pale for me." Quote, "FIFA is not a private equity fund. It is an association with statutes, regulations, and a fiduciary responsibility to protect the global game. If you sell football's crown jewels to private investors, you also sell part of the game, especially its soul. Money matters, but it must never become everything." End quote. And look, the hypocrisy embedded in this tweet, of course, is something to marvel at,

• 30:26Pablo Torre?

  given Set Bladder's role in previous FIFA corruption. But it underscores the depths of the Infantino administration.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Well, because it's been a pattern under Infantino of a pretty appalling governance of, I would say, elasticity of rules and policies and consultation that has alienated pretty much everyone, including now even his own closest allies. I mean, his adviser, Carlos Cordero, quit on Friday morning.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  We, of course, start with that breaking news and a major blow for Gianni Infantino. His senior adviser, Carlos Cordero, has resigned with immediate effect today in protest at proposals to sell a stake in the World Cup, calling the plan "a bad deal for football."

• 31:19Speaker 04

  I messaged Carlos on Thursday night about 7:00 PM to say, "I heard you knew nothing about this. Do you want to comment?" And then I woke up the next morning and he quit.

• 31:29Pablo Torre?

  Well, this is the former US soccer president who was Gianni Infantino's right-hand man? Is that a fair description?

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And he had been essentially running around after Infantino like a little puppy since 2021. Very involved with all the planning for the North American World Cup and White House meetings, on the White House task force, all of that sort of stuff. And he basically said, you know, he wants to distance himself from it. And then there was the most extraordinary statement from the COO of FIFA, Kevin Lamore. This is FIFA's chief operating officer. His name is Kevin Lamore. And he said that the governing body's staff were deceived by Infantino's lack of openness over his plans for the World Cup private investor scheme. So this is a statement from Kevin Lamore in which he said that staff, quote,

• 32:19Speaker 04

  "deserve better than contempt and intimidation." This was really an extraordinary one because Kevin is a previously UEFA executive, moved over to FIFA maybe a year and a half ago. He's one of the few people, I would say, from FIFA land that almost universally people outside of FIFA speak well of.

• 32:41Pablo Torre?

  He's the Josh Kushner of FIFA.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Right, right. And so I don't say that lightly, but he basically came out and said, "Look, we've all been completely deceived by Gianni. This was a one-man show. I don't care if I lose my job over this." He's not yet lost his job over this, but it's hard to imagine how he could possibly continue if Infantino is president. But that just gives you a sense of, you know, the level of alienation. You know, when your own adviser and your COO are coming out publicly to stab you in the front. You know, this isn't behind the scenes or anything like that. That is, you know, stabbing you right in the front.

• 33:19Pablo Torre?

  All of this leads us to Friday because what does Gianni Infantino finally decide to do?

• 33:27Speaker 04

  He pulls back.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  We start with breaking news and an embarrassing U-turn from Gianni Infantino, who has scrapped his controversial plan to sell off stakes in FIFA competitions, including the World Cup. It comes after global criticism aimed at the FIFA president, who in a lengthy statement in the early hours of this morning, admitted the project had created divisions and was no longer in the interest of its original objective.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  It was basically, how do we extricate ourselves from this while keeping Gianni in a job? That was the level it had got to. You sort of, what had happened? You had UEFA threaten a boycott. You had CONCACAF reject it. Then FIFA doubled down on it in the early hours of Friday morning, only for the Asian Confederation to immediately come out and reject it. And, you know, he was hoping that that would be the end of it. And it's not. Because Saturday morning UEFA came out, basically said he's not fit for purpose.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  UEFA welcomes FIFA's decision to withdraw its plan to sell a stake in its competitions, including the World Cup, into private hands. "We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast-tracked timescales cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game." The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA's confidence, but also that of many other members of the football family.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  CONCACAF then come out, called for a reckoning for the presidency. There have been some federations who have come out and backed Gianni, who have basically said, you know, "Look, you've made a mistake. Thank you for correcting the mistake. Now, you know, we still believe in you." I mean, the ones who have come out for him, Qatar, who obviously he's got a very close relationship with Qatar, going back to the '22 World Cup, even lived there for a little bit and was very defensive of Qatar, you know, in and amongst all of his, all the workers' abuses that took place there.

• 35:25Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  And also Morocco, who are a co-host of 2030 and desperate to get the final for 2030. So maybe that loyalty could be rewarded. I think that's going to be really interesting to see which confederations are a unified bloc, which splinter. FIFA politics is really simple. It's a numbers game. It's 211 nations. You need the numbers. And Gianni, I think, will only resign if he feels he's lost the numbers. If he feels he's in with a fighting chance, I can imagine he will attempt to fight on. And then it's a case of who has the guts to fight it.

• 36:03Pablo Torre?

  Well, now we get to the political question on the back end of this scandal and this turn, this twist in the plot here. Because something that you've been alluding to, of course, is that, yes, this is a federation. There are 211 voters. For those who are not familiar, it is one country, one vote. The smallest state in the union has the same number of votes as the largest state in the union. And so the other thing that everyone's anticipating that had been previously established, Adam, is yet another expansion of the World Cup. So biggest ever was what we just saw, 48. And now 64 is looming.

• 36:44Pablo Torre?

