FIFA's most ambitious commercial experiment collapsed this week, and Joshua Kushner — the billionaire investor positioned to lead it — said absolutely nothing as it fell apart.
Kushner's firm, Thrive Eternal, had been expected to front the private investor group seeking a stake in FIFA Forward Enterprise, the proposed commercial vehicle that would have opened the World Cup's commercial operations to outside capital. FIFA president Gianni Infantino confirmed the proposal "will not proceed" after opposition spread across virtually every major continental federation. UEFA threatened to boycott future World Cups. Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation both rejected it. FIFA needed 106 votes. It never got close.
A deal that fell apart from the inside
The revolt didn't just kill the investment plan — it exposed fractures inside Infantino's inner circle that rarely surface in public. Senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro resigned and called it "a bad deal for football." Chief operating officer Kevin Lamour went further, saying FIFA's own administration had been "deceived" about the project. When your own leadership team is using that word, the problems run deeper than political optics.
And the optics were already bad. Joshua Kushner is Jared Kushner's younger brother, and reports had emerged that figures close to the Trump administration were consulted during the proposal's development. Trump denied any involvement, telling reporters at Camp David he never discussed the plan with Infantino — though the two have spent considerable time together over the past year, including a conspicuous shared spotlight during the 2026 World Cup trophy presentation.
Joshua's silence throughout was striking. No statement. No defense of the project. No explanation of what Thrive Eternal stood to gain. He manages around $25 billion in assets through Thrive Capital, which has backed Instagram, Spotify, and OpenAI since its founding in 2009. This wasn't a firm out of its depth financially — it simply watched the deal burn without comment.
Infantino's bigger problem
Scrapping the plan hasn't calmed anything for Infantino. A fourth-term presidency, which looked like a formality heading into the March vote in Morocco, now looks genuinely contested. The confederations that united to kill this deal aren't going to forget how it was handled — pushed through without adequate consultation of FIFA's own decision-making bodies, according to multiple critics.
Infantino still has a base of smaller football nations dependent on FIFA's development funding. That's not nothing. But losing Europe, North and Central America, and Asia simultaneously in a single week is a political hole that development grants alone won't fill.
Carlos Cordeiro's resignation remains the sharpest detail in all of this. When the man advising the FIFA president walks out and publicly brands the project a bad deal for football, that's not a footnote. That's the story.
