Faisal Islam: Four reasons why Fifa's World Cup plan never stacked up
Image source, Reuters
Documents that set out Fifa's plan to part-privatise the World Cup and seen by the BBC show why the deal may have fallen apart.
The sales pitch was circulated to Fifa members this week, setting out the case for Gianni Infantino's controversial plan featuring pictures of the Spain team lifting the trophy and Argentina's fans.
The 25-page deck of slides painted a picture of American football-level revenue expectations, which pointed to a potential continuation and extension of the controversial 2026 US-influenced World Cup model.
It suggested there was the potential for $1,000+ tickets, dynamic pricing, and pressure to put broadcasting of the world's biggest sports tournament behind a paywall.
The documents make it clear that the plan and Fifa's arguments never really stacked up. Here are four reasons why.
In the slides, Fifa's central argument was that football does not raise enough cash in relation to its fan base, that "Fifa has been under-monetised versus other leagues" and so "global football development gets squeezed".
It did this with reference to a comparative chart showing annual revenue as well as revenue per fan for Fifa, the Uefa Champions League, Premier League, US baseball and NFL American football.
On the face of it, Fifa is the poorer cousin at just $1 per global fan, compared to NFL's $52.80. But this measure is rather suspect.
The World Cup is not an annual competition - it happens once every four years. If instead this was done on revenue per World Cup 2026 match, Fifa makes multiples of the Premier League, perhaps more than three times as much.
As important, football is decentralised globally, so more of the revenues go to individual leagues, such as the Premier League or Champions League. Fifa was effectively arguing it wanted to keep more of that overall football pie.
Football's fans are also spread across the globe, in rich and poor countries alike. NFL has a much smaller base concentrated in the US and is pretty much the whole of American Football.
Finally, about half of NFL's revenues are paid out as wages. Fifa does not pay Erling Haaland or Lionel Messi or Vozinha. Profits would have yielded a rather different result than the chart’s focus on revenues.
According to the document, the new partly privatised entity, called Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE), would have become the "organiser and operator of competitions" - i.e. the World Cup - and would be responsible for ticketing, broadcast, licensing and sponsorship.
That would have been a clear transfer of the organising power from a non-profit answerable to all of world football to a privately backed company, albeit one with majority of Fifa board members.
The slides said that the FFE structure would "expand and optimise media rights monetisation" and "maximise the value of Fifa IP [Intellectual Property], which has been undermonetised, historically". This would have been a transfer of responsibility and accountability from Fifa itself.
As Fifa highlighted the revenue per fan of the NFL in the document, it raised questions about a future of free-to-air World Cup games.
This is protected by legislation in the UK and Europe, but digital rights will alter considerably in the coming years. It could also clearly have underpinned the continuation of the extraordinary ticket prices charged in 2026.
Why was Fifa trying to sell a $4.2bn (£3.1bn; €3.6bn) stake?
Fifa had already said that it would give FFE a 20% stake in the organisation, which would raise an initial $4.2bn.
The document made it clear that initial cash injection would fund the $20m "extraordinary distribution" to each of the 211 member associations.
That explained the $4.2bn funding requirement. Essentially, the funding would have been used to provide a $20m one-off payment for infrastructure to every voting association that would have made the decision on Infantino's plan.
It would have meant, for example, giving Montserrat a sum worth just under half its entire economy or $10,000 per person, and the same for, say, Bangladesh, a massive highly-populated growth market for global football development.
Where would the extra money for investment in Fifa's future been, given the new investment would have been immediately distributed to voting members? How much would actually have been paid back to Fifa as an "annual license payment" referred to in a flow diagram in the charts, but not quantified? Would that have been fixed or proportionate to revenues?
Did FFE have a mission to maximise revenues at all costs to provide returns for the investors?
None of these crucial questions were answered by the document.
The private timetable shared in the document said that investors would be given access to the materials starting this month. Terms would have been confirmed by September, and bids and transfer of funds by the end of October. This showed how advanced the plans were, and the speed with which members were being asked to decide.
The lead investors were publicly been named as Thrive Eternal, run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared.
Thrive was almost entirely concerned with AI investments, with OpenAI taking a stake in one of its arms.
