On 19th September 2026, all 211 of FIFA’s member associations face a deadline. Approve a new proposal, and each receives an immediate $20 million payment. Approve it, and FIFA can begin selling roughly a fifth of a new entity — FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), valued at $20 billion and built around the commercial rights to the World Cup itself — to private investors led by Thrive Capital, the firm founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

FIFA says it will retain full control of football’s governance, competitions, and calendar. UEFA’s response was blunter: “It is not FIFA’s to sell!”

It is, by most measures, the most consequential vote in FIFA’s history. It’s also, in a strange way, a question the organisation has been quietly answering since the day it was founded — and rarely in favour of the people who actually play the game.

A meeting room in Paris, 1904

FIFA was created on 21st May 1904 by seven national associations — France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland — meeting at the offices of a French sports federation. Robert Guérin, a French sports journalist, was elected its first president the following day, at only 28 years old.

England, football’s birthplace, didn’t attend. Its FA judged it already had enough authority over the game and didn’t initially see the point of joining.

What’s easy to miss is who wasn’t in that room at all: the players. Football’s rules and its first governing body were built by committee: administrators, journalists, federation secretaries, a full generation before the sport’s working-class following had any formal say in how it was run.

The working man’s game, run by committee

Association football had spread through English mill towns and industrial cities largely as a working-class pastime, even as the FA itself — founded in 1863 by public-school men under an ideal of amateur “muscular Christianity” — held out against paying players. That changed in the 1880s, when northern clubs with bigger crowds and better players started beating the game’s amateur aristocracy on the pitch. It was only after a series of these humiliating defeats that the FA legalised professional pay in 1885, less by principle than by necessity.

By 1904, then, football was already a working person’s game in practice — but its governance, both nationally and now internationally, remained at the discretion of committees the working-class support had no direct hand in choosing.

From committee to commercial giant

FIFA’s early decades were modest: standardising rules, organising fixtures, and — from 1930 under president Jules Rimet — running the first World Cup. The scale shift came under João Havelange (1974–1998), FIFA’s first non-European president, who brought in the sport’s first major sponsorship deals and grew the federation’s membership from 142 to over 200 associations. Sepp Blatter (1998–2015) continued that commercial expansion, overseeing World Cup growth to 32 teams and closer confederation integration.

That growth had a cost. In May 2015, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging FIFA officials with taking $150 million in bribes over two decades; Swiss police arrested seven of them at a Zurich hotel during that year’s FIFA Congress. Blatter, re-elected days later, resigned within a week. Reforms followed: term limits, disclosed compensation, an independent ethics structure.

The $20 billion question

Under Gianni Infantino, elected in 2016 on a reform mandate, FIFA’s revenue has climbed steeply — roughly $13 billion projected for the 2023–26 cycle, boosted by a record-breaking $12 billion from this summer’s 48-team World Cup. The FFE proposal, unveiled in late July, is the next step in that trajectory: bundling broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing for FIFA’s competitions into a single commercial vehicle, then selling private investors a minority, non-controlling stake to raise an estimated $4.2 billion.

The incentive for member associations is substantial. Alongside the equity sale sits the FIFA Fast Forward Programme, which would lift football development funding per association from $8 million to $20 million for the 2027–30 cycle, rising to $24 million by 2038 — plus an optional $20 million paid immediately to any association that approves the plan by September 19th.

The response from Europe’s, North America’s and Asia’s governing bodies was swift. UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC all said they learned of the plan through the press rather than through FIFA’s own governance channels. England’s FA said it was “deeply concerned” by the lack of detail. FIFA, for its part, says the goal is to more than double global football development funding, all while keeping sole authority over the sport itself.

Numerically, the vote may not be close. UEFA controls only 55 of FIFA’s 211 votes; the other 156 associations include many of the smaller federations for whom $20 million is transformational money — the same coalition Infantino has built development funding around since 2016.

A line that keeps moving

FIFA has always been run by people who weren’t on the pitch — by design, from its very first meeting. What’s changed since 1904 isn’t who holds the pen; it’s the size of what’s being signed. A Paris committee once decided how international matches should be arranged. A Zurich-based non-profit now decides whether a fifth of the World Cup’s commercial future belongs, in part, to a private equity firm.

Whether that’s the natural next chapter of a 122-year-old institution, or the moment it stops looking like one, is exactly what 211 federations — and the fans who fund them every four years — are being asked to decide by September.