“The Fifa President has not made any call to the U.S. President, or any members of his administration, in recent days. It is pure fiction,” Fifa said in a formal response to Reuters. A senior US State Department official separately confirmed there were no plans for Rubio to speak with Infantino.
The denial closes one chapter in a turbulent fortnight that has left Infantino’s authority under intense scrutiny and raised fresh questions about the limits of his long cultivated relationship with the White House. Only days earlier, the 56-year-old Swiss had been forced into a public retreat on a scheme that would have created a new commercial vehicle, Fifa Forward Enterprise, to house the organisation’s most valuable assets, including the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup. Under the plan, roughly 20 per cent of the entity valued at around $20 billion would have been sold to private investors, unlocking up to $4.2 billion that Fifa intended to distribute rapidly to its 211 member associations.
The lead external investor was expected to be Thrive Eternal, a long duration fund linked to Thrive Capital, the firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Advisers on the project included JPMorgan and the former Liberty Media executive Greg Maffei. Fifa insisted throughout that “nobody is selling football” and that the governing body would retain majority control. Yet the optics of a deal involving a family with close ties to Trump, coming so soon after Infantino had awarded the US president the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize and established an office in Trump Tower, proved toxic.
Opposition crystallised with unusual speed and breadth. Europe’s governing body Uefa declared that its 55 member associations would refuse to participate in any Fifa competition, including future World Cups, until the proposal was withdrawn. Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation issued equally firm rejections. Inside Fifa itself, chief operating officer Kevin Lamour publicly accused the leadership of having misled staff, while senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned in protest. By Friday evening the plan was dead.
In a statement attributed to Infantino, Fifa conceded the scale of the rupture: “Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place. Our purpose has always been and will always be to unite and improve. As a result, this proposal will not proceed.”
Trump himself had already distanced the White House from the commercial negotiations, telling reporters he had never discussed the stake sale with Infantino. The president’s earlier public interventions during the World Cup itself including a reported call seeking the overturn of a red card issued to a US player had already fuelled perceptions that the boundaries between sport and politics had grown uncomfortably porous under Infantino’s leadership.
The episode leaves the Fifa president in a more precarious position than at any point since his election in 2016. His re-election ambitions for a further term running to 2031 remain formally intact, yet the speed with which confederations, national associations and internal executives mobilised against him has exposed the fragility of the consensus that once sustained his authority. For an organisation that presents itself as the guardian of the global game, the week that began with ambitions to monetise the World Cup on an unprecedented scale ended with a stark reminder that football’s power structures still retain the capacity to push back.
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