Finance in football is not (always) the enemy

Since the announcement of FIFA’s plan for a commercial company, a certain refrain has accompanied some of the criticism. It can be summed up in one sentence: those who are outraged today are the same people who let CVC through in Ligue 1 yesterday. The argument has the merit of simplicity. It has the flaw of sidestepping a debate that I actually find very interesting: under what conditions does private money serve football?

As an adviser, I worked on the legislative opening that made the CVC operation possible. I was neither a minister nor a member of parliament, I voted for nothing and signed nothing, and I claim no authorship of it. But I contributed to it and I do not distance myself from it. And it is precisely for that reason that I can explain what sets apart Gianni Infantino’s plan, which consists of opening up to private investors a share of the company intended to house FIFA’s commercial activities.

1. What Parliament authorised, and what it never decided

Yes, the French legislator allowed professional leagues to create a commercial company and to sell up to 20% of its capital. That option was used in 2022: the LFP created LFP Media, a subsidiary that operates Ligue 1’s TV rights, and brought in CVC for 13% of the capital in exchange for €1.5 billion.

Holding Parliament and the Government accountable for the entirety of CVC’s shareholders’ agreement is a convenient shortcut. They chose neither the price, nor the sizing of the operation, nor the clauses negotiated between the LFP and the fund. They opened up an option. Private-sector actors exercised it, as the law provided, under their own responsibility.

For those who consider the CVC deal a failure, conflating the authorisation with the transaction is like confusing the highway code with the accident.

2. Ligue 1’s problem is not CVC

It is the collapse of media rights.

Let us recall the starting point: the €1.5 billion contribution rested on a business plan built on one billion euros of domestic rights. We are very far from that. Since then, everyone has lost: the clubs, the League, and the fund itself, which has written down its investment.

CVC did not cause the crisis. Nor did CVC make it possible to resolve it, and that is the real criticism. It is aimed first at those who steered the use of the windfall, not at those who opened the possibility of raising it. The operation gave breathing room to clubs left suffocating in the aftermath of Covid and the Mediapro collapse. It was never meant to serve as a business model.

A capital contribution does not replace revenue. One may regret it. One cannot be surprised by it.

3. Three questions to avoid posturing

There are actors opposed on principle to any entry of private investors into a sporting competition, whatever it may be, and perhaps into the clubs themselves. Against it for Ligue 1, against it for the Six Nations, against it for Formula 1. It is a coherent position, one that naturally simplifies the arguments of those opposing the FIFA plan. I respect it. It is not mine.

I believe a financing need must be examined case by case. Bank debt, bond issuance, securitisation of receivables, capital raising, state-guaranteed debt: each instrument has its cost, its duration and its trade-offs. It is the situation that dictates, not the principle, and the decision must be made with the long term in mind. Funds, like bankers, are not philanthropists. But to believe that club owners, or even players, all are would be somewhat naive. The question is where to set the profitability threshold. And the other way round, for that matter: FIFA did not need to sell off a share of its assets to push the maximisation of its commercial revenue to excess.

From there, the assessment comes down, for me, to three questions.

Why? An exceptional financing need tied to a crisis, a transformative investment to rethink one’s model, a project to support such as building a stadium: the answer may be yes. Money for money’s sake, a distribution designed to secure a re-election or to buy short-term social peace: the answer is no. Let us recall that as of 31 December 2025, FIFA held 2.7 billion in reserves.

Who? I do not judge a club competition and an international federation in the same way. On one side, owners who commit their own money and bear their personal risks, within a framework whose rules — both those of the sport and those of the competition — are set by others and under the oversight of a federation. On the other, the bearer of a public-interest mission, the guardian of a sport, of its rules, its history and its heritage. The legal nature is not the same. Nor is the responsibility. Nor can the rules be.

How? Transparency of method, honesty of the valuation, prior democratic debate, control of the commitments given in return, keeping the organisation of the competition in the hands of the sporting authority. These are imperative conditions.

