For a month this looked like the kind of dispute governing bodies handle quietly: a bad idea floated, an outcry, a retreat, everyone pretending it never happened. On Thursday, August 27, 2026, UEFA made clear that wasn't going to fly.
UEFA filed applications in three US courts: the Southern District of New York, the Southern District of Florida, and the District of Colorado. The targets: the New York investment fund Thrive Capital Management, founded by Joshua Kushner; two FIFA companies registered in Coral Gables, near Miami; and Greg Maffei, CEO of BANN Ventures and former president and CEO of Liberty Media, retained as Infantino's "key commercial adviser" on the deal.
Before anyone reaches for the word lawsuit: this isn't one. These are so-called 1782 applications, US discovery tools used to gather documents and testimony for a foreign proceeding, filed without the other side present. UEFA wants the paper trail so it can hand it to Swiss authorities as the basis for a criminal complaint against Infantino, under Article 158 of the Swiss Criminal Code, which covers criminal mismanagement. FIFA is based in Zurich, Infantino is a Swiss citizen, and the route runs through Miami and Manhattan but ends in a courtroom in Switzerland.
That distinction matters: no criminal complaint has been filed yet, and US judges haven't ruled on whether they'll grant the discovery UEFA wants. It's an opening move, not a verdict, but one that changes the shape of the fight.
What Infantino tried to sell
Strip away the acronym and FIFA Forward Enterprise was a plan to carve off the commercial rights tied to the men's and women's World Cups and the Club World Cup, drop them into a new subsidiary, and sell a slice to private money. Thrive and Kushner were lined up as anchor investors, set to pay $4.2 billion for roughly a fifth of the business, a figure UEFA's filing pegs at about a 20 percent stake, with one court read of the numbers putting it at 21. Treat the exact percentage as approximate. The valuation it implied doesn't need rounding to land: about $20 billion for FIFA's commercial engine, World Cup included.
UEFA's lawyers, in a 56-page document, went straight at that number. Those investors, they wrote, "stood to acquire a permanent financial interest in FIFA's commercial arm for $4.2 billion, implying an absurdly low enterprise value of only approximately $20 billion, a figure that was neither the product of an open, competitive auction, nor tested by any independent valuer."
That single sentence is the spine of the whole case: nobody bid against anybody, no independent expert put a price on the crown jewels, and a number simply appeared, with a small group of people positioned to buy in at it.
The bypass is the story
Strip the personalities out and you're left with the allegation that should keep FIFA's 211 member associations up at night. UEFA's filing claims Infantino and a small group of advisers and investors developed the plan for more than a year without consulting the FIFA Council, the regional confederations, or the 211 member associations, before it was unveiled on July 28. FIFA's own statutes, UEFA says, give the Council sole authority to decide how FIFA's commercial rights are promoted.
More than a year of work, not a rushed pitch or a trial balloon that got away from its authors. If UEFA's account holds up, and that's still to be tested, it describes a deliberate effort to keep the organization's own decision-making body in the dark until the deal was ready to announce.
Infantino sold it as liberation. He claimed, per UEFA's filing, that the plan would "unleash the commercial potential and opportunity that FIFA has." UEFA's counter is blunt: "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."
That's UEFA's characterization, an allegation in a filing, not a proven finding. But you don't have to accept the harshest reading of Infantino's motives to ask a simpler question: why did the man running a members' organization think he could reshape its most valuable assets without asking the members?
Be careful who you accuse
The Kushner name draws the eyeballs, and the family connection is real: Joshua Kushner directed an investment vehicle called Thrive Eternal to lead the investor group, and he's the brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. But the filings are explicit that Kushner and Maffei's firm are not anticipated defendants in any eventual Swiss criminal case. They are sources of documents, not accused parties. Anyone framing this as Infantino and Kushner in the dock together is getting the story wrong. The alleged jeopardy, at this stage, points at one man.
The internal rebuke was the tell
What separates this from ordinary football politics is that Infantino's own house turned on him before UEFA ever got near a courthouse. When the plan surfaced in late July, FIFA chief operating officer Kevin Lamour said staff had been deceived by Infantino's lack of openness, and put it as plainly as an executive can about his own president: "It is the project of one person." FIFPRO, the global players' union, went further, accusing him of a "profound abuse of presidential power."
When your own operations chief and the people who actually play the games are both saying you acted alone, the governance-bypass argument stops being UEFA's talking point and starts looking like the consensus in the building.
UEFA did hand Infantino one piece of relief the same day: it provisionally withdrew its threat to have Europe's federations boycott FIFA events, after FIFA confirmed in writing that the FFE project had been "irrevocably and permanently withdrawn" and "will not re-appear in any other shape, construction, name or form." Provisionally is the key word. The boycott is paused, not buried, and UEFA can bring it back.
Why the legal odds are not the whole game
Here's where I'll pump the brakes on any narrative that Infantino is finished. Switzerland has been a graveyard for FIFA prosecutions. Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, former UEFA president Michel Platini, and PSG's Nasser al-Khelaïfi were each acquitted twice at Swiss trials. It's not even settled whether UEFA's eventual complaint would land with the federal prosecution office in Bern or local prosecutors in Zurich. Betting on a Swiss conviction against a well-resourced football executive has been a losing wager for a decade.
So the real battlefield may not be a courtroom at all. The 77th FIFA Congress is set for Rabat, Morocco, on March 18, 2027, and Infantino is seeking a fourth term. The defections are piling up on the European side: the English FA, Serbia, Sweden, and Wales have pulled their support, and Italy's federation joined this week, its statement citing alignment with UEFA over "recent initiatives promoted concerning the governance and development of international competitions."
But Europe doesn't decide FIFA elections alone. Infantino still has real backing from the Confederation of African Football, key parts of CONMEBOL, and political figures including Trump. Africa alone carries 54 voting members, and a contested election needs 106 votes for a majority, with no guarantee any bloc moves as one. My read: the filing matters less for what a Swiss judge might eventually do than for what it does to Infantino between now and Rabat. It keeps the paper trail alive and keeps the word criminal attached to his name, which gives every wavering federation a reason to ask the same question UEFA is asking.
If the World Cup belongs to the 211, why did one man think he could sell part of it without telling them?
