FIFA has gone on the offensive. In a filing to the Southern District of New York court, the global governing body has hit back at UEFA's legal action over the collapsed $20bn World Cup privatisation plan, calling it "little more than press releases in further support of UEFA's smear campaign against FIFA and its leadership."
That's a remarkable sentence to find in an actual court document. Not a press briefing. Not a tweet. A legal filing.
What's actually being fought over
UEFA filed cases in American courts seeking evidence tied to FIFA Forward Enterprise — the controversial plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors. Gianni Infantino's own senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, quit the role and told Sky News it was a "bad deal" for football. That's a damning internal verdict on a scheme FIFA is now having to defend in court.
FIFA's legal team is arguing the whole thing was only ever "a proposal" requiring approval from member associations and the ruling council — not a done deal steamrolled through. They also claim UEFA is acting out of pure self-interest, protecting its own competitions from a more financially competitive global landscape.
The filing puts it bluntly: "UEFA's economic motivation was to prevent smaller countries from having the financial strength to compete with the European elite." If that argument lands, it reframes the entire fight. UEFA stops looking like a whistleblower and starts looking like a cartel protecting market share.
Infantino's position is shakier than FIFA wants to admit
UEFA is pushing for Infantino's resignation or defeat in the FIFA presidential election in March. Filing cases in US courts — and threatening criminal proceedings in Switzerland — is not the behaviour of an organisation that thinks this will quietly go away.
FIFA's lawyers are trying to block the discovery process on a technicality: that UEFA lacks the authority to initiate criminal proceedings and therefore can't use US courts to gather evidence for a case that doesn't legally exist yet. It's a procedurally clever argument, but it sidesteps the question everyone is actually asking.
Sky Sports News reports that UEFA's position internally is simple — if there's nothing to hide, disclose the documents. The process could apparently be shortened significantly if FIFA just handed over the FFE-related paperwork. That they haven't tells its own story.
Presidential elections have long odds attached to them for a reason. Infantino's just shortened considerably.
