Football World Cups bring people together, including football officials. The World Cup in Qatar in December 2022 was entering its final week, with the President of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Gianni Infantino, sitting opposite the Spaniard David Aganzo.
The former professional had been elected president of the players’ union FIFPro the year before, and on that December 11th in Doha, FIFA President Infantino and FIFPro President Aganzo signed a letter of intent. “There are,” FIFA quoted its president on its website, “important matters that always require discussions and challenges for which solutions must be found.” The intention is to work closely together in the long term.
A good 500 days later it can be said: Nothing has come of this in the medium term. On the contrary. The FIFA members are meeting this week in Thailand’s capital Bangkok, first the council members this Wednesday morning, then on Friday the congress of delegates from 211 FIFA member associations. As always in football, it’s about the future, which means more money than in the past.
Infantino is planning his biggest deal to date
The 2027 Women’s World Cup will be awarded by the congress on Friday; the German Football Association would like it, together with the Belgians and Dutch; but the favorite is Brazil. At the council meeting on Wednesday, agenda item 3.4 is about the future, specifically: the future of the calendar and the competitions. And on this point, FIFPro, together with the World Leagues Association (WLA), an alliance of 36 professional football leagues from all over the world, including the major European ones, sent a letter to Infantino and his interim general secretary Mattias Grafström at the beginning of the month .
Because for the future, the summer of 2025, Infantino is planning his biggest deal to date: the first Club World Cup with 32 teams, held from June 15th to July 13th in the United States, broadcast by Apple. At the end of April, the “New York Times” reported on the advanced status of the negotiations and the amount of one billion dollars in question.
With the tournament, Infantino wants FIFA and its members to share in the profits generated by the best soccer players in the world on the best teams in the world. Income such as that which the Europeans and their UEFA in particular generate with the Champions League.
FIFPro and WLA have called on the FIFA Council to reschedule the Club World Cup, renegotiate the deployment periods for the period 2024 to 2030 and the plans for the Intercontinental Cup, essentially the continuation of the format of the previous Club World Cup at the end of the year, to bury.
“FIFA’s current strategy of expanding its own competitions,” the letter reads, “results in the schedule being more than saturated, to the point that it is impossible for domestic leagues to organize their own competitions. (…) Players and leagues cannot be expected to simply ‘adapt’ to FIFA’s decisions, which are driven by their business strategy.” In short: FIFPro and WLA are threatening legal action, FIFPro representatives confirm in confidential terms Conversations, they were really serious about the threat.
The thrust of a possible lawsuit can be found in the letter to Infantino and Grafström. This refers to FIFA’s “inherent conflict of interest” to which it exposes itself by acting as an organizer of competitions and their rule setter.
Ultimately, as in the Super League case, it could fall to the European Court of Justice to once again deal with antitrust law issues relating to the market, power and the abuse of dominant market positions. Grafström responded to the letter from WLA and FIFPro on behalf of FIFA. The calendar remains as intended; it was drawn up after consultation with all relevant parties.
