Fair Process Is How the Powerful Keep What They Already Took

Research & Analysis: Avilian Research Labs, Applied Research Division
Domain: Global Institutional Political Economy

What the IMF's 80-year voting fight teaches us about UEFA's objection to FIFA's money

When UEFA, CONCACAF, and the Asian confederation killed FIFA's proposed $20 billion commercial restructuring in August 2026, none of them said Africa didn't deserve more development money. They said the process was wrong — no consultation, an "artificially short deadline," FIFA's own council bypassed. Fix the process, the argument implied, and the money question can be revisited properly, by everyone, together.

That sounds reasonable. It's also, if you look at the only other institution that has run this exact play for eighty years, a way of guaranteeing the money question never actually gets revisited at all.

The IMF already ran this experiment, for decades

At the International Monetary Fund, voting power isn't one-country-one-vote. It's weighted by economic size, financial contribution, and a formula the IMF itself controls. Sub-Saharan Africa — home to a population comparable in scale to the advanced economies bloc — holds roughly 4.6% of the vote. Advanced economies, with 13.7% of the world's population, hold 59.1%. Emerging and developing Asia is even more underrepresented relative to its share of the global economy.

This has been known, documented, and formally acknowledged as a problem since at least the 1960s. And here is the part that matters for football: every time it comes up, the answer is process, not substance. A quota review "requires 85% of the total vote to approve," which hands the United States alone an effective veto, since it holds just over that threshold's complement. A 2010 reform agreement — modest, incremental, already a compromise — sat unratified by the U.S. Congress for five years before finally taking effect in 2016. The next quota review, promised for 2028, will need, in the IMF's own words, a "new formula" — meaning the current one is acknowledged as flawed, and has been for a generation, and the fix is always the next review, never this one.

Meanwhile, the actual money keeps flowing under the actual current rules. Nobody paused IMF lending while the fairness question was "being worked out." The process objection never once froze the benefit the process was supposedly protecting.

Watch the same mechanism in football, in real time

FIFA's confederations didn't reject Infantino's plan on the grounds that Africa shouldn't get $20-40 million per federation. They rejected it on the grounds that the decision to send that money wasn't made the right way — no council review, no adequate notice, side-channel negotiation with a single investor. Fix the process, and presumably the money question returns to the table.

But notice what already happened underneath that objection: CAF's current share of FIFA's existing Forward funding — the un-restructured, "properly governed" system everyone agrees is legitimate — was set by FIFA's existing governance architecture, an architecture nobody currently proposing "better process" is proposing to reopen. The demand is: use the fair process to decide the next allocation. The fair process being invoked is the one that already produced the current allocation. If the current baseline was never negotiated from equal footing, defending the procedure that produced it isn't neutral. It's a vote for continuity.

This is precisely the structure IMF critics have named for years: a "double majority" reform proposal — one that would require both a shareholder-weighted majority and a one-country-one-vote majority — has been floated as a genuine fix, because it stops letting the already-powerful approve their own continued power under the banner of "following procedure." No equivalent proposal exists yet in FIFA's confederation structure. Until one does, "let's agree on fair process first" and "let's keep the current allocation" are functionally the same sentence.

The tell: who gets to define what counts as "proper"

In both cases, the same body that benefits from the current distribution also gets to certify what a legitimate process looks like. The U.S. holds the IMF veto that blocks unfavorable quota changes and sits on the board that decides when a review is "ready." UEFA — Europe's confederation, the wealthiest by a wide margin — was among the loudest voices insisting FIFA's plan violated proper governance, while UEFA's own internal allocation of European football's vastly larger broadcast and sponsorship revenue answers to no comparable outside review.

That's not hypocrisy exactly. It's something more structural: the institutions with the most to lose from a redistribution are also the institutions with the most capacity to define, credibly and in good faith, what "proper process" requires. That capacity itself is a form of power the process argument doesn't count.

What this doesn't mean, and what it does

This isn't an argument that process doesn't matter, or that FIFA's Kushner-linked plan deserved to pass simply because Africa needed the money. FIFA's own secretary general said staff had been "deceived" about how the deal was negotiated — that's a real, substantive problem, not a procedural nicety invented to stall reform. A plan negotiated in secret with one investor, bypassing FIFA's own council, deserved scrutiny on the merits, separate from who it would have benefited.

The argument is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: process objections are not neutral between parties who start from different positions. When the IMF says "we need a new quota formula" for the third consecutive review cycle without changing the formula, or when football's wealthiest confederations say "we need better consultation" about a plan to send money toward the confederation with the least existing leverage, the demand for fair process functions — whether anyone intends it to or not — as a demand that the conversation restart from an unequal baseline, indefinitely.

The honest question this leaves for Africa's football institutions, and for anyone using this argument seriously, is the one CAF's leadership hasn't yet had to answer publicly: if the objection to FFE really was about how the money would move rather than whether it should, then the next proposal needs an answer to the process critique that doesn't just repeat the plan UEFA already killed. Naming the trap is not the same as escaping it. That's the harder piece still to write.