"No, I never spoke to him." That was Donald Trump on Friday, distancing himself from a FIFA plan that had the soccer world in open revolt — one that conveniently featured his son-in-law's brother at the centre of the investor group.
The plan in question was FIFA's Forward Enterprise initiative (FFE), announced earlier in the week by Gianni Infantino. The idea: create a $20bn subsidiary that would allow external investors to buy minority stakes in FIFA tournaments, including the World Cup. Leading the proposed investor group was to be Thrive Eternal, a firm run by Joshua Kushner — brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and has served as a White House advisor. The optics were never going to be good.
The backlash was immediate and overwhelming
UEFA didn't just push back — it threatened a full boycott of all FIFA competitions if FFE went ahead. "The World Cup is not for sale," the European governing body said flatly on Thursday. CONCACAF's 41 member nations followed with a formal rejection. By Friday, the Asian Football Confederation had lined up alongside them.
Infantino initially tried to hold the line, calling FFE "the natural next step" for the sport and insisting "nobody is selling football." That position lasted roughly 48 hours before he pulled the plug entirely.
"Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place," Infantino said in his climbdown statement. Three of the world's five major confederations uniting against you has a way of clarifying things.
A relationship that keeps making headlines
The Trump-Infantino connection is worth understanding here. Infantino called Trump "my great friend" as far back as 2020 and presented him with FIFA's newly-invented "peace prize" last December. This summer, during the 2026 World Cup co-hosted by the U.S., Trump personally phoned Infantino to request a "review" of a red card shown to American player Folarin Balogun. FIFA's disciplinary committee subsequently lifted the automatic one-match ban, allowing Balogun to play in the next round.
So when Trump says he "never spoke" to Infantino about FFE, that's technically his answer — but it lands in a context where the two men have a well-documented habit of making things happen together. Whether that context matters to anyone beyond the soccer establishment probably depends on which side of the Atlantic you're watching from.
The FFE is dead. The Kushner connection is now a footnote. But the question of how much influence circles around FIFA's decision-making isn't going away anytime soon.
