"They messed up the Super League really badly and now they risk walking away with a big black eye." That's not a fan on social media. That's a large US sports investor — one of JPMorgan's own kind — summing up the bank's second spectacular misread of European football in five years.
JPMorgan has spent months quietly advising FIFA on a plan to raise $4.2bn from global investors for a new commercial entity valued at around $20bn. The pitch is straightforward enough: monetise FIFA's broadcast rights better, grow margins, build toward an exit at a higher valuation. The kind of logic that works fine in a boardroom. The kind that keeps exploding on contact with football.
Within 48 hours of the Financial Times revealing the plans, all 55 UEFA member associations unanimously agreed to boycott the World Cup if FIFA presses ahead. Concacaf — covering North America, Central America and the Caribbean — also rejected the proposals. Without European nations, who have won five of the last six men's World Cups, the investor case essentially collapses. You can't sell a premium asset that's missing its most marketable product.
The Super League ghost refuses to stay buried
In 2021, JPMorgan helped bankroll the doomed Super League, which would have replaced open European competition with a closed league of permanent members — clubs like Real Madrid and Manchester United guaranteed a seat at the table regardless of results. The backlash was immediate and ferocious. UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin called the architects "snakes and liars." Gary Neville went further on live television. The project collapsed within days.
JPMorgan apologised. Said it "clearly misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community." Said it would "learn from this."
It did not learn from this.
People close to the bank insist this is fundamentally different — inclusionary rather than exclusionary, designed to pump money into the global game rather than wall off an elite. That argument has merit on paper. But there's a second problem this time that the Super League didn't have: the deal is being led in part by Thrive Eternal, a fund run by Joshua Kushner — brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law — and FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been openly cultivating favour with Trump, including handing him FIFA's inaugural peace prize last year. The optics are, to put it generously, complicated.
"The appearance of close links between the deal and the Trump family leads people to immediately question it," said one person with direct knowledge of the plan. The commercial thesis, they added, is actually sound — but that's almost beside the point now.
The Chase UK problem JPMorgan didn't anticipate
There's a wrinkle that makes this particularly awkward for the bank beyond the investment side. Chase UK — JPMorgan's retail banking brand — is the official banking partner of the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland national teams. The same nations now potentially boycotting a tournament JPMorgan has financially engineered. That's not a conflict of interest so much as a collision of interests, and the bank has declined to comment on any of it.
The deal is being run out of New York by Mary Erdoes, CEO of JPMorgan's asset and wealth management division, with sports investment banking co-head Eric Menell leading the advisory side. Former Liberty Media president Greg Maffei is acting as commercial adviser to FIFA, drawing comparisons to what private capital did for Formula 1 and the PGA Tour.
Those comparisons aren't wrong. Private investment transformed F1 from a chaotic, commercially underperforming series into one of the world's fastest-growing sports properties. The logic of applying that model to the World Cup isn't absurd.
But Formula 1 didn't have 55 governing bodies threatening to pull their drivers.
"You can't keep getting involved in big projects and botching them without thinking about the broader impact," said the same US sports investor. Whether FIFA blinks, whether Europe holds firm, and whether JPMorgan emerges with anything other than another apology — all of that is still in play. What isn't in doubt is the scale of the miscalculation. Again.
