UEFA has filed legal applications in United States courts seeking access to documents connected to a now-abandoned FIFA plan to sell commercial rights in the World Cup to private investors. The filings mark a formal step towards potential criminal proceedings against FIFA president Gianni Infantino in Switzerland, where the football body is headquartered. Lawyers for UEFA describe the applications as preparatory, intended to gather evidence before any complaint is lodged with Swiss prosecutors.

The scheme at the centre of the dispute, known as FIFA Forward Enterprise, would have transferred commercial rights to the men's and women's World Cups, along with the Club World Cup, into a newly created subsidiary. Thrive Capital Management, a New York investment firm founded by Joshua Kushner, was set to serve as the anchor investor. Under the terms Infantino announced in July, the deal would have handed investors a 20 per cent stake for $4.2 billion, a figure UEFA's lawyers argue implied an enterprise value of only around $20 billion for FIFA's commercial arm.

UEFA's applications span two American jurisdictions. In Manhattan, the governing body has requested discovery from Thrive Capital, seeking communications and internal analyses relating to the origins and development of the proposal. A separate application in southern Florida targets FIFA itself, whose operations for delivering the 2026 World Cup are based in Coral Gables. Both filings are designed to build a factual record that UEFA can later present to prosecutors in Switzerland, where FIFA's main offices sit in Zurich.

At the heart of UEFA's complaint is the question of valuation. The organisation's filings contend that the $4.2 billion price was never tested by an independent valuer, nor was it arrived at through any form of open or competitive process. UEFA goes further, suggesting the figure may have been deliberately set low to benefit Infantino and a small number of associates, rather than reflecting what FIFA's commercial rights were genuinely worth. Whether that claim can be substantiated is precisely what the discovery process is intended to establish.

Governance failings feature prominently in UEFA's account of how the deal was struck. According to the application, Infantino pushed the plan through FIFA's internal approval process without consulting the FIFA Council, UEFA, other continental confederations, or the organisation's 211 member associations. UEFA states that the proposal was signed off at a hastily arranged meeting, attended by a limited number of FIFA staff, some of whom had reportedly not encountered the plan before being asked to approve it. That account, if accurate, points to a structure of decision-making concentrated tightly around Infantino himself.

The legal basis for any Swiss complaint would rest on Article 158 of the Swiss Criminal Code, which covers criminal mismanagement. UEFA and its lawyers have not yet decided whether to bring a case before federal prosecutors in Bern or local prosecutors in Zurich, a choice that may depend on how the evidence obtained through the American discovery process develops. Switzerland's prosecutorial record on football-related corruption cases has been mixed in recent years, a factor likely to weigh on how UEFA proceeds.

Infantino dropped the sell-off plan on 1 August after opposition from UEFA and other governing bodies within world football, some of whom had threatened to boycott FIFA-organised competitions if the scheme went ahead. Its collapse has not ended scrutiny of how it came about. The episode has drawn renewed attention to the concentration of authority within FIFA's leadership and to Infantino's personal relationships with external financial backers, including his connections in the United States, where he built close ties during this year's World Cup. For UEFA, the discovery applications represent an attempt to establish, through documentary evidence, whether those relationships shaped a transaction that bypassed the organisation's own governance structures.