Thrive only began its sports investment arm in April, with an investment in the San Francisco Giants baseball team, which was the pioneer in sport-based dynamic pricing of tickets.
Kushner said that the fund would focus on certain live sports as "these are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology".
This is an investment thesis that the value of certain forms of entertainment which can not be replaced by AI (unlike music or some films) will increase in the coming years.
So in the end, we were left with an opaque structure designed to continue the 2026 experiment with high ticket prices, commercialisation which would put pressure on broadcast costs, and inevitably lead to more matches, and more frequent tournaments. A proposal that fell apart in a matter of days.
Read the full story at BBC ↗
Fifa presented documents this week outlining a proposal to create a privately-backed entity to operate the World Cup, with investors purchasing a 20% stake for $4.2bn. The proposal argued that Fifa's revenues per fan were low compared to the NFL, justifying greater monetisation through higher ticket prices, dynamic pricing, and potentially restricted broadcast access. However, the financial comparison was flawed: the World Cup occurs every four years rather than annually, football's revenues are distributed globally across many leagues, and the NFL's model involves entirely different structural factors. The proposed private entity would have assumed operational control of ticketing, broadcasting, and sponsorship from Fifa itself, while the $4.2bn investment would have been immediately distributed as $20m per member association rather than reinvested in development. The lead investors included an investment fund focused primarily on artificial intelligence and new to sports investment. The proposal was withdrawn within days.
Read the full story at BBC ↗
Image source, Reuters
Documents that set out Fifa's plan to part-privatise the World Cup and seen by the BBC show why the deal may have fallen apart.
The sales pitch was circulated to Fifa members this week, setting out the case for Gianni Infantino's controversial plan featuring pictures of the Spain team lifting the trophy and Argentina's fans.
The 25-page deck of slides painted a picture of American football-level revenue expectations, which pointed to a potential continuation and extension of the controversial 2026 US-influenced World Cup model.
It suggested there was the potential for $1,000+ tickets, dynamic pricing, and pressure to put broadcasting of the world's biggest sports tournament behind a paywall.
The documents make it clear that the plan and Fifa's arguments never really stacked up. Here are four reasons why.
In the slides, Fifa's central argument was that football does not raise enough cash in relation to its fan base, that "Fifa has been under-monetised versus other leagues" and so "global football development gets squeezed".
It did this with reference to a comparative chart showing annual revenue as well as revenue per fan for Fifa, the Uefa Champions League, Premier League, US baseball and NFL American football.
On the face of it, Fifa is the poorer cousin at just $1 per global fan, compared to NFL's $52.80. But this measure is rather suspect.
The World Cup is not an annual competition - it happens once every four years. If instead this was done on revenue per World Cup 2026 match, Fifa makes multiples of the Premier League, perhaps more than three times as much.
As important, football is decentralised globally, so more of the revenues go to individual leagues, such as the Premier League or Champions League. Fifa was effectively arguing it wanted to keep more of that overall football pie.
Football's fans are also spread across the globe, in rich and poor countries alike. NFL has a much smaller base concentrated in the US and is pretty much the whole of American Football.
Finally, about half of NFL's revenues are paid out as wages. Fifa does not pay Erling Haaland or Lionel Messi or Vozinha. Profits would have yielded a rather different result than the chart’s focus on revenues.
According to the document, the new partly privatised entity, called Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE), would have become the "organiser and operator of competitions" - i.e. the World Cup - and would be responsible for ticketing, broadcast, licensing and sponsorship.
That would have been a clear transfer of the organising power from a non-profit answerable to all of world football to a privately backed company, albeit one with majority of Fifa board members.
The slides said that the FFE structure would "expand and optimise media rights monetisation" and "maximise the value of Fifa IP [Intellectual Property], which has been undermonetised, historically". This would have been a transfer of responsibility and accountability from Fifa itself.
As Fifa highlighted the revenue per fan of the NFL in the document, it raised questions about a future of free-to-air World Cup games.
This is protected by legislation in the UK and Europe, but digital rights will alter considerably in the coming years. It could also clearly have underpinned the continuation of the extraordinary ticket prices charged in 2026.
Why was Fifa trying to sell a $4.2bn (£3.1bn; €3.6bn) stake?
Fifa had already said that it would give FFE a 20% stake in the organisation, which would raise an initial $4.2bn.
