New Zealand Football has come out of the biggest governance fight the world game has seen in years asking the rest of Oceania to hold one line on whether Gianni Infantino should stay as FIFA president.
Chief executive Andrew Pragnell told Reuters this week that the abandoned plan to sell a slice of the World Cup to private investors had shaken confidence across international football, and that the region’s member associations would count for more if they moved together. RNZ Sport carried his comments on Wednesday.
The plan Pragnell is talking about was called FIFA Forward Enterprise, and it lasted four days. FIFA wanted to spin its tournaments, including the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup, into a new commercial company and sell outside investors a minority stake of up to 20 percent. The company was valued at around US$20 billion and the sale was expected to raise as much as US$4.2 billion. The core investor was an investment firm founded by Joshua Kushner.
The sweetener for the 211 national associations that would have had to approve it was money, and a lot of it. 1News reported that each member was offered US$20 million over four years, roughly double the basic funding already on the table, with projected payments through to 2038 more than doubling as well. For a federation the size of New Zealand’s, that is not pocket money. It pays for coaches, competitions and travel out of a country that sits a long way from anywhere.
It still got rejected almost everywhere. UEFA’s 55 associations voted unanimously to boycott the World Cup and every other FIFA competition if the sale went ahead. CONCACAF’s 41 members rejected it over what they described as a lack of due process and an artificially short deadline. The Asian confederation warned it would undermine the foundations of continental football. Germany, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and others put their names to public objections, and the European leagues and the players’ union lined up alongside them.
New Zealand’s own position moved fast once the details landed. New Zealand Football initially said it needed more information and more time before it would say anything, a caution that drew some criticism at home while European federations were already firing. Then on the Saturday, New Zealand time, it became the first member association in this country to reject the proposal outright, saying the plan lacked the independent governance, legal and financial assessment required for any robust evaluation. FIFA pulled the whole thing within minutes of that statement, and New Zealand Football has since defended the speed of its response.
Infantino said the project had created divisions that were no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place, and that it would not proceed. RTE traced how it unravelled, from a newspaper report on 28 July to complete withdrawal by the end of the month.
Pragnell’s argument to Reuters was that the idea and the execution should be judged separately, and that smaller federations have genuinely done well under the current FIFA leadership. “If we park the proposal overall, what you’ve seen from FIFA is enormous commercial growth and increased focus on the redistribution of wealth across all member federations, including some great projects that we’ve benefited from,” he said. He described enormous gains for associations outside the traditional powers of Europe and South America. But he also said the way the proposal was developed and delivered, and the way members found out about it, had delivered a shock to confidence across the international football system, and that New Zealand Football had no hesitation in rejecting it even with the extra funding attached.
That is the tension Oceania now has to resolve. The confederation’s 11 members have benefited more than most from the Infantino era, through direct funding, an expanded World Cup and a guaranteed Oceania place at the expanded 2026 tournament that took the All Whites back to a World Cup for the first time since 2010. They also have to decide whether a leadership that tried to sell a fifth of the World Cup without telling them first can be trusted with the next round of decisions. The Oceania Football Confederation has not taken a public position on Infantino. Its statement on 30 July said only that the proposal would be considered by its executive committee at a meeting in August and invited members to take part in FIFA’s consultation. Events overtook that meeting before it happened.
The immediate question is whether enough associations formally demand an extraordinary congress, which requires written requests from 43 of the 211 members. UEFA has said it has lost confidence in the current FIFA leadership, and the Dutch, German and Norwegian associations have called for change. Infantino faces re-election in March 2027, and former FIFA vice-president Jim Boyce told Reuters the president has eight months to rebuild trust, describing the proposal as ludicrous and pointing out that investors invest to make money while FIFA is a non-profit body.
Pragnell will not be around to see how it ends. He confirmed this week that he is stepping down in early 2027 after eight years in the job, making him New Zealand Football’s longest-serving chief executive. He arrived in 2018, helped land the 2023 Women’s World Cup co-hosting rights, oversaw a large lift in commercial revenue and participation, and saw Auckland FC established as a second professional club. Whoever replaces him inherits a seat at a table where the small federations have just discovered how much noise they can make when they all say the same thing at once.
What do you think, should Oceania take a public position on Infantino’s leadership or stay out of it? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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