In 2004, on Brazilian television, Ronaldo Nazário said something that most footballers think and almost none say out loud.
"I have had sex several times before some games. It helps you concentrate. Not all the coaches let you have sex before a match though. I have noticed that in some games that I played better because I had sex before them."
A World Cup winner, three-time World Player of the Year, stating plainly that one of the oldest taboos in sport had no hold over him — and that, if anything, the opposite was true. Ten years later, at the 2014 World Cup, four national federations would publicly disagree with him. All four would be home before the quarter-finals.
The Ban That Keeps Coming Back
Before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Mexico, and Russia all imposed restrictions on sexual activity during the tournament. Bosnia's coach Safet Susic was characteristically blunt: "There will be no sex in Brazil. They can find another solution, they can even masturbate if they want. I am not interested what the other coaches do, this is not a holiday trip, we are there to play football." Mexico's coach Miguel Herrera offered a similarly unimpressed defence of his own ban: "Nobody has died from practising abstinence for 40 days."
These were not fringe positions. They sat inside a belief that has existed, in some form, since ancient Greece — that sexual activity, and ejaculation specifically, draws something vital away from an athlete's body. Roman and Greek trainers preached abstinence as a path to athletic purity. The belief survived because it felt intuitively true, not because anyone had ever tested it.
All four of the abstinence nations were eliminated by the round of 16.
This proves nothing on its own — eliminations happen to good and bad policies alike — but it is the kind of detail that earns a place in the conversation precisely because of how neatly it lands.
What the Science Actually Says
The honest answer, for most of football history, has been: nobody properly checked. Sports science largely avoided the question, partly from squeamishness and partly because rigorous studies are hard to design around something this private.
That has started to change. A systematic review covering decades of available research, published in Frontiers in Physiology, found that sexual activity does not measurably affect testosterone levels in the short or long term, and that no consistent effect on athletic performance — positive or negative — could be demonstrated across the existing literature. The myth of depletion, in other words, had never actually been supported by evidence. It had simply been repeated until it sounded like fact.
A more recent and considerably more rigorous study went further. Published in Physiology & Behavior, researchers followed 21 well-trained male athletes through a randomised crossover design, comparing performance thirty minutes after a masturbation-induced orgasm against performance following seven days of abstinence. The result directly contradicted the centuries-old assumption: exercise duration increased by 3.2 percent, testosterone and cortisol both rose rather than fell, handgrip strength improved slightly, and markers of muscle stress actually decreased. The researchers proposed that sexual activity may function as a kind of physiological primer — activating the same sympathetic nervous system response that a conventional warm-up does, releasing endorphins that reduce pain perception, and increasing motivation and confidence in the process.
None of this means sex makes anyone a better athlete by default. The sample size is small, the subjects were all young trained men, and the researchers themselves caution against overreaching. But the directional finding is consistent and clear: there is no evidence that sexual activity weakens performance, and there is now reasonably good evidence that, for some athletes, it does the opposite of what coaches have assumed for over a century.
Ronaldo Nazário was not making an excuse. He may have been describing something real.
Why the Myth Survived Anyway
If the evidence does not support abstinence, why has the belief lasted this long, across cultures and centuries, repeated by coaches who have no scientific basis for repeating it?
Part of the answer is psychological rather than physiological. Pre-competition rituals — including abstinence — function as a form of perceived control. An athlete facing an outcome they cannot fully determine reaches for any variable they can manage. Diet, sleep, superstition, sexual abstinence: all of it offers the same psychological service, regardless of whether it does anything measurable to the body. If a coach believes abstinence sharpens focus, and communicates that belief with total conviction, the belief itself can produce a kind of placebo discipline — not because semen retention does anything biologically, but because the ritual of self-denial signals seriousness, and seriousness is genuinely useful.
There is also a less flattering explanation, and it deserves more than a passing mention. The abstinence belief was never really about testosterone. It is about who gets to decide what a male athlete's body is for, and it rests on a specific, old idea: that a man's sexual desire is a finite resource, that spending it is a form of weakness, and that a coach — not the athlete — is the correct authority to manage that resource on his behalf.
Sit with what Susic's rule actually asked of his players. Forty days. Not a headache, not a minor inconvenience — forty days of watching his partner across a room in the team hotel and being told the wanting itself was the problem. Forty days of a body doing exactly what bodies do, and being informed that the doing was a discipline failure. "They can even masturbate if they want." Not encouragement. Not neutrality. A grudging allowance, delