The documents circulating inside world football this week confirm what many suspected: FIFA‘s World Cup privatisation plan never had the arithmetic to match its ambition. A 25-page pitch deck, seen by the BBC, set out Gianni Infantino’s proposal to part-sell the World Cup’s commercial operations. It fell apart within days. Here is why the numbers never held.
The ‘under-monetised’ argument that doesn’t survive scrutiny
The centrepiece of FIFA’s case was a comparative chart showing annual revenue and revenue per fan across football and American sport. At $1 per global fan, FIFA presented itself as a poor cousin to the NFL’s $52.80.
The comparison is flawed at the foundation. The World Cup is not an annual competition. Calculated on revenue per match at the 2026 tournament, FIFA generates multiples of the Premier League, perhaps more than three times as much. That framing was conspicuously absent from the slides.
Football is also structurally decentralised. Revenue flows to leagues, clubs, and confederations across the globe, not upward to Zurich. What FIFA was really arguing was that it deserved a larger slice of a pie that other football institutions currently share. And then there is the wages question: roughly half of NFL revenue is paid out to players. FIFA does not pay Erling Haaland or Lionel Messi. A profits-per-fan chart would have looked very different.
For context: Reuters reports FIFA exceeded $15 billion in revenue across the 2023–2026 financial cycle, with the 48-team 2026 World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico its largest tournament ever. The ‘under-monetised’ label was always a stretch.
A structure built around the FIFA World Cup privatisation plan’s most contentious details
The proposed entity, Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE), would have become the organiser and operator of the World Cup, taking over ticketing, broadcasting, licensing and sponsorship. That is not a commercial partnership. That is a transfer of governance from a non-profit accountable to world football to a privately backed company, however many FIFA board members sat on its board.
FIFA’s official release described FFE as being valued at an implied $20 billion, with private investors purchasing minority, non-controlling interests to raise up to $4.2bn. Each of the 211 member associations would receive a one-off voluntary payment of up to $20m for infrastructure.
The maths on that is direct: 211 associations at $20m each accounts for the full $4.2bn. The initial cash injection would have been distributed almost entirely to the voting members who would decide whether to approve the plan. Where the ongoing investment in football’s development was supposed to come from remains unanswered by the document.
The slides also referenced an ‘annual licence payment’ flowing back to FIFA in a flow diagram, but gave no figure. Fixed or variable? Proportionate to revenues? A mission to maximise returns at all costs? None of those questions were addressed. That is not an oversight. It is a gap where the business case should have been.
The Kushner connection and what Thrive Eternal actually is
The lead investor named publicly was Thrive Eternal, a vehicle controlled by Joshua Kushner, brother-in-law to Jared Kushner, son-in-law to Donald Trump. Thrive Capital, the parent firm, manages roughly $25 billion in assets according to Forbes, and raised more than $10bn earlier this year, including a $9bn vehicle for large late-stage investments.
Thrive Eternal is structured as a permanent capital vehicle with no set exit timeline, initially seeded by existing Thrive investors, according to Axios. It only launched its sports arm in April 2026, with a stake in the San Francisco Giants, a franchise Forbes valued at $4.05bn according to the New York Post. The Giants, of course, pioneered dynamic ticket pricing in sport.
Former Walt Disney chief executive Bob Iger is expected to be closely involved with Thrive Eternal, according to Bloomberg as cited by Forbes. Greg Maffei, former president and chief executive of Liberty Media during its Formula One acquisition, is named in FIFA’s official release as a key commercial adviser on FFE.
Kushner’s investment thesis is that certain live sports cannot be replicated or disrupted by artificial intelligence, unlike music or film, and that their value will therefore rise. That may be correct. But the question for FIFA’s members was whether handing commercial control of the World Cup to a vehicle that has been operational for fewer than four months, with no disclosed returns to FIFA, was the right vehicle through which to test it.
The internal timetable had bids and fund transfers pencilled in for October. The speed at which members were being asked to commit was itself a red flag. It took rather fewer days than that for the plan to collapse entirely. Whether a revised structure resurfaces under a different Infantino tenure, or a different president altogether, is the question that now matters.
