This page tracks FIFA's plan to sell a minority stake in the company that would run the World Cup, and the revolt it triggered. We update it as votes, deadlines and defections land; the "Updated" date at the top tells you how fresh it is. * **Update - the plan is withdrawn** * On Friday, July 31, 2026 - four days after the proposal surfaced and one day after UEFA's 55 associations voted unanimously to boycott - Infantino announced that the "proposal will not proceed." * His wording is worth reading closely: "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." The phrase doing the work is "regardless of the level of support." That is not a man conceding he would have lost the vote. It is a man saying he might well have won it and is stopping anyway - which is precisely what you say when the vote was never the binding constraint. * It wasn't. The arithmetic laid out below never changed: UEFA has 55 votes out of 211, and a simple majority is 106. Europe could not outvote anyone. What Europe could do was withhold the teams that make the asset worth $20 billion, and it said so in public. The deal died of valuation risk, not of democracy. * UEFA did not treat the reversal as a reconciliation. Its statement: "This is a victory for the whole game. But it must not be the end of the story. The proposal has gone. The task of rebuilding trust in FIFA has only just begun" - adding that "the current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA's confidence but also that of many other members of the football family" (Sky Sports, August 1, 2026). * That last line is the part with a future in it. The proposal is gone; the fight over who runs FIFA is not. The next hard date on Infantino's calendar is the FIFA presidential election, scheduled for November 18, 2026 in Rabat, Morocco (ESPN). * The September 19 vote described below is now moot, and the material that follows it should be read as the record of how this happened rather than as a live process. We have left it intact deliberately - the structure of the deal, the per-association payments and the confederation split are the things to check against whenever a version of this proposal comes back. * What is actually being sold. Not the World Cup itself - FIFA is emphatic about that, and it is technically correct. What is on the table is up to 20% of a new subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, into which FIFA's commercial and event operations would be placed. The trophy stays with FIFA. The business that monetises the trophy gets outside shareholders. Forbes reported the structure on July 29, 2026 as a roughly $4.2 billion raise valuing the entity at about $20 billion. * Who is buying. The lead investor group is Thrive Eternal, a fund created by Thrive Capital, the firm founded by Josh Kushner. JPMorgan bankers are advising. Gianni Infantino, asked by The Times about the idea of his serving as commissioner or chief executive of the new company, said it "has never been discussed." * The deadline. September 19, 2026. FIFA's 211 member associations - one vote each, Germany and Guam alike - are being asked to approve the plan by then, and a yes comes with an immediate payment to each association. * **The number that moved** * Here is a detail worth holding onto, because it is the kind of thing that gets flattened in a headline. On July 29, 2026, Forbes reported the offer as $20 million per member association. On July 31, after UEFA's boycott vote, Al Jazeera reported Infantino offering $40 million each. We have not seen a FIFA statement reconciling the two figures, so treat both as reported rather than settled, and note the direction of travel: the number got larger after the opposition organised. * The $20 million figure has an arithmetic property worth noticing. 211 associations at $20 million each is $4.22 billion - functionally the entire capital raise. On those numbers, the money coming in from investors goes straight back out to the people voting on whether investors get in. That is not an accusation of anything improper; it is what the structure does. At $40 million a head the payout would be roughly $8.4 billion, or about double the reported raise, which is one reason the discrepancy matters rather than being a rounding error. * **Why Europe went nuclear** * On Thursday, July 30, 2026, UEFA held an emergency meeting and its 55 member associations voted unanimously - 55 to 0 - to boycott FIFA tournaments if the plan goes ahead. The scope is not symbolic: the men's World Cup, the women's World Cup and the Club World Cup. UEFA said no team from any of its members would take part "so long as these proposals remain alive," and that it would keep boycotting unless the proposal is abandoned "in its entirety" and FIFA gives "binding assurances" it will not pursue private ownership again. * Its statement of principle was short: "The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product... No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale." * Strip the diplomacy and the leverage is obvious. A World Cup without European teams is not a World Cup with a gap in it; it is a