In July the price of a FIFA vote had a number. The plan that set it is dead, but the number has simply been repriced, and on 15 October the FIFA Council sits down to decide what each of 211 associations is worth in the run-up to an election. The angle comes from Infantino’s letter to the six confederation presidents, first reported by The Athletic.
Start with the offer that was withdrawn. Under the FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal, every member association would have seen its regular Forward funding rise from $8 million to $20 million for the 2027-30 cycle, with the option of a further $20 million one-off payment through the new Fast Forward programme. Across the cycle that comes to up to $40 million a head, which is the figure Infantino had put to members. The plan was pulled within days after uproar across the game, and by 27 August UEFA said FIFA had confirmed in writing that it was gone for good. The idea of a per-association price, though, survived the plan. It just went looking for a new home.
It found one on 18 September. In a joint letter, UEFA’s Aleksander Ceferin and Concacaf’s Victor Montagliani asked FIFA to release at least $10 million to each of its 211 members over the 2027-30 cycle, about $2.1 billion in all, paid on top of the regular development funding and drawn from reserves they put at around $6 billion. The letter’s sharpest line was aimed squarely at the dead deal: FIFA, it said, could do this “without asking anything of the MAs in return”. The subtext was hard to miss. AP read the letter as reassurance to members that the money would keep coming even without Infantino.
Infantino did not say no. In a letter reported on Monday 28 September, he confirmed that the size of the distributions will be on the agenda of the FIFA Council’s 15 October meeting, declined to name a figure and wrote that “a single figure can begin the discussion, but it cannot complete a global policy”. He has asked the confederation presidents for financial models and supporting evidence and said he would back the largest amount that could responsibly be released through FIFA’s own procedures. That is not a man resisting a payout. It is a man taking ownership of one.
Lay the numbers side by side and the shape of the contest becomes clear. Under the existing FIFA Forward programme, each association is budgeted to receive $8 million over the 2027-30 cycle. The withdrawn FFE offer was worth up to $40 million. The opposition’s offer is that same $8 million plus at least $10 million, or $18 million in all, which is less than half of the most the dead deal offered, and less than even the part of it that was guaranteed. The incumbent’s offer is a blank: whatever the Council can be persuaded to approve, assembled by a Secretary General Infantino has instructed to consolidate every submission into one integrated assessment. There is a principled case behind the lower number. The opposition’s objection was never that members should get less, only that they should not be paid with a slice of the World Cup. But principles are not what the electorate is being asked to count.
Where the money comes from matters as much as how much there is. The reserves stand at a level the two confederation presidents described as the highest in FIFA’s history, and they are, overwhelmingly, the proceeds of the 104-match, 48-team tournament that we argued before kick-off was a competitive gamble and that turned out to be a commercial certainty. Insider Sport has reported that the 2026 World Cup generated more than $15 billion. In its US court filings, UEFA put the price investors would have paid for a stake in FFE at $4.2 billion, which, as we noted when we counted the votes, is almost exactly $20 million multiplied by 211. Both offers, in other words, are drawn on the same asset. FFE would have sold a share of the World Cup’s future. The reserves letter proposes to spend its past.
Money and votes have travelled together at FIFA for a long time, and the record is not encouraging for the side offering less. When Infantino was returned unopposed in Kigali in 2023, AP pointed to FIFA’s wealth, and to member funding that had grown from $250,000 a year to at least $8 million a cycle, as a big part of the reason. This time the African and South American confederations have backed him, and he does not need Europe. UEFA’s 55 associations are around a quarter of the electorate. The 106 that decide the election in Rabat are mostly the federations for whom $10 million, or $18 million, or $40 million, is not a rounding error but the budget.
That is the risk in the opposition’s move. By arguing that FIFA can afford to pay every member more, Ceferin and Montagliani have conceded the terms of the contest: the election will be fought, at least in part, over how many dollars each association receives. In that contest the incumbent holds the pen. The confederations can only make recommendations to the Council. Whatever the Council approves will flow in a cycle that opens in January 2027, eleven weeks before the vote on 18 March. If the Council approves something close to $10 million, the opposition can fairly say it forced FIFA to pay without strings, and Infantino can fairly say he delivered it. Only one of them will be on the ballot.
For now, the opposition’s other campaign is being fought in American courtrooms. UEFA has sought discovery over FFE in the US, and FIFA’s lawyers accused the European body of harassment and of trying to influence the election, while insisting the FFE plan had always been subject to approval by members and the Council. What UEFA has not yet produced is a candidate. The deadline for nominations is 18 November, and UEFA’s leadership meets in Berlin next week. A lower bid can still win an auction if the bidder is more trusted. It cannot win one without a bidder.
So 15 October is the date to watch. It will not settle the election, but it will settle the price, and it will settle who is seen to have paid it. In July the question was whether FIFA would sell part of the World Cup to fund its members. By October it has become how much of the World Cup’s money the members get, and from whose hand. That is a smaller question, and a far more dangerous one for anyone hoping to beat the man who controls the timing of the answer.
Sources: The Athletic (via Field Level Media), Associated Press, AFP, BBC Sport (via Insider Sport), Inside World Football, Al Jazeera, Variety, NBC Sports, Football Today, Anadolu Agency, Insider Sport, Wikipedia.
