UEFA welcome FIFA's U-turn: 'Football is not for sale', Infantino 'has failed to deliver'

UEFA have welcomed FIFA's decision to abandon its plan to sell a stake in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors, but used the announcement to launch a withering attack on president Gianni Infantino, accusing him of betraying the promises that first won him office.

In an official statement, European football's governing body said the scheme to open FIFA's competitions to private capital was “unanimously rejected by UEFA’s national associations”, with Italy's FIGC among the 55 member federations and associations of every size across the world. The proposal had provoked an extraordinary revolt in recent days: European nations threatened to boycott the World Cup, confederations in North America and Asia rejected it, and Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino, resigned in protest before the president finally backed down on Friday evening.

The project would have raised around $4.2bn from investors, led by a group fronted by Joshua Kushner, in exchange for roughly a 20% stake in a new commercial entity valued at $20bn. UEFA thanked the fans, leagues, clubs, players and confederations that had opposed the plan, saying they had shown the FIFA president that “football is not for sale”. It then sharpened its tone considerably.

“We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game,” the statement read, demanding that those responsible be identified and held to account.

For UEFA, the manner of the episode was as damning as the substance: “The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.” The body then reached back to Infantino's 2016 election pitch, when he pledged transparency and told the associations that “the money of FIFA is your money”, meant to serve the development of the game. On both counts, UEFA delivered its verdict bluntly: “On both these promises, he has failed to deliver.”

With FIFA's reserves standing above $5bn, UEFA argued, that money had been left idle rather than invested in the game. The body said it would act immediately to propose a new way of distributing resources through FIFA's existing Forward programme, insisting there was no need to “sell off the family silver” to fund the grassroots across FIFA's 211 nations. It framed the outcome as “a victory for the whole game”, while warning that “the task of rebuilding trust in FIFA has only just begun”.

Sources

• Football Italia
• ANSA