Football's governing body has never been far from the headlines this summer. As always, the expanded 2026 edition of the FIFA World Cup captured the imagination of billions around the world. The last-minute comebacks, the fairytale stories and the superstar performances will live long in the memory, as of course will the controversies.
From profiteering ticket prices to sycophantic peace prizes, FIFA faced a wave of criticism ahead of the tournament. This was compounded by allegations of political interference in disciplinary decisions, and most recently an attempt by President Gianni Infantino to sell off stakes in international competitions to private investors.
All of these issues have raised fundamental questions over the accountability and governance of the organisation tasked with administering and safeguarding the so-called 'beautiful game'.
The latest scandal
Last week (28 July) with the prestigious trophy barely back in its cabinet, FIFA outlined plans for a new commercial vehicle – the FIFA Forward Enterprise – which would oversee commercial and events operations. Stakes of up to 20% would be sold to external investors for a reported $4.2bn.
Member associations were offered one-off payments and a 19 September deadline to sign up. The plan had been drawn up in secret, without consulting the confederations, players' unions or leagues who make up the game it proposed to sell a piece of.
Mirroring the arguments made by many organisations involved in the sport over the past week, the Union of European Clubs (UEC) published a statement highlighting what it describes a "governance problem that has been growing within football for years".
It reads: "For too long, football's leaders have spoken the language of transparency, accountability and inclusiveness. Yet the reality has been the complete opposite: increasing centralisation of power, reduced scrutiny of decision-making and strategic alliances developed behind closed doors."
The ill-fated plans to sell the ownership of FIFA's tournaments have now been halted following a fierce backlash from football associations around the world. However, as the UEC and many other argue, this episode calls into question the effectiveness of the decade-long transparency reforms that Infantino had spearheaded when he stepped into the role.
FIFA corruption and the "turning point"
In the 2000s and early 2010s, FIFA was mired by scandal, particularly over the allocation of the lucrative rights for countries to host tournaments.
This came to a head in May 2015, when the US Department of Justice indicted 14 officials and executives on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering, alleging more than $150m in bribes linked to the awarding of World Cup hosting rights and other commercial deals. Erstwhile President Sepp Blatter resigned from the post after this scandal and was later suspended from being involved in any football-related activities over a seperate payment-related scandal.
Infantino stepped into the role in the wake of these scandals, having campaigned on an 11-point manifesto which promised to reform governance, combat corruption, and make decision-making more transparent.
New accountability and governance measures were approved at an 'Extraordinary Congress' in February 2016, which Infantino described as the "first and vital steps to restore trust in the organisation".
The reforms replaced the previous 24-person Executive Committee with a 37-member FIFA Council, cut down the number of standing committees, introduced new eligibility checks and term limits for senior officials, and required executive pay to be disclosed publicly for the first time.
A decade of disclosure
In many ways, the 2016 reforms are reflected in the evolution of FIFA's annual disclosures. Before the "turning point", it published an annual report with audited financial statements, updates on development programmes, and a short section on the make-up of its committees.
From 2016, it started publishing a standalone Governance Report, built around the key pillars of transparency, accountability and a separation of powers.
Prompted by a review on the treatment of migrant workers building World Cup infrastructure, FIFA adopted a formal Human Rights Policy and became the first global sports body to set up an independent Human Rights Advisory Board in 2017.
However, this period was not free from controversy. That same year, FIFA Governance Committee chair Miguel Maduro was removed from the role, after blocking the re-election of Vitaly Mutko as a FIFA Council member as his role in the Russian government was in breach of FIFA’s rules on political neutrality.
Maduro later told a UK parliamentary inquiry that Infantino had personally pressured him to let Mutko stand for re-election so as not to jeopardise the forthcoming 2018 World Cup in Russia. It was an early sign that FIFA's rhetoric on independent oversight had limitations in practice.
Progress on transparency and disclosures continued, however. In 2017, FIFA finally published a full unredacted 2014 report into the bidding contest for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, years after the contents had been leaked.
