NEW YORK: FIFA President Gianni Infantino wants US President Donald Trump’s Administration to help keep him in office, according to a media report.
The New York Post reported that Infantino had repeatedly tried and failed to reach Trump by phone since his proposal to create a private company to run the World Cup and other FIFA tournaments collapsed on Friday, and that the FIFA chief felt “isolated” by an avalanche of negative media coverage.
The report also mentioned that Infantino had scheduled private talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with two sources familiar with the matter confirming that the FIFA boss would hold a call with America’s top diplomat just after 9 a.m. ET on Monday. However, Dylan Johnson, Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs, said no such call was scheduled in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
In what he called a “democratisation of football”, Infantino announced a plan to create a subsidiary worth USD 20 billion, which was supposed to be called the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE).
FFE would have been in-charge of the World Cup rights, including broadcast, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing, and also taken charge of the “operational delivery” of the tournament. The proposed lead investor to take a stake in FFE was Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who owns a venture capital firm called Thrive Eternal Capital Management. Other minority investors were supposed to come on board through this venture capital firm, with plans to raise up to USD 4.2 billion from the stake. Agencies
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