Reboot FIFA Campaign Statement on World Cup sell-off

No one owns football. It is the common property of humanity.

The announcement that FIFA plans to sell off its tournaments to private equity should be opposed by Member Associations (MAs) of FIFA, as well as clubs, players and fans across the world. 

Criticism should be directed at FIFA President Gianni Infantino. But the scheme reveals deep-lying structural and governance problems that are at the root of these plans and which have plagued FIFA for decades. 

An organisation that was set up to govern and regulate the world’s most popular sport has been transformed over time into a predatory commercial entity that feeds off the game’s global appeal, and is instrumental in exacerbating a wide range of social harms, including human rights abuses. 

Gianni Infantino is the symptom of the problems at FIFA, not the cause. 

We call on the FIFA Council and Congress to hold the FIFA President to account. We are disappointed that, to date, none of the members of the FIFA Council have spoken out against this decision or other arbitrary decisions or actions of the FIFA President. 

FIFA’s judicial mechanisms have also failed to hold the FIFA President for repeated breaches of the rules on political neutrality. 

FIFA says that “this is about the democratisation of football worldwide” and that “all net benefits” of its new venture “will be reinvested back into football worldwide” with USD 10 billion available to member associations over the next four years. 

However, what this will actually do is turbo-charge the patronage network that is the central cause of the dysfunction at FIFA and has the potential to drive corruption. 

FIFA distributes vast sums of development money to its members in a way that ensures that a critical mass of its member associations are financially dependent on FIFA. These plans mean that billions of dollars from private equity of unknown provenance will be redistributed in a way that encourages the member associations’ support for the President. 

The necessary first step of any meaningful reform of FIFA – and the one that all previous efforts at reform have ignored – involves breaking up FIFA’s patronage network. We believe these plans will bolster that network.

Football is not FIFA’s to sell. Its potential is being squandered by an unaccountable elite of greedy and ambitious officials who claim to represent the world’s most popular sport but who act in direct opposition to its interests. 

In its current form FIFA is an unfit custodian of a game that is part of our collective global heritage. 

We call on politicians and all other influential figures and organisations to oppose these plans, to support calls for FIFA’s Ethics Committee to investigate Gianni Infantino’s connections to US President Donald Trump, and to call on individual members of the FIFA Council and Member Associations to speak out against this unconscionable proposal. 

Football deserves a governing body that is transparent, accountable and democratic – one that serves the game rather than itself. 

Until those reforms are achieved, FIFA cannot credibly claim to be an appropriate custodian of a sport that belongs to the world. 

The Reboot campaign is supported by an Advisory Board whose members are David Goldblatt, Jules Boykoff, Keith Look Loy, Niam O’Mahony, Bonita Mersiades, Steff Ndei and Musa Okwonga. 

Reboot has collected over 100,000 signatures in support of FairSquare’s complaint to FIFA’s ethics committee regarding Gianni Infantino’s repeated breaches of neutrality rules. The Reboot campaign is a FairSquare initiative.