Infantino's Letter: How a $4.2 Billion Proposal Vanished and the Question of Who Really Presses the Button

On October 15, at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, the FIFA Council will meet. But before the microphone is switched on, a document has already preceded the meeting: a letter from Gianni Infantino to the FIFA Council and the presidents of all 211 member associations. In it, the FIFA president proposes an independent assessment of the current governance structure. He wants the FIFA Council to formally request that assessment, and to open talks with the associations and other stakeholders about possible reforms inside the organisation. Those discussions, according to the letter, must cover the roles of the FIFA president, the FIFA Council and the FIFA Congress. This is not a press release. It is a document drafted before a meeting, and documents always tell a different story than statements. Because only months before the letter was written, FIFA had quietly withdrawn a plan that forced the entire football industry to sit down: FIFA Forward Enterprise. Under that proposal, FIFA intended to sell 20 per cent of its commercial and organisational activities to external investors, at a valuation of around $4.2 billion. The number 4.2 billion is not small change, and the 20 per cent ratio is not a meaningless figure. Put the two together and you have a new ownership structure for the most-watched sport on the planet. The plan was withdrawn before it could be officially presented to the FIFA Council and member associations. Infantino stresses that it was only a proposal, and that no final decision was ever taken. But he himself concedes the row made one thing clear: big plans can only succeed if the decision-making process commands sufficient trust. In the letter, he writes: "Big ideas must be developed, tested and communicated through clear and reliable institutions." I read that sentence more slowly than the others. And I counted every line in the petition. Numbers never lie. To understand why the October letter matters, it must be placed alongside the entire timeline. FIFA Forward Enterprise was not an idea that emerged at a press conference. It was the product of months of work between FIFA leadership and financial institutions, including private investment funds already accustomed to pouring money into broadcasting rights, tournaments and the commercial products of football. The proposed structure was not merely a share sale. It was the separation of part of FIFA's commercial machinery from FIFA itself, placing that part under the pressure of a new group of shareholders, and leaving the rest of the organisation to operate as a purely regulatory entity. Financially, that sounds coherent. But for an organisation that functions as a federation of 211 national associations, each with one vote, the question is not whether such a structure generates profit. The question is who controls decision-making power once the structure is built. Three years after the signing ceremony, the secret clause still sits quietly in the financial basement. And this is the point the October letter touches, perhaps unintentionally. When an organisation proposes to assess its own governance structure, there are usually two reasons. The first is a genuine belief that the machinery is flawed and needs fixing. The second is the need to create a buffer period in which difficult decisions are postponed and difficult questions are redirected into a longer process. Both reasons can coexist. And usually they do. The October 15 meeting sits between two dates. One has passed: the withdrawal of FIFA Forward Enterprise. One has not yet arrived: March, when FIFA holds its presidential election. Infantino plans to stand again. At present, he is the only candidate. Other candidates have until November 18 to put themselves forward. Place the three dates side by side – October, November, March – and you see a very tidy stretch of time. The Council meeting discusses governance reform. The nomination deadline falls a few weeks later. The election follows a few months after that. In investigative work, we have a principle: the timing of publication is never neutral. The same document, published on one day, applies pressure; published on another, it creates noise. Here the document is not my investigation but the FIFA president's own letter. Yet the principle holds. A proposal to review governance, issued just before a Council meeting and before an election with no rival, carries two layers of meaning. The surface layer is openness to reform. The layer beneath is shaping how the reform story is told before any other candidate enters the race. Of course, reading it that way moves too fast. I have been in this trade long enough to know that between a suspicion and a piece of evidence lies a very long distance, and that distance is only bridged by documents, witnesses and cross-checked data. So let us return to what can be verified. First, a letter exists. It was sent to the FIFA Council and 211 association presidents. That is a public act within the industry, not a private phone call. Second, a proposal named FIFA Forward Enterprise exists. The figures cited are 20 per cent of commercial and organisational activities, valued at around $4.2 billion. A structure at that scale, if executed, would change the nature of FIFA's cash flows for decades. Third, that proposal was withdrawn before being officially presented. This is the most important detail, and also the easiest to skim past. Because a proposal never officially presented does not exist in the minutes. No minutes means no accountability at the documentary level. No accountability at the documentary