Infantino's Own Deputies Trash His Killed World Cup Sell-Off Plan as FIFA Chief Loses Grip

The knives are out inside FIFA headquarters

Since Gianni Infantino killed his plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors late Friday night, the fallout hasn't slowed down. His own people are now lining up to say, on the record, that the plan was a disaster and that he ran it without them.

Arsene Wenger, FIFA's chief of global football development and a technical adviser to the sport's rule-making body IFAB, broke his silence Tuesday. He said scrapping the plan was "absolutely necessary and beyond question," according to the BBC. He then added: "I was not involved in this strategic plan and first became aware of the project through media reports."

Infantino's own development chief found out about a $4.2 billion restructuring of FIFA's flagship event from a newspaper.

Mattias Grafstrom, FIFA's secretary general and Infantino's number two, piled on in an internal staff memo obtained by the Guardian. He called the whole episode a "sad and reproachable series of events" and admitted staff had been "thrown into the middle of a turmoil, which is difficult to comprehend and accept." Grafstrom stopped short of naming Infantino directly, though the target of his criticism is clear.

The plan that blew up

Infantino's proposal, according to City AM, would have raised roughly $4.2 billion by selling stakes in a new commercial vehicle set up to run the World Cup, with private investors including members of Donald Trump's extended family reportedly in the mix. In exchange for member federations backing the deal, Infantino offered all 211 national associations $40 million each, per the BBC.

It didn't work. UEFA, representing 55 European federations, threatened to boycott every FIFA tournament if the plan went through, according to the Associated Press. FIFA's chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, went public before that with his own complaint, calling it "the project of one person" and saying he and other senior staff had been kept in the dark, as reported by City AM.

Carlos Cordeiro, Infantino's senior adviser on global strategy and governance, resigned over it. He said the deal was "a bad deal for football" that would "mortgage football's future," per the BBC.

By Friday night Infantino had no room left. He pulled the plan and apologized for how it had divided the sport, according to CP24. That should have ended it. Instead it opened a second phase of the crisis: his own administration publicly settling scores.

The math that should worry Infantino

UEFA sent FIFA a document preservation letter naming 18 FIFA officials, threatening legal action, the BBC reported. Wenger is one of the 18 named.

Five European federations, including England's FA, have formally withdrawn support for Infantino's re-election bid at the FIFA Congress scheduled for Morocco in March, according to CP24. Denmark's federation said it was never going to back him regardless.

On the other side, federations from Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon and Sri Lanka have publicly stood by Infantino, and he's been amplifying those statements on his own Instagram, per CP24. FIFA also dismissed as "pure fiction" a report claiming Infantino sought help from the Trump administration to hang onto power.

211 federations will vote at Congress, and the number with firm public positions right now is small. Five withdrawals and five declarations of support out of 211 is not a landslide either way. What's changed is the tone inside FIFA's own walls, not necessarily the vote count.

The BBC and Guardian both nail the internal-memo angle, quoting Grafstrom's email at length and correctly noting he avoided naming Infantino directly even while trashing the plan. That's an important distinction: Grafstrom is criticizing the project, not openly calling for Infantino's ouster. CP24 adds the vote-count context that's missing from the British outlets, showing just how thin the public backing and opposition currently is on both sides.

None of the sources have gotten confirmation from FIFA on whether the Trump family investment reporting, cited by City AM, is accurate, and FIFA has already denied a separate Trump-administration angle as "fiction." That claim remains unconfirmed and should be treated as such.

Private investment in a nonprofit sports governing body's crown jewel event was always going to draw scrutiny, and FIFA's federations were right to demand transparency before signing off on a $4.2 billion restructuring most of them apparently never got to review. That's not an ideological objection. It's basic governance. An organization spending other people's trust and money doesn't get to blindside its own board.

The open question now is whether Infantino survives to next March's Congress in Morocco, and whether Grafstrom's carefully worded memo is loyalty management or the first public step toward distancing himself for his own future inside the organization.