The document made it clear that initial cash injection would fund the $20m "extraordinary distribution" to each of the 211 member associations.
That explained the $4.2bn funding requirement. Essentially, the funding would have been used to provide a $20m one-off payment for infrastructure to every voting association that would have made the decision on Infantino's plan.
It would have meant, for example, giving Montserrat a sum worth just under half its entire economy or $10,000 per person, and the same for, say, Bangladesh, a massive highly-populated growth market for global football development.
Where would the extra money for investment in Fifa's future been, given the new investment would have been immediately distributed to voting members? How much would actually have been paid back to Fifa as an "annual license payment" referred to in a flow diagram in the charts, but not quantified? Would that have been fixed or proportionate to revenues?
Did FFE have a mission to maximise revenues at all costs to provide returns for the investors?
None of these crucial questions were answered by the document.
The private timetable shared in the document said that investors would be given access to the materials starting this month. Terms would have been confirmed by September, and bids and transfer of funds by the end of October. This showed how advanced the plans were, and the speed with which members were being asked to decide.
The lead investors were publicly been named as Thrive Eternal, run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared.
Thrive was almost entirely concerned with AI investments, with OpenAI taking a stake in one of its arms.
Thrive only began its sports investment arm in April, with an investment in the San Francisco Giants baseball team, which was the pioneer in sport-based dynamic pricing of tickets.
Kushner said that the fund would focus on certain live sports as "these are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology".
This is an investment thesis that the value of certain forms of entertainment which can not be replaced by AI (unlike music or some films) will increase in the coming years.
So in the end, we were left with an opaque structure designed to continue the 2026 experiment with high ticket prices, commercialisation which would put pressure on broadcast costs, and inevitably lead to more matches, and more frequent tournaments. A proposal that fell apart in a matter of days.
Read the full story at BBC ↗
Fifa circulated a 25-page proposal this week to Fifa members outlining a plan to part-privatise the World Cup through creating Fifa Forward Enterprise, a privately-backed entity with majority Fifa board representation The proposal included plans for $1,000+ tickets, dynamic pricing, and potential paywall restrictions on World Cup broadcasting Fifa's central argument was that it had been 'under-monetised versus other leagues' by comparing its $1 annual revenue per global fan to the NFL's $52.80 This revenue-per-fan comparison was misleading because the World Cup occurs every four years rather than annually, which would show Fifa generating multiples of Premier League revenue per match Football revenues are globally decentralised with individual leagues retaining significant income, whereas the NFL operates primarily within the United States The NFL comparison omitted that approximately half of NFL revenues go to player wages, while Fifa does not directly pay player salaries The proposed Fifa Forward Enterprise would have transferred organising power and accountability from Fifa to a privately-backed company The $4.2bn investment was designated to fund immediate $20m payments to each of the 211 member associations, rather than being retained for infrastructure development This payment structure meant every voting member would receive a one-off sum equivalent to half Montserrat's economy or $10,000 per capita in Bangladesh The proposal raised unresolved questions about how much would be returned to Fifa as annual licensing fees and whether those would be fixed or revenue-dependent Lead investor Thrive Eternal, run by Joshua Kushner, was founded in AI investment and only began its sports investment arm in April 2024 Thrive's sports investment thesis focuses on live sports as assets 'with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology', positioning them as protected from AI disruption The proposal's rapid timeline—with investor access beginning this month and fund transfer by end of October—indicated how advanced planning had become The proposal fell apart within days of circulation
Read the full story at BBC ↗
- Fifa circulated documents proposing to part-privatise the World Cup through a new entity called Fifa Forward Enterprise, with a $4.2bn stake sale to investors including Thrive Eternal (backed by Joshua Kushner)
- Fifa's financial argument that it was 'under-monetised' compared to the NFL doesn't account for the World Cup's four-year cycle, football's global decentralisation, and wage structures, making revenue comparisons misleading
- The proposed structure would have transferred organising power from Fifa to a privately-backed company while immediately distributing the $4.2bn investment as $20m payments to each of the 211 member associations rather than funding future development
- The plan suggested potential $1,000+ tickets, dynamic pricing, and pressure to place broadcasts behind paywalls, continuing the 2026 World Cup model