different and much cheaper product. The value of the thing being sold depends on the participation of the confederation that just voted to withhold it. Whatever else UEFA did on July 30, it put a question mark over the $20 billion valuation. * **FIFA's answer** * FIFA did not blink. On July 31 it said it would "proceed with this consultation process to ensure that each MA has the ability to express its vote based on facts," and insisted: "Nobody is selling football. This is not something FIFA would ever entertain." It also said it would not advance without majority support from the 211 members - which is both a reassurance and a reminder of the arithmetic. UEFA has 55 votes. A simple majority of 211 is 106. Europe cannot outvote the rest of the world on its own; it can only refuse to play. * One person did leave. Carlos Cordeiro, a senior adviser to Infantino and a former president of US Soccer, resigned on Friday, July 31, 2026 over the plan. * **Where the other confederations stand** * As of July 31, 2026: CONCACAF rejected the proposal but did not vote to boycott. The Asian Football Confederation is strongly opposed and also stopped short of a boycott vote. The Mexican Football Federation said it would study the proposal before deciding. CAF (Africa), CONMEBOL (South America) and OFC (Oceania) had not announced positions or vote dates. * That distribution is the whole game. The associations most likely to accept are the ones for which $20 million is transformative relative to their annual budget, and those are overwhelmingly outside Europe. The associations refusing are the ones whose players make the tournament worth $20 billion. FIFA's one-member-one-vote structure, long defended as the democratic heart of the organisation, is now the mechanism by which the smallest federations decide the fate of the biggest ones' asset. * **What we are watching next** * Whether the structure returns in a different shape. Infantino said he would "bring all interested parties back together in the coming days and weeks," and UEFA's original demand was that the proposal be abandoned "in its entirety" with "binding assurances" that FIFA will not pursue private ownership again. No such assurance has been published. A smaller stake, a governance carve-out or a confederation veto would all be ways of bringing the same idea back with the objections priced in. * Whether UEFA formally withdraws the boycott resolution, or leaves it standing as a deterrent. Its 55-0 vote was conditional on the plan proceeding; the plan is not proceeding, but the resolution has not been reported as rescinded. * Whether Carlos Cordeiro, who resigned as a senior adviser to Infantino on July 31, 2026 over the plan, returns or says more about how it was developed. * **Update, August 7-8, 2026: a second front opens** * Nine days after the deal collapsed, the story stopped being about corporate structure and started being about Infantino personally. On Friday night, August 7, 2026 the Daily Telegraph reported that UEFA paid a six-figure sum to a woman it reported had been in a relationship with Infantino during his time as the confederation's general secretary - a post he held from 2009 until he was elected FIFA president in February 2016. * Infantino's denial is absolute. A FIFA spokesman said he "strongly denies these allegations, as they are completely untrue," adding that "any suggestion of improper conduct or a breach of rules or regulations is defamatory." * UEFA's statement is the part worth reading twice: "We are aware of the allegations and can confirm a departure payment was made to the individual in question, coupled with the payment of fees for a MBA course at a local business school." It added that the payments complied with the regulations in force at the time, and that those rules have since been tightened to match the standards of modern, high-level institutions (RTE; Goal, August 8, 2026). * Read that carefully, because it does more work than the headlines did. The severance payment is confirmed. The MBA fees are confirmed - by UEFA, not by the Telegraph. What is denied is the characterisation of the relationship and any suggestion that a rule was broken. Those are three separate propositions, and most of the coverage compressed them into one word: "denies." * A useful rule for any story shaped like this one: separate the fact that is admitted from the framing that is denied, because they are almost never the same sentence - and the admitted fact usually arrives in a statement nobody quotes in the headline. * The timing is its own fact. UEFA declared in the first days of August that Infantino had lost its confidence. One week later, UEFA is confirming a payment from his tenure there. Nobody has alleged the two are connected, and we are not alleging it either - but the presidential election in Rabat is on November 18, 2026, and the governance case against the incumbent now has two chapters instead of one. * And the November 18, 2026 FIFA presidential election in Rabat, which is now the venue where the "loss of confidence" UEFA described either turns into something or does not.