ByDaniel AustinBBC Sport senior journalist
Uefa is pursuing criminal legal proceedings against Fifa and its president Gianni Infantino over the now scrapped plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup and its other competitions to private investors.
Documents seen by BBC Sport show an application has been made by European football’s governing body requesting access to evidence and documents for use in proceedings in Switzerland against both the embattled president himself and Fifa.
In the application, Uefa claims that Infantino engineered the plan in order to enrich himself and the potential private investors.
“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,” Uefa’s application says.
“Infantino pushed the plan through internal Fifa approval only days earlier at a hastily convened meeting where a limited number of Fifa’s management officials and employees – some of whom had never heard of the plan – were given mere hours to sign off on an unprecedented multi-billion dollar scheme.”
Uefa also claims that the valuation of the stakes to be sold were not independently verified and would have been offered too cheaply.
Uefa’s application adds: “Under the terms Infantino announced, those investors stood to acquire a permanent financial interest in Fifa’s commercial arm for $4.2bn, implying an absurdly low enterprise value of only approximately $20bn, a figure that was neither the product of an open, competitive auction, nor tested by any independent valuer.”
In the application, Uefa is applying to a court in Florida – where the businesses Fifa operated in order to deliver the 2026 World Cup are based – in an attempt to access files to be used to pursue the criminal charges in Switzerland at a later stage.
Uefa claims that its 55 member nations would have potentially been harmed by the sell-off plan, and that it may pursue criminal proceedings against other Fifa officials.
“Uefa and other interested parties are preparing to bring criminal claims in Switzerland against Infantino and possibly other Fifa officials and advisors for criminal mismanagement,” the application states.
“The secretive structuring, valuation, financing, and marketing inflicted direct and concrete injury on Fifa’s reputation, governance authority, and commercial relationships to the detriment of Fifa as well as its 211 members, including Uefa’s 55 member associations.”
Uefa insists that the plan was concocted without the knowledge of them or other key stakeholders in football, and that it had been long in development.
The applications says: “On July 28, 2026, without consulting the Fifa Council, Uefa, or any of the other confederations, or any of the 211 Fifa member associations, Infantino, purportedly acting on behalf of Fifa, publicly announced a plan to place the commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup into a new subsidiary: Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE).
“That announcement by Infantino was the public unveiling of a plan that he and a small circle of co-conspirators had conceived and reportedly been developing in secret for more than a year.”
More to follow.
