UEFA is preparing criminal legal proceedings against FIFA president Gianni Infantino over the now scrapped plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup and its other competitions to private investors.
BBC reports it has seen documents by showing an application has been made by European football’s governing body requesting access to evidence and documents for use in proceedings in Switzerland against the embattled president himself, who UEFA accuses of “criminal mismanagement”.
Shortly after the 2026 World Cup, Infantino proposed creating a new company, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), which would have sold off stakes in the association’s football competitions to private investors.
The plan was scrapped after widespread backlash.
In the application for evidence, UEFA claims that Infantino engineered the plan in order to enrich himself and the potential private investors.
“In truth, it was a vehicle for Infantino and that small circle to acquire a permanent stake in and otherwise profit from Fifa’s most valuable assets to the detriment of Fifa, its members, and other parties within the football family,” UEFA’s application says.
“Infantino pushed the plan through internal FIFA approval only days earlier at a hastily convened meeting where a limited number of FIFA’s management officials and employees – some of whom had never heard of the plan – were given mere hours to sign off on an unprecedented multi-billion dollar scheme.”
UEFA insists that the plan was concocted without the knowledge of them or other key stakeholders in football, and that it had been long in development.
The applications says: “On July 28, 2026, without consulting the Fifa Council, Uefa, or any of the other confederations, or any of the 211 Fifa member associations, Infantino, purportedly acting on behalf of Fifa, publicly announced a plan to place the commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup into a new subsidiary: Fifa Forward Enterprise.
“That announcement by Infantino was the public unveiling of a plan that he and a small circle of co-conspirators had conceived and reportedly been developing in secret for more than a year.”
Uefa states in the document that there has been “an enduring history of corruption among Fifa officials” and claims that world football’s governing body only relents on its plans when pressure comes from outside the sport.
“Fifa’s extraordinary power over world football has operated largely without meaningful internal constraint, with accountability coming principally through external forces, including political pressure, public scrutiny, and intervention through international criminal law enforcement,” the application adds.
Fifa’s headquarters are in the Swiss city of Zurich, and Uefa says that its plan to eventually pursue criminal charges against Infantino is backed up by Swiss law.
“Swiss counsel has confirmed […] that the proceeding is within reasonable contemplation for purposes of Swiss law and that Uefa has standing, as a complainant, to file a criminal complaint for criminal mismanagement against Infantino and potentially other Fifa officials as may be warranted,” UEFA says.
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