{"id":869294,"date":"2026-08-24T04:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T04:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/869294\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T04:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T04:34:10","slug":"gianni-infantino-must-remember-he-is-european-after-attempts-to-sell-world-cup-stake-says-aleksander-ceferin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/869294\/","title":{"rendered":"Gianni Infantino must remember he is European after attempts to sell World Cup stake, says Aleksander Ceferin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin says Gianni Infantino needs to remember he is European after describing his Fifa counterpart&#8217;s plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup as &#8220;worse than the Super League&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Earlier this month <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/sport\/football\/articles\/clyq3el5gkqo\" class=\"ssrcss-18834jl-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the world governing body abandoned Infantino&#8217;s proposal<\/a> to create a new company &#8211; Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) &#8211; to manage the commercial and ticketing rights of all Fifa competitions, with 21% to be sold off to a private investment company.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Uefa led opposition to the plan, with its members voting to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/sport\/football\/articles\/c2k74yevgzwo\" class=\"ssrcss-18834jl-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">boycott World Cups<\/a> unless it was scrapped.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">European football&#8217;s governing body has since said it has lost confidence in Infantino, while the football associations of all the home nations have withdrawn support for the 56-year-old Swiss.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I think this plan is even worse than the Super League plan,&#8221; Ceferin told the <a href=\"https:\/\/lnk.to\/LeadingYT\" class=\"ssrcss-18834jl-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Rest is Politics podcast., external<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Super important clubs wanted to do their own league, which is wrong, and would destroy football. But in this case, football would be literally sold. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;m absolutely sure that the plan is dead. It&#8217;s hard to to imagine what kind of people would sell the sport that belongs to everyone. We will not allow that to happen.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The European Super League was a proposed breakaway league of 20 top European clubs as a rival to Uefa&#8217;s Champions League, but the project fell apart days after its unveiling in April 2021 after widespread criticism.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Ceferin said that Uefa had no prior knowledge of Infantino&#8217;s plan, and that he found out through the media while on holiday with his family.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;He didn&#8217;t contact me since this happened,&#8221; Ceferin said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They [Fifa] play on, you know, &#8216;[how] arrogant Europe is against us: They have enough money, but I help the small and the poor&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;But I think someone should remind him that he is a European, and that he was supported by Uefa, which he forgot.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Infantino &#8211; who worked at Uefa for 16 years, and was general secretary for nine &#8211; has been flying around the world in the search of public support.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">On Saturday, he met with Caribbean Football Union members in the Dominican Republic and on Sunday he was at the E-Sports World Cup in Paris, attended by the French President Emmanuel Macron, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Portugal forward Cristiano Ronaldo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin says Gianni Infantino needs to remember he is European after describing his Fifa counterpart&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":869295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-869294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=869294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/869295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=869294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=869294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=869294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}