Who Actually Controls Football's Money — And Why the Answer Isn't "Europe"

Research & Analysis: Avilian Research Labs, Applied Research Division
Domain: Global Sports Governance & Institutional Power

A case study from the collapse of the FIFA Forward Enterprise

In early August 2026, FIFA president Gianni Infantino tried to do something that would have reshaped football's finances for a generation: sell roughly a 20% stake in FIFA's commercial rights — broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing — to outside investors, aiming to raise up to $20 billion. Some of that money, FIFA argued, would eventually flow to all 211 member associations as development funding, potentially worth tens of millions of dollars each over the coming years.

Within days, the plan was dead. FIFA's own secretary general admitted staff had been "deceived" about how it was being handled. UEFA said it had lost all confidence in Infantino and threatened to boycott future FIFA competitions. CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation joined the opposition, calling it a "profound failure of judgment." Even England's Football Association said it had been kept in the dark — despite its own chair sitting as a FIFA vice-president.

Confederation of African Football did something different. It didn't oppose the plan. CAF's Executive Committee studied it, then — after FIFA apologized for the process and shelved the proposal — unanimously endorsed FIFA's handling of the matter and reaffirmed its support for Infantino. CAF president Patrice Motsepe put it plainly: "I personally support Gianni Infantino. He's not just a good friend, he's a loyal friend. He's loyal to Africa."

That split is the real story. Not "Europe versus Africa" — a confederation that already has the deepest pockets in world football rejecting a plan that a confederation with some of the shallowest pockets was prepared to work with.

If you're looking for who is fighting to keep African football underfunded, the FFE collapse doesn't point at a villain wearing a European flag. It points at something less satisfying and more important: a structure where deciding where football's money goes is itself a form of power — and that power sits almost entirely outside Africa.

The actors, precisely

Before going further, it's worth being exact about who's who, because the loose version of this story ("Europe versus Africa") collapses the moment you name the actual institutions:

FIFA — the global governing body, currently led by Gianni Infantino.
UEFA — European football's confederation. Not the European Union; a sports body with no formal government affiliation.
CAF — African football's confederation, representing 54 of FIFA's 211 member associations, led by South African businessman Patrice Motsepe.
CONCACAF — North and Central America and the Caribbean's confederation.
The European Club Association / European Football Clubs (EFC) — representing over 800 European clubs, distinct from UEFA itself.

The FFE controversy was a fight between FIFA's presidency and most of the sport's other major institutions — UEFA, CONCACAF, the Asian confederation, FIFPRO (the international players' union), and a coalition of clubs. CAF was the one major body that stayed publicly supportive throughout.

What the plan actually offered — and why it collapsed

The FIFA Forward Enterprise wasn't a hypothetical. It was a specific commercial vehicle, reportedly linked to financing interest from Thrive Capital, the investment fund run by Joshua Kushner — a detail worth getting right, since it is frequently and incorrectly reported as his brother Jared. Joshua Kushner holds no political office and has no formal role in the current U.S. administration.

FIFA's own numbers, presented to member federations, were substantial: an expanded FIFA Forward programme worth $20 million per federation, plus a new one-off "Fast Forward" payment of another $20 million — up to $40 million per federation from January 2027, and a projected $86 million per federation across three funding cycles, compared to roughly $3 million before Infantino took office in 2016.

For federations like Nigeria's, or Zimbabwe's, that is not abstract money. It is the difference between fielding a competitive team and not.

The opposition wasn't about that goal. Every statement from every confederation that rejected the plan — UEFA, CONCACAF, the AFC — objected on the same grounds: the proposal was negotiated without consulting FIFA's own council or its member federations, on what CONCACAF called an "artificially short deadline," bypassing FIFA's own governance review. FIFA's leadership ultimately conceded the point, publicly apologizing for excluding its council and member associations from the process.

Notice what's absent from every one of those objections: nobody said the money shouldn't reach federations. Nobody proposed an alternative way to get $20–40 million to a struggling football association. The fight was entirely about who gets to make that decision — not about whether the decision should favor the Global South. That silence is worth sitting with.

The uncomfortable part: Africa's own institutions

Here is where an honest version of this argument has to complicate itself, because the temptation is to say Europe blocked money that Africa needed. The actual record doesn't support that as a complete picture.

CAF didn't just decline to fight FIFA. Its Executive Committee met, and several of its most senior figures — CAF vice president Fouzi Lekjaa of Morocco, FIFA Council members from Egypt, Niger, and Mauritania, and the newly elected president of DR Congo's federation — issued public statements of support for Infantino during the controversy, before CAF's formal endorsement. This is not a confederation that felt robbed. It is a confederation that has depended on Infantino's FIFA Forward programme since 2016 and, by its own account, sees him as an ally.

That raises a harder question than "why won't Europe let this money through": why does African football's financial survival depend so heavily on a single office in Zurich in the first place? And once that money arrives, where does it actually go?

The answer is not encouraging. Nigeria's House of Representatives voted in October 2025 to open a special investigative probe into the Nigerian Football Federation over more than $25 million in FIFA and CAF development grants received between 2015 and 2025, after a $1.2 million grant meant for a regional stadium produced a facility widely mocked online as substandard — while Kenya's federation reportedly built a comparable facility for a fraction of the cost. The probe followed years of unresolved audit queries, including a 2016 FIFA finding that over $800,000 of a $1.1 million development grant was unaccounted for.

In the Republic of Congo, the federation's president was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment — along with his wife, son, and two other officials — for embezzling $1.3 million in FIFA development funds through money laundering and forgery.

These are not footnotes. If the argument is "Africa deserves a larger and more direct share of football's money," it has to be paired with "and African football institutions need to be able to account for every dollar of it," or the argument hands its opponents an easy dismissal: we tried that, and it didn't reach the pitch.

So what is the actual scandal?

Not that Europe is stealing from Africa. The evidence doesn't support that claim, and making it anyway would be the fastest way to have the rest of this argument dismissed.

The real pattern is this: African football produces enormous value — some of the most commercially valuable players on earth, passionate and enormous audiences, extraordinary young talent — and very little of the decision-making power over that value's distribution sits inside African institutions. When FIFA tried to unilaterally restructure who controls football's commercial future, the confederations powerful enough to stop it in its tracks were the ones that didn't need the money as urgently. The confederation that needed it most had no comparable leverage — only trust in a personal relationship with the man proposing it.

That is the more precise, more defensible version of "Africa is being robbed": not of cash that was on the table and got redirected, but of a seat at the table where the size of the table itself gets decided.

The next piece in this series looks at what it would actually take to get FIFA development money past the federation level and down to where it matters most — the player earning $100 a month in a fifth-division league, and whether "create employment through football" can be built as a real, costed proposal rather than a slogan.