The World Cup for Sale, the U.N. for a Friend
FIFA’s president wants to hand slices of the World Cup to a Kushner-family investment firm. The American president wants to hand FIFA’s president the United Nations. The trade is not subtle — and it is not isolated.
The concern is not that FIFA president Gianni Infantino cut a business deal. It is that he cut it with a firm founded by the American president’s son-in-law’s brother, days after the American president publicly proposed him as the next Secretary-General of the United Nations, months after handing that same American president a made-for-television “Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw. Any one of these facts, standing alone, would raise an eyebrow at any competent ethics office. Together, they raise a constitutional one.
The plan itself is called FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE. It would spin FIFA’s commercial rights — broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing — into a $20 billion company and sell a roughly 20 percent minority stake to outside investors for around $4.2 billion. The lead investor, FIFA confirmed after The Times of London broke the story, would be Thrive Eternal, a permanent-capital vehicle launched this year by Joshua Kushner. Josh is the younger brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and current Special Envoy for Peace Missions. Sources close to Thrive have insisted to CBS News that Josh Kushner is not politically involved with the administration and has in fact donated to Democratic causes. That defense is worth taking seriously. It is also, precisely, the wrong defense. The Emoluments Clause was written for the appearance of influence, not only its proof.
I. What Is Actually Being Sold
According to FIFA’s own announcement, member associations have until September 19 to sign on. If enough do, the World Cup — a tournament FIFA has staged since 1930 as a member-owned, nonprofit trust of the world’s 211 football federations — will for the first time include private equity in its capital structure. Reporting from Forbes and multiple wire services confirms that FIFA “consulted with the Trump administration” on the plan, according to The Times. J.P. Morgan is the banker. And former FIFA president Sepp Blatter — hardly a paragon of the sport’s integrity, but a man who understands where its bodies are buried — has publicly called the arrangement “deeply damaging” and questioned whether Donald Trump is now “running world soccer.”
European football’s governing body, UEFA, did not wait for a second opinion. On Thursday, its 55 member federations voted unanimously to boycott any future FIFA competition — including the 2027 Women’s World Cup and the men’s tournament beyond it — if the plan is not withdrawn. The statement, reported by France 24, was blunt.
“The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product. No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale.”
— UEFA, Official Statement · July 30, 2026
CONCACAF, the confederation that governs football in North America, the Caribbean, and Central America — the confederation that just co-hosted the tournament in Trump’s own country — rejected the proposal the same day. This is not the fringe. This is football’s mainstream telling the FIFA president, in public, that he is trading a global public trust for a private windfall.
II. The Job Offer That Isn’t Officially A Job Offer
On July 22, the New York Post, citing a source close to the White House, reported that President Trump wants Infantino to succeed António Guterres as United Nations Secretary-General when the Portuguese diplomat’s term ends on December 31. Trump’s stated reasoning, according to the report, is that Infantino is “respected by everyone around the world” and has “a special ability to bring people together.” Paolo Zampolli, Trump’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, added — apparently without irony — that “only President Trump could have such a genius idea.” The story was picked up by Fox News, Euronews, Mediaite, and virtually every major outlet on both sides of the Atlantic.
The nomination has essentially zero chance of clearing the UN Security Council. Any candidate needs endorsement from all five permanent members, including China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom — a body Trump has spent years attacking, defunding, and threatening. But the point of the gesture is not to actually seat Infantino in Turtle Bay. The point is that a sitting American president, in the space of eight months, was awarded the choreographed “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw in Washington by Infantino; sat next to him at the final; publicly proposed him for the most important diplomatic post on earth; and stood by as Infantino simultaneously negotiated to sell part of that same World Cup to a firm run by the president’s in-law’s brother. Whatever the private facts, the public sequence is textbook. As former Bush White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told NPR earlier this month, “for every other executive branch official, it would be a violation.”
III. A Presidency Run as a Family Business
FIFA is not the outlier. It is the pattern.
Trump’s own 2025 financial disclosure, filed with the Office of Government Ethics on July 2, showed the president personally earned more than $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures alone during the first year of his second term. Reuters, cited by both The American Prospect and multiple congressional watchdogs, calculated the Trump family’s total crypto profits since the 2024 election at $2.3 billion. That includes $635 million from a licensing agreement for “Celebrational Coins,” $236 million in raw token sales, and more than $300 million from World Liberty Financial, the family-owned crypto firm — even as the president signed the GENIUS Act deregulating stablecoins and pushed the CLARITY Act, which strips investor protections and hands crypto oversight to an agency he controls.
The $400 Million Qatari Jet
In May 2025, Trump accepted a Boeing 747-8 from the Qatari royal family — the most valuable gift ever given to a sitting American president by a foreign government. Twenty-seven senators, led by Brian Schatz, formally condemned it. Read more →
The UAE Half-Billion Crypto Buy-In
Four days before Trump’s inauguration, a member of the UAE royal family invested $500 million in a Trump family crypto firm. Weeks later, the administration authorized the sale of 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips to the UAE. Read more →
The $620 Million DoD Loan
The Department of Defense issued the largest loan in the program’s history — $620 million — to a company Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm had bought into three months earlier. Read more →
Net Worth: $2.3B → $6.5B
Per Forbes, cited in ethics filings, Trump’s personal net worth rose from $2.3 billion in 2024 to $6.5 billion by March 2026 — nearly tripling during his own second term. Read more →
These are not marginal cases. Painter — writing in an opinion piece published in early July — described the president as running “not a presidency” but “a cash extractor.” Norman Eisen, executive director of the State Democracy Defenders Fund and a former Obama-era ethics counsel, told CNN of the Qatar jet: it is “so obviously a violation of the Emoluments Clause,” and “even his own party is calling him out on it.” Kathleen Clark, the Washington University law professor who has spent a career on federal ethics, told PBS NewsHour that the arrangement was “an illegal, unconstitutional payoff from a foreign government to the president at a scale we actually have never seen.”
IV. The Hunter Biden Standard, Applied
For roughly six years — from the first impeachment through the 2024 campaign — Donald Trump and the Republican Party built a permanent political identity around the proposition that a president’s family cannot profit from the office. Trump himself made the argument, repeatedly and loudly, that Hunter Biden’s roughly $10 million in foreign consulting income over a decade was disqualifying corruption. House Republicans opened a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden over it. The party’s 2024 platform treated the Biden family’s finances as an existential threat to the republic.
The comparison is now, by Republican math, absurd. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — hardly a Democratic partisan — publicly conceded that the $2.2 billion Trump reported in his most recent disclosure is more than 200 times what House Republicans ever alleged the entire Biden family, its associates, and its affiliated companies received from foreign sources across a decade. Hunter Biden himself put it more directly: “250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur.”
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V. What This Costs Ordinary Americans
The temptation is to file all of this under “corruption” as if it were a spectator sport. It is not. The costs are already being paid in currency Americans recognize.
The World Cup boycott. If UEFA follows through — and every signal from the 55 European federations, from Aleksander Ceferin down, indicates that it will — American soccer fans will watch a diminished tournament, American host cities will absorb billions in lost tourism, and American players will suit up against a smaller field. The 185,000 jobs and $17.2 billion in projected GDP that the White House itself trumpeted from the 2026 tournament exist only because the World Cup was universal. Turn it into a private-equity vehicle and the universality goes with it.
The credibility of American diplomacy. The United States asks other countries, routinely, to prosecute their own corruption — to accept election results, to honor treaties, to hold their leaders accountable. That request lands differently when foreign ministries can read, in their own morning newspapers, that the American president is publicly nominating his business partner’s business partner for the top seat at the United Nations. As Senator Jeanne Shaheen, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to the White House Counsel over the Qatar jet: the Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent “every kind of influence by foreign governments upon officers of the United States.” That protection is functionally suspended.
The rule of law itself. If a president can accept a $400 million foreign jet, earn a billion dollars from a market he personally regulates, and publicly barter a UN nomination against a private business deal — all in a single 18-month span — without meaningful consequence, then the Emoluments Clause is a dead letter. Every future president, of any party, inherits that permission. This is not a partisan warning. It is a structural one.
“Americans should not have to wonder whether consumer protections are weakened because the president profits from crypto, whether foreign policy is shaped by foreign-linked business deals, or whether law enforcement decisions are influenced by the president’s private balance sheet. The presidency is not supposed to be a profit center.”
— Richard Painter · Chief White House Ethics Lawyer, 2005–2007
VI. A Question of Fitness, Not Politics
The question is no longer whether the president is unusually acquisitive. That question has been answered by his own financial disclosures. The question is whether a man who transacts the office this openly can be trusted to discharge its duties.
The FIFA episode is instructive because it is not a scandal of appetite — a golf-club invoice, a hotel booking — but a scandal of judgment. To publicly nominate the head of FIFA for the United Nations while that same official is negotiating to sell the World Cup to your family’s associates is not the behavior of someone weighing consequences. It is the behavior of someone who no longer perceives that consequences apply. In a president, that perception failure is not a policy disagreement. It is a fitness question.
“Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, provides in Section 4 a mechanism for the transfer of presidential power when the president is unable to discharge the duties of the office. The transfer requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to submit a written declaration of inability to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. It is, deliberately, a mechanism of last resort.
The dominant reading of “unable” has historically emphasized medical incapacity. But constitutional scholars — from Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat and lead sponsor of the pending House commission bill, to Rep. Ro Khanna of California, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois — have argued in recent months that a president who cannot recognize the line between his office and his balance sheet, who threatens to “wipe out an entire civilization” on social media, and who trades diplomatic appointments for private commercial favors is not merely unwise. He is unable, in the constitutional sense, to faithfully execute the office he holds.
The practical barriers are real. Section 4 requires the sitting Vice President and a majority of the sitting Cabinet — both, in this case, appointed by and loyal to the president himself — to act. Vice President JD Vance has given no indication he would. More than 85 House and Senate Democrats have already called for either impeachment or 25th Amendment action; none has cleared a Republican-controlled chamber. Raskin’s commission bill to formally assess presidential fitness sits in committee.
But the political impossibility of the remedy does not negate the constitutional case for it. The Framers wrote the Emoluments Clauses because they anticipated presidents who would monetize the office. The 79th Congress wrote the 25th Amendment because they anticipated presidents who would be unable — for any reason, medical or otherwise — to distinguish their private interests from the public trust. Both texts are being tested at once. The record ought to reflect that the tools existed. The record ought to reflect who declined to use them.
VII. A Timeline of the Convergence
Infantino awards Trump the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center in Washington, marking the beginning of a public alliance between the two men.
J.P. Morgan is retained to help FIFA monetize its media rights, based on private discussions the previous year between Infantino and Joshua Kushner, per Bloomberg.
Trump’s OGE financial disclosure reveals more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related earnings in a single year, prompting bipartisan alarm and Democratic demands for ethics provisions in the pending CLARITY Act.
Trump sits next to Infantino at the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium and remains onstage during Spain’s trophy celebration, a moment UEFA president Ceferin pointedly declines to attend.
The New York Post reports Trump is privately pushing Infantino as the next UN Secretary-General to replace António Guterres in January.
FIFA formally announces FIFA Forward Enterprise, confirming Josh Kushner’s Thrive Eternal as lead investor. UEFA responds within hours: “The World Cup is not for sale.”
UEFA’s 55 federations vote unanimously to boycott future FIFA competitions if the plan proceeds. CONCACAF rejects the proposal the same day.
Editorial Conclusion
The Emoluments Clauses were not written for ordinary presidents. They were written for the one who would try this. The FIFA arrangement, the Qatar jet, the UAE crypto payment, the Pentagon loan, the billion-dollar disclosure, and the UN nomination are not six scandals — they are one scandal, repeated. A presidency that treats every foreign government and every global institution as a counterparty in a family business is not merely an ethical failure. It is a constitutional one. And a Congress that will not name it — will not impeach, will not invoke, will not so much as vote to condemn — is choosing, by its silence, to write the permission slip for every president who follows. The remedy is unlikely. The record must be clear anyway.
UPDATE: August 1, 2026
The president of World Cup organizer FIFA said he’s nixing a much-criticized plan to sell stakes in soccer’s biggest tournament to private equity investors. Gianni Infantino said the project was intended to strengthen world soccer but that it “has created divisions.” [Reported by NBC News]
“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. “Our purpose has always been — and will always be — to unite and improve.”
Sources & References
- Time — FIFA Draws Fury Over Plan to Sell Stakes in World Cup
- CNN — FIFA plan for privatizing World Cup meets fury from UEFA
- CBS News — UEFA boycotts FIFA over plan to sell World Cup stake to investors led by Joshua Kushner
- France 24 — UEFA to boycott FIFA in protest at World Cup private investor plans
- Al Jazeera — Why is UEFA threatening FIFA boycott? Infantino’s plan explained
- ABC News — FIFA plan for $20 billion operation to run World Cup meets fury from UEFA
- Forbes — FIFA Head Sets Deadline For Members To Claim $20 Million In Kushner-Backed World Cup Plan
- Newsweek — The Trump Family FIFA Money Machine Mapped
- Fox News — Trump wants FIFA President Gianni Infantino to become next UN Secretary-General
- Euronews — Trump’s pick for the next UN Secretary-General? Gianni Infantino
- Mediaite — Trump Pitches FIFA Boss Gianni Infantino as Next UN Secretary-General
- NPR — Former ethics lawyer says Trump’s crypto poses ‘clear conflict of interest’
- Roll Call — Trump ethics disclosure throws curveball at Senate crypto talks
- The American Prospect — The Project Crypto Scheme
- The Hill — Qatar jet ‘obviously’ Emoluments Clause violation: Former WH ethics lawyer
- PBS NewsHour — Qatar gifting Trump $400M luxury jet raises ethical and legal concerns
- Senate Foreign Relations — Shaheen letter on Qatari airplane gift and Foreign Emoluments Clause
- MSNBC/Painter — Trump’s financial disclosure shows his corruption hitting a new low
- NBC News — Dozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after Iran threats
- Axios — House Democrats file 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump
- Newsweek — Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Trump family “corruption” to Hunter Biden
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