The $20bn Question: Inside the Fight to Stop FIFA Selling Off the People's Game

For a few sun-drenched weeks in the summer of 2026, football felt like it belonged to everyone. The World Cup delivered a swirling carnival of scintillating soccer, celebrated the vitality of diaspora communities, showcased the fortitude of underdogs, and accomplished something almost nothing else can in our splintered, on-demand entertainment age: it gathered people from radically different backgrounds to experience the same moment, at the same time, and feel that it mattered. Then the trophy was lifted, the confetti fell — and FIFA president Gianni Infantino dropped a political pipebomb into the afterparty. As Jules Boykoff reports in The Guardian (via Guardian Football), Infantino has proposed effectively privatizing the World Cup by injecting a staggering $20 billion in private capital into the tournament. The financial machinery behind the plan includes Wall Street heavyweight JP Morgan alongside Thrive Capital, the investment vehicle orchestrated by Joshua Kushner — brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump. The political entanglements, Boykoff notes, are impossible to ignore. For Boykoff, a prominent scholar of sport and politics, the proposal is the clearest evidence yet of what he describes as FIFA's 'authoritarian turn' under Infantino — a governing body that controls the world's most beloved sporting event while drifting ever further beyond meaningful accountability. The timing makes the power play even more audacious. The 2026 tournament reminded the planet why the World Cup matters: not as a balance sheet, but as a rare shared human ritual in a world fractured along countless cultural axes. To hand the keys of that ritual to private investors, critics argue, would transform football's grandest communal experience into a product — optimized for returns rather than for the people whose passion built it. So what can halt the slide? Not FIFA itself, Boykoff argues. The organization has repeatedly shown it will not rein in its own ambitions, and the aftermath of this World Cup made that painfully clear. Change, he insists, must come from the outside: independent oversight exerted by governments and non-governmental organizations dedicated to preserving what he calls 'the people's game.' The looming battle is about more than one tournament or one blockbuster deal. It is about whether football's future is decided behind closed boardroom doors or defended in the public square — and whether the game that once united the world can be shielded from those who would carve it up and sell it back to the fans who never stopped loving it. The confetti has been swept away. The fight for football's soul may be only beginning.