In a perhaps rare example of corporate contrition, JPMorgan Chase issued a public apology in 2021 over its involvement in a scheme to form a breakaway elite European football league. America’s richest bank pledged: “We will learn from this.”
Some five years later, the financial giant finds itself in the teeth of another controversy embroiling elite football after it was this week revealed to be the main adviser to global governing body Fifa over its hotly-disputed plan to sell a stake in the World Cup and its other competitions to private investors.
The £3.2bn investment project spearheaded by Fifa president Gianni Infantino appeared to be unravelling this weekend after three major football federations, led by Europe’s Uefa, voiced trenchant opposition. The European body said its members, including England, would boycott future World Cups if the scheme went through.
Fifa, which is officially a not-for-profit organisation, insisted it was pressing ahead with its plan, saying “nobody is selling football”. Unhelpfully for Infantino, Fifa’s bullishness coincided with the resignation of one his most senior advisers, Carlos Cordeiro, who said he had no knowledge of the scheme and suggested it would “mortgage football’s future”.
In all events, however, the footballing farrago has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on the nexus linking Infantino and Fifa to a cast of corporate players ranging from JPMorgan and a Rome-based investment consultancy, to Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared.
Infantino has been the subject of a tidal wave of negative headlines over his ardent courting of the US President both before and during this summer’s World Cup tournament.
What is the Fifa scheme and what’s JPMorgan’s role?
In a somewhat hurried statement earlier this week, Fifa said the American bank, which is the country’s largest in terms of its assets, had been “engaged to work alongside” football’s governing body on the creation of an entity called Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE).
This is a commercial subsidiary which Infantino wants to create to run Fifa events, including the men’s and women’s World Cups, with external investors able to make “minority, non-controlling investments”.
A 25-page document created by JPMorgan to explain the scheme to Fifa’s 211 member national football associations states that the number of Fifa tournaments will be expanded alongside “new business initiatives”. The resulting commercial growth would then see member organisations receive a series of windfalls reaching about £21m a year – triple the current level – from 2035 onwards after the bank described Fifa as “under-monetised”.
Joshua Kushner with his wife Karlie Kloss at event in New York early this month. The brother of Trump’s son-in-law is a key figure in the proposed scheme (Photo: TheStewartofNY/GC Images)Waiting in the wings are private investors led by Thrive External, an investment fund set up by Kushner. The investors are expected to take a 20 per cent stake in FFE in return for a cash injection for Fifa of $4.2bn (£3.2bn).
Given the ferocity of the response to the plans, JPMorgan, which last year made a profit of $57bn (£43bn) and has assets worth $4.4trn (£3.3trn), may be forgiven for feeling an amount of corporate déja vu when it comes to footballing investments.
The bank previously played a central role in the development of the Super League – a proposal to upend Europe’s club football pecking order by creating a de facto closed league of elite teams such as Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool.
Such was the outrage among fans and other clubs caused by the plans – pundit and ex-United star Gary Neville called the scheme “an absolute disgrace” – that they were abandoned within days, accompanied by fulsome apologies from several participants.
JPMorgan was one of several organisations criticised by football fans in 2021 over the proposals for a European Super League. The bank apologised and said it had ‘misjudged’ feeling among supporters (Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP)For its part, JPMorgan, which had pledged to invest about $4bn (£3bn) to underwrite the league, said: “We clearly misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community and how it might impact them in the future. We will learn from this.”
Whether the current row over the Fifa scheme will now lead the bank to conclude that its key learning point should be to simply steer clear of the business of football remains to be seen.
JPMorgan declined to comment when contacted by The i Paper.
But it is understood insiders feel the FFE project differs diametrically from the Super League scheme in so far as its aim is to provide additional funding to boost football around the world and build on the potent brand of the World Cup.
One person with knowledge of the plans emphasised that the scheme could only proceed if approved by Fifa members and the bank’s role was to act as a bridge between investors and the governing body.
Experts also pointed out this week that the model proposed for FFE – external investment in the commercial operations of a sports league or franchise – is increasingly common and includes La Liga and Ligue 1 – the top flights of Spanish and French football.
What other private companies and individuals are involved?
At the core of the scheme is Thrive Eternal, a venture capital fund whose website suggests it was set up in April this year to oversee “a small number of assets that we can own and steward over many decades”.
The company is headed by 41-year-old Joshua, who also has a minority stake in the Miami Heat NBA basketball team, and is the founder of Thrive Eternal’s parent company, Thrive Capital, which has raised some $13bn (£9.6bn) from investors since it was founded in 2009.
In its statement, Fifa said that Thrive Eternal would “lead the proposed investor group” for FFE.
As such, its involvement is further evidence of the overlapping relationship between Infantino and the wider Trump family.
Kushner is the younger brother of Jared, who is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and plays a prominent role in the current administration as a Special Envoy for Peace. Jared helped negotiate the Islamabad Memorandum which underpinned the now unravelling ceasefire between America and Iran.
Thrive Eternal has made no public comment on its involvement in the FFE project.
Infantino has made no secret of his efforts to win Trump’s favour, endowing the US President with the inaugural “Fifa Peace Prize” ahead of this summer’s World Cup and overseeing a decision by Fifa to take up office space in Trump Tower in New York.
Such is the bond between the two men that Trump wasted no time in directly calling Infantino during the World Cup to express his unhappiness at the red card issued to US player Folarin Balogun. The punishment for the sending off was then suspended – a decision which sparked outrage but which Infantino insisted had been reached independently by Fifa’s disciplinary committee.
Speaking at the end of the tournament, Infantino told Trump that the World Cup would not have been a success without him, suggesting with Trumpian rhetoric that the competition had been “not just the greatest World Cup of all time… but the greatest human social and cultural event that mankind has ever witnessed”.
According to Fifa, the FFE scheme has also had a “key commercial adviser” in the shape of Greg Maffei, an American businessman who is chairman of Tripadvisor and led the acquisition of the multibillion-pound Formula One franchise by Liberty Media.
Other Fifa advisers include OpenEconomics, a Rome-based investment consultancy which has previously worked with the football body on assessing its socioeconomic impact.
What are the chances of Infantino’s scheme succeeding?
Since becoming Fifa president in 2016, Infantino has repeatedly emphasised the ability of football to bring unity to the world, describing the game as “an excuse to unite”.
Sceptics may well point out that he has this week succeeded only in vehemently uniting the football federations of Europe (Uefa), North and Central America (Concacaf) and Asia (AFC) against his commercialisation plans.
Gianni Infantino has been accused of bringing an excessively commercial edge to tournaments such as the World Cup by football fans (Photo: Lars Baron/Getty)The opposition has been led by Uefa, which this week accused Fifa of “using football to enrich themselves and their friends”. In a statement, the European body said: “The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product… No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors.”
Fifa has emphasised that the ultimate decision on the FFE scheme rests with its member national football associations after an “open and democratic consultation”.
It is a concept which opponents complain sits uncomfortably with the detailed proposals unveiled this week and Fifa’s insistence that a substantive vote be held by late September.
It is a vote which, at present, may well not go the Fifa president’s way. The three objecting federations have between them 136 votes on Fifa’s 211-member governing council. If each national association from Europe, Asia and America voted against the FFE proposals it would deprive Infantino of the majority of 106 he needs to push his scheme through.
The Fifa president is nothing, however, if not persistent.
In a statement on Friday, the Switzerland-based body insisted its consultation process had been “disrupted by incorrect media reports” and it remained committed to offering its members a “vote based on facts”.
The statement concluded: “Nobody is selling football. This not something Fifa would ever entertain.”
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