A three-day lesson: An own goal for want of proper governance

On the last Friday in July, Gianni Infantino ended a proposal that, four days earlier, had been billed as one of the most significant commercial decisions in FIFA's history. FIFA Forward Enterprise — a plan to bring outside investors into a subsidiary holding FIFA's commercial rights at a valuation of around $20 billion — was withdrawn in a statement of a few sentences. Those sentences contain most of what is worth learning from the episode.

The Commercial Proposal had Merit

The proposal's commercial logic was defensible. Rising per-federation development payments from $8 million to $20 million, funded by unlocking the World Cup's commercial value, was not an unreasonable objective. What undid it was not the underlying idea but the sequence. UEFA objected almost immediately. CONCACAF raised concerns about process. By Thursday, UEFA had moved toward a boycott of FIFA competitions. By Friday evening, the proposal was gone — three days after it became public.

Its rejection was due to a lack of governance, not commercial analysis

Strikingly little of the opposition was about the investment itself. UEFA, CONCACAF, the AFC and the Dutch federation all made the same point: initiatives of this scale should be tested with stakeholders before announcement, not after. The Dutch federation noted the episode had cost FIFA's leadership confidence regardless of the outcome. None of this reads as an argument against private capital in football. It reads as an argument about process.

The pattern is not new. The European Super League followed the same shape in 2021 — developed internally, announced publicly, opposed immediately, abandoned under pressure. The collapse of clubs like Bury in the EFL showed what happens when financial distress builds without independent oversight capable of intervening before failure becomes irreversible. In each case, the correction came through conflict rather than process, and at considerable cost.

What a functioning alternative looks like

England's Football Governance Act 2025 established the Independent Football Regulator as a direct response to this type of pattern — created because football's own authorities concluded, following the Fan-Led Review of 2021, that a self-interested body proposing its own reforms was not a reliable way to test whether those reforms served the wider game. The IFR sits outside the competitions it oversees, with no representation from the leagues or clubs it regulates. Its major reforms go through extended, published consultation before taking effect.

FIFA has no equivalent. Infantino's own explanation for withdrawing — that the plan was never intended to proceed without a clear majority of member associations behind it — is an admission that no mechanism existed to establish where that majority stood before the proposal became public and contested.

An Empowering Lesson

The FIFA Forward Enterprise episode will likely be remembered as a proposal that never happened. Its more durable lesson is simpler: good governance is not a constraint on ambition — it is a precondition for it. Decisions built with stakeholders rather than presented to them do not require a near-boycott to correct. Independent oversight, whether a standing body or a strengthened consultation process, points in the same direction that England's football authorities are already  walking toward – transparent governance built in advance, rather than assembled under pressure once a decision has gone wrong.

At Law Debenture, independent governance is central to what we do. Across a range of structures and sectors, we act as an independent party where trust, process and accountability matter — precisely the combination that episodes like FIFA Forward Enterprise demonstrate is so difficult to build after the fact, and so valuable when it is built in advance.

Do reach out to patrick.davis@lawdeb.com author and Head of Corporate Secretarial Services UK to find out more about our solutions.