  There was just a memo released about this amid all of this. And what does that signal to you? And what does it mean?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  I think it makes it really hard if he stays in power for it to go to 64 teams. I think the likelihood of 64 teams is now greatly diminished due to the events of the past week because UEFA and CONCACAF are already opposed to that. If he then tries to push that through, do you want to go and start another war? Or do you have a little mini war with CONMEBOL, the South Americans, which have about 11 members? You know, that's one of the downsides of South America for Gianni is there's not that many countries. You know, it's a lot of landmass, but not that, not that many votes. And they're the ones who are really keen on it. So they get more of a hosting rights in 2030. So I think that does make it harder. There's a lot of things that it would make harder for him.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  And I think it would make his, even if he was re-elected, I think it would make him a real lame duck, to be honest, as a president. I'm not really sure what he'd be able to get through because anything that he attempts to get through that's his own idea, I think, would really struggle now.

• 37:55Pablo Torre?

  This is a bit surprising in a way that makes me now need to calibrate. Like, am I feeling optimism? Is that sinking sensation optimism?

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Well, never, never be too optimistic until you know who the next one is. That's what I'd say, right? You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who, you know, until this week, have quietly enabled this, right?

• 38:19Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  You know, for the past, well, 10 years, pretty much. You know, think of all the things that have gone on at FIFA over the last 10 years. You know, the, the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, the Balagan affair, the Peace Prize, the kind of slightly ridiculous Club World Cup expansion, the Saudi Arabia, the way that it was kind of rigged so that the Saudis would be the sole bidder for 2034. So are we going to now have, you know, one of these vice presidents from one of these confederations who have largely sat there, taken, you know, $300,000 a year as a salary, occasionally had a bit of a whinge publicly to make themselves look good, or because they genuinely believe it in some cases.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Are we saying that they're not, they've not enabled this at all for the last few years? That, you know, it's taken this, this thing where it's literally got to the point of Infantino has sold out so much that he is literally selling a piece of the World Cup that was the red line, when there probably should have been a red line four or five years ago, to be honest, over kind of

• 39:28Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  oddly even more kind of ethically important issues.

• 39:32Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. I mean, admittedly, I had, and this is quite sad to verbalize near the end here, but I had given up on the idea that human rights violations were the threshold beyond which we would not cross.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  You know, the Saudis were given the, were given a kind of World Cup 2034. They had to do because one of the, one of the consequences of the Qatar World Cup was that they would do a human rights assessment for future World Cups. And FIFA got a global law, a global kind of law firm consultancy, I think it was Clifford Chance, in their Saudi practice to do an assessment of Saudi human rights. It came back, medium assessment, a medium assessment of human rights, which begs the question of where on earth would be higher, right? And, you know, but that, just kind of, you know, a couple of news stories, a few people

• 40:30Speaker 04

  talk about it for a week, breeze on. The Confederation vice president's nothing to say. And no, that's not kind of a British, European, American resident, whatever you want to call me, sort of talking down to the Gulf States or anything like that. That is simply an observation of the way that these people who work within FIFA, what they have been prepared to tolerate over the last few years, the elasticity that they've been prepared to tolerate. So don't be surprised at some point if you give someone so many inches that they then try and take a mile away from you as well.

• 41:12Pablo Torre?

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• 43:34Pablo Torre?

  I mean, there is this larger conversation in which everyone, I think, is feeling tempted to say, oh my God, there is a limit on greed, there is the ability to organize a, an even vaguely populist revolt to put your foot down on the March of Capital. And the thing I am left thinking here at the end with you is this is actually the story of what it is to [bleep] up your political strategy so badly that you lose your allies.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that feels like kind of the easiest way to describe what's happened because never has someone been in a position so strong and squandered so much political capital so quickly.

• 44:23Pablo Torre?

  But to Johnny Infantino, reportedly, there was another familiar play worth trying here. The news of this Hail Mary breaking just yesterday in the New York Post and elsewhere.

• 44:36Speaker 07

  There is going to be a meeting, we think via telephone today, with the under pressure FIFA president and members of the Donald Trump administration. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State for America, is expected to be on the call. I mean, get yourself a bigger shovel, Gianni. This is going to have the opposite effect, isn't it? What else have you got to do with Donald Trump?

• 44:58Pablo Torre?

  And this is what I can't get over now. I think it's now becoming sort of farcical.

• 45:04Speaker 07

  It's almost comical.

• 45:05Pablo Torre?

  And laughable and

• 45:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's the way I was looking for farcical and comical.

• 45:08Pablo Torre?

  Now, the spokesman for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has denied reports of this call, and FIFA privately has done the same, we are told. But as one lame duck appears to plead for help with another, testing the reciprocality of the favor trading that brought us here in the first place, I think you can begin to hear what is now a quite familiar sound to both Donald Trump and Johnny Infantino. Laughter from the rest of the world.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  And it may only get worse, really, from here, but let's see.

• 45:50Pablo Torre?

  It is a fitting postscript to the biggest and most American World Cup that we've ever seen Adam Craft in. A fellow resident, a fellow new American, who I'm glad to talk to as all of this is swirling.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Thanks, as always.

• 46:08Pablo Torre?

  Godspeed.

• 46:17Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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