The following year, it formally ended the opacity surrounding its host selection process. It published the technical evaluation reports scoring the rival bids for the 2026 World Cup, and the individual voting records of member associations for the first time.
Sustainability reports have accompanied each World Cup since Brazil 2014. FIFA went on to publish a GRI-aligned sustainability report after the 2022 Qatar World Cup, covering 79 separate initiatives across worker welfare, carbon accounting and social impact. This, however, brings into focus the serious allegations that surrounded the tournament.
Qatar and the human rights question
The 2022 edition of the World Cup was lauded for the on-the-pitch spectacle, with the final between an Mbappe-inspired France and a Messi-led Argentina set to go down as one of the greatest games in history.
Off-the-pitch though, the story is much darker. The Qatar tournament is amongst the most controversial in football recent history, with significant concerns over alleged human rights abuses and the treatment of the migrant workers that built the underlying infrastructure.
The disclosures on workforce welfare section of FIFA’s sustainability report directly draw on Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, the body that controversially claimed that there had been only three ‘work-related’ stadium fatalities since 2014, alongside 37 further deaths it classified as unrelated to work. While fatality figures were absent from the report, Infantino himself repeated these disputed figures in a 2022 speech to the European Council.
Independent Guardian research estimates that over 6,500 migrant workers died in Qatar between 2010 and 2020. FIFA has never conducted or published an independent count to reconcile these figures.
On compensation, FIFA provides more concrete numbers but the story again is controversial. Qatar's Workers' Support and Insurance Fund, set up in 2018 to cover unpaid wages, had disbursed more than $350m by the time of the tournament, according to Infantino himself.
Amnesty International called on FIFA to match that scale of commitment directly, proposing a dedicated $440m compensation fund equivalent to the tournament's prize money. FIFA, however, never established one.
An independent review into its own responsibility for remediation, approved by the Council in March 2024, recommended direct compensation for affected workers and their families. FIFA said the recommendations were "considered" but that "not all" could be met, and did not proactively publish the review itself.
A second turning point?
After the Human Rights Advisory Board delivered its final report ahead of the Qatar tournament, finishing its four-year mandate, FIFA chose to discontinue the body and transition oversight of human rights issues to internal divisions and sub-committees.
This offered an early indication of the new direction of travel. Aside from the criticisms surrounding its previous World Cup, there are concerns that FIFA has reneged on its commitments to improve transparency and establish strong internal governance structures.
A 2024 report by the NGO FairSquare, drawing on more than a hundred interviews, concluded that FIFA had reversed several of its 2016 reforms. The report argued that the system of financial patronage between FIFA’s Zurich headquarters and its 211 member associations means football’s governing body is "structurally resistant to internal reform".
In 2024, FIFA moved to expand its standing committees from nine to 35, with the president given power to create further panels of his own choosing.
That same year, a statutes amendment established that Infantino's initial term completed Blatter's mandate and would not count towards his own limit. If he is re-elected next year, he will end up serving 15 years in the role, exceeding the 12-year limit he helped introduce.
In addition, FIFA fast-tracked Saudi Arabia as the sole viable bidder for the 2034 World Cup, giving rival nations barely a month to declare interest.
The independent human rights assessment accompanying the Saudi Arabia bid was produced by a law firm with extensive commercial ties to Riyadh.
This assessment criticised by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who noted the exclusion of entire risk categories from the report - including free expression and LGBT discrimination - because Saudi Arabia had not ratified the relevant treaties.
FIFA's Peace Prize, and phone call to Trump
Moving ahead to the most recent tournament. Before a ball was kicked, Infantino was widely ridiculed for creating the inaugural ‘FIFA Peace Prize’ and presenting it to US President Donald Trump last December.
Several reports claim he failed to inform the FIFA Council of this decision until the announcement was already public. The apparent closeness of the two men would resurface during the World Cup with significant implications for the integrity of the sporting tournament.
