Global opposition to FIFA President Gianni Infantino's plan for selling a stake in World Cup revenue to private investors grew Thursday with Asia's soccer leader warning members about threats to their own competitions. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
"FIFA's unilateral actions appear to undermine the very foundations of continental football," the Asian Football Confederation president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa said in a letter to member federations. The sheikh's letter, seen by the Associated Press, circulated as European soccer body UEFA prepared to host an online meeting of its 55 national members on Thursday to shape a strategy for resisting Infantino's plan.
The FIFA project would be underwritten by a New York investment vehicle, Thrive Eternal, created by Joshua Kushner, the brother of U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Infantino has had close ties to Jared Kushner since the first Trump administration. Infantino held secret talks in recent months with potential backers in the U.S. about creating the $20 billion FIFA Forward Enterprise subsidiary with $4.2 billion of private equity. It comes off the back of a record-setting men's World Cup in North America that pushed FIFA's income to $15 billion over the past four years.
The 55 European federations and 46 from Asia count close to a majority of FIFA's 211 member countries globally that each was given a Sept. 19 deadline by Infantino to accept a one-time offer of $20 million to invest. The North American soccer body known as CONCACAF has said it is "deeply concerned by the lack of due process" in Infantino's project. Sheikh Salman, an ally to Infantino since losing the FIFA presidential election to him in 2016, wrote in his letter "such an initiative will not succeed".