level means the question "who pushed it" can only be answered by insiders' accounts, not by paper. And this is where the October letter becomes more noteworthy than its title suggests. If the FIFA Council genuinely requests an independent assessment of the governance structure, the scope of that assessment will decide everything. An assessment looking only at the roles of the president, Council and Congress will draw a picture of formal power-sharing. An assessment looking also at how commercial proposals are formed, at negotiations with external investors, at how ideas are developed before they become official documents – such an assessment will draw a very different picture. From my years of tracking matches and financial files, I recognise a recurring pattern: the biggest changes are never announced at the moment they actually happen. They are announced at the moment they become safe for public consumption. A proposal to sell 20 per cent of FIFA's commercial machinery cannot survive in silence unless a decision-making structure allowed it to travel that far without a single vote. The right question is not "why did FIFA withdraw the proposal", but "what structure allowed it to travel so far without any vote at all". That is also why Infantino's statement about "clear and reliable institutions" deserves to be read on two levels. On the first, it is an indirect self-criticism. On the second, it is a definition of the conditions under which similar future plans could succeed. He does not say the proposal was wrong. He says the process of communicating it was insufficient. People call it a leak. I call it a document that finally found its way out. Now, let us address the reasonable part of the opposing view, because an analysis is only trustworthy if it can withstand the strongest argument against it. The case for Infantino's approach can be summarised thus: FIFA is not a listed company, it has no shareholders, and no market regulator sits above it in the ordinary sense. Its highest governing body is the Congress of 211 associations. In such a structure, any large fundraising plan touches the question of sovereignty, and sovereignty cannot be resolved by a financial presentation. Withdrawing the proposal and opening a governance review could be read as prudent restraint rather than retreat. Moreover, looking at the existing structure, the demarcation of roles between president, Council and Congress has long been complex. The president has the power to initiate proposals, the Council has approval power, the Congress has final say on many matters. But the boundaries between these three tiers have never been drawn with a straight line. They are drawn by convention. And convention shifts with each president. A formal review could be an opportunity to fix boundaries that are currently floating. With that argument in mind, the October letter is no longer merely a timing device. It is a reasonable attempt to rationalise the machinery. But there is one detail that prevents me from reading it with complete ease. The governance review is proposed at a moment when Infantino is preparing to stand again in an election where, until November 18, he remains the only candidate. Under those conditions, a reform promise does not have to compete with another reform promise. It only has to exist. That is the biggest blind spot of this process: transparency is promised on a playing field with no opponent. This does not mean he is hiding anything. It means the only check on the reform process, in the current context, is the very person proposing it. And in any governance system, that is the weakest possible configuration. I have spent years watching how clubs use crises to restructure debts, rename debtors and legalise losses. The pattern is usually the same: an event creates a gap, and that gap is filled with a new language – the language of reform, of transparency, of restructuring. In many cases that new language is real. But it always has a side effect: it slows down specific questions by shifting them to a more abstract level. So the real question is not whether Infantino intends reform. The question is: what will bind the candidate standing again in March if the governance review is not yet complete? So far, there is no answer at the documentary level. November 18 is a date worth watching, not because it changes the landscape, but because it determines whether the March election is a genuine vote or merely a confirmation procedure. As long as the candidate list holds only one name, every governance review takes place in an atmosphere where the outcome is known in advance. The October 15 meeting will leave behind a document. Not the letter, but the minutes. Those minutes will show whether the FIFA Council approves an independent assessment, how broad its scope is, and whether it covers the formation of commercial proposals such as FIFA Forward Enterprise. Those three lines, once written, will say more than any statement. Football is a sport in which every action is recorded: goals, cards, substitutions, stoppage time. But at the boardroom level, many actions are not recorded where the public can read them. A governance review, if designed correctly, could change that. If designed poorly, it merely adds another layer of paper to a structure already heavy with layers. I will wait for the October 15 minutes. And I will wait for November 18. Between those two dates, a $4.2 billion proposal will either enter history as a lesson in governance, or vanish like a note deleted from a file. And if it vanishes, there will always be a copy sitting on another server. The stands are empty, but the owners' accounting rooms are never empty of people typing numbers.