Striker Folarin Balogun was, perhaps unfairly, sent off in the USA’s victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina, triggering an automatic one-match ban that would rule him out for the subsequent last-16 tie against Belgium.
Within 48 hours, FIFA's disciplinary body had suspended that ban for a probationary period under Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code, clearing him to play. President Trump had by his own account called Infantino directly to lobby for a review.
Balogun later said he knew the reversal would "cause a lot of controversy", and it certainly did. Belgium's federation objected, European players and administrators criticised the decision, and broader questions were raised about the penalty and appeals system, and FIFA’s relationships with political leaders.
Other players had been shown similar leniency before. Notably, Cristiano Ronaldo's ban was suspended under the same article ahead of the tournament. However, none carried the same political charge as a sitting US president dialling the FIFA president mid-tournament.
Football for sale
After the latest World Cup, the credibility of FIFA’s current leadership has been directly and very publicly questioned following Infantino’s plans to sell stakes in the World Cup. Europe’s football governing body UEFA called the proposal a betrayal of football's "soul", and voted unanimously to boycott FIFA competitions unless it was scrapped.
The AFC and CONCACAF – the respective football bodies for Asia, Central America and North America – have raised their own objections over the lack of consultation with the wider football community.
FIFA's own chief operating officer Kevin Lamour stated that staff had not been consulted and that the controversial plan was "the project of one person". Even Blatter, for many the symbol of FIFA’s most scandalous era, declared on social media that Infantino is "not the solution” to the organisation’s governance problem.
Three days after it was announced, Infantino scrapped the plan, saying it had "created divisions" that outweighed any benefit. Somewhat ironically, the episode appeared to have united almost the whole football world.
CONCACAF, welcoming the U-turn at the weekend, argued the episode was symptomatic of "a leadership that has stopped putting football first", and called for the presidency itself to face a full review.
The UEC's own statement went furthest of all, asking directly whether the current leadership “continues to reflect the interests of the wider game", and putting the onus back on the national associations that elect FIFA's president to decide whether their continued silence is defensible.
Infantino, for his part, has given no indication that he intends to step down. He spent the past week in a series of crisis meetings at FIFA's Africa office in Morocco, and is still expected to seek re-election for the presidency.
A call for reform
While the blame has been put squarely on his shoulders FIFA’s chequered history indicated that the issues surrounding its governance and transparency run deeper than just one man. It may even reflect a broader trend of the game being financialised and supporters being turned into commodities.
The showpiece tournaments are the most watched events in the world – with 1.5bn people tuning in to that famous game in Doha in 2022. The commercial opportunities are underlined by the $7.6bn in revenues that FIFA declared in the four-year cycle before the FIFA World Cup.
Much of this money was redistributed amongst the federations which are tasked with holding FIFA to account. Furthermore, the revenue and prestige attached to the competitions is extremely appealing to political leaders.
Establishing stronger transparency, governance and accountability mechanisms is therefore incredibly important given the financial and political influence that FIFA wields.
The Sport & Rights Alliance, an organisation which seeks to address human rights risks linked to sport, has partnered with a range of civil society organisation to set out proposed governance reforms for FIFA and all of its member associations to implement.
These include: re-establishing the Human Rights Advisory Board permanently, reforming the ethics committee, adopting a binding human rights strategy, re-evaluating host agreements, and establishing a fund for people impacted by the Qatar tournament.
Finally, the bodies urge FIFA to “re-instate regular, robust transparency avenues for public accountability”.
Sport & Rights Alliance executive director Andrea Florence argued: “The person who leads FIFA matters a great deal, but the bigger problem is systemic. The landscape for human rights, transparency and good governance will not improve if FIFA’s structures are not addressed.”
“This crisis must spur long-overdue reforms to finally embed human rights protections at the heart of world football. Only a systemic transformation that addresses the many abuses linked to FIFA’s operations will prevent history repeating itself,” she added.
Many questions remain to be answered. For now though, Spain reigns as world champions, Infantino remains in office, and FIFA's next governance report will make very interesting reading once it lands.