Allow me an aside. The same reasoning applies to the financialisation of clubs. There are good and bad scenarios, and the bad ones do not justify a blanket ban. Bordeaux’s Girondins showed what a fund produces when it enters a club the way one walks into a casino. That does not prove a protective framework is impossible; it proves it is indispensable: checking the origin of the funds, verifying the real capacity to finance over time, honouring the commitment made on the projected budget. That is the French model, and it is exactly what the law on the organisation, management and financing of professional sport, definitively adopted on 21 July, comes to reinforce. An accident must not become a doctrine. Rules are needed — which, incidentally, is easier at the scale of a country than at the international level…

4. What I supported, and why I still support it

I continue to think that it was not normal that, in the aftermath of Covid, French clubs had no refinancing horizon other than prohibitive loans. As long as the organisation of the competition remained in the hands of the LFP and the FFF, and the valuation was honourable — and it was far more than that — the capital raise was a legitimate option.

What needed to be done was to sit around a table, examine all the options — and there were several — then decide on the basis of something other than urgency. The option chosen may not have been the best; I have too little information to judge. But the absence of a choice was not one. I would not have found it legitimate for clubs to be deprived of that option.

Those who are more reassured by the idea of an LFP repaying one billion euros today at a prohibitive rate, or of debt backed by the state guarantee and therefore by the taxpayer, are entitled to think so. PSG and OM would of course always have got by through shareholder contributions. The others — too bad for them.

Am I comfortable with the distribution of the windfall and the use that was then made of it? No, obviously. But it is not the State’s role to judge that. We are not in the USSR. Let us stop asking the public authorities to constantly second-guess the running of a private business: not all ministers and public officials claim to know how to run a club.

5. FIFA, or the exact opposite

Let us take the three questions again. None receives the same answer.

Why? What exceptional need? FIFA is emerging from the most lucrative cycle in its history, with revenue of around 15 billion dollars over 2023-2026, roughly double the previous cycle. This is not an institution in a liquidity crisis. It is a growing institution that wants to accelerate.

Then the arithmetic. Ten billion dollars are promised over four years — an exceptional allocation of 20 million per federation in early 2027 and an increase in the grant from 8 to 20 million for 2027-2030. Dated, capped, known amounts. In return, 20% of the capital of the company intended to house the bulk of commercial revenue is given up, and a share of capital has no maturity. On an activity whose revenue has just doubled in a single cycle, this amounts to exchanging acquired growth for a sum fixed today (and part of whose increase was already planned).

And before even talking about outside capital, let us look at the rest: redistribution, reduction of fixed costs, control of organisational costs, and above all the real impact of the funds committed. How can more educational, social and health impact be produced for the benefit of registered players, clubs and local communities? How can it be measured? These questions have received no answer. Yet they come before any discussion of financing.

Who? Which fund put its money into the participants, took on the sporting risk, financed the training or the infrastructure of the national teams? None. The actors that really invest in national teams are the federations and, behind them, the States. Their legitimacy to ask for more does exist. That of a financial investor entering through the commercialisation door remains to be demonstrated.

And FIFA is not the organiser of one competition among others. It stands on the side of the one who sets the rules, not the one who plays under them. It is the guardian of football: the game, the calendar, integrity, universality. You do not financialise a trusted third party the way you financialise a media asset.

How? A plan announced without prior consultation of the confederations — UEFA, Concacaf and the AFC having publicly regretted not being informed — then a deadline set for 19 September to secure the federations’ buy-in. This is called a consultation. It bears little resemblance to one.

It would moreover be naive to ignore what this plan implies for the electoral calendar, and what a new commercial structure can offer when it comes to staying in a position of responsibility once the mandate is over. The press mentions the presence, among the prospective investors, of people close to the American administration. On a matter of this nature, the question of conflict of interest is not an insinuation: it is a governance prerequisite.

Global, yes. For sale, no.

Gianni Infantino has made “Football is Global” his signature. The ambition of a more universal football I share without reservation: every country must be able to dream of the World Cup and see its sport develop there.

But a global heritage is not handled like a portfolio of assets. The real question is not what FIFA takes in, it is what it gives up in order to take it in — and for how long, and for whose benefit.

Increasing resources, yes, provided it serves the game and those who bring it to life. Not to serve voters. Not blindly. Not without oversight.

Finance in football is not the enemy. The absence of a project, on the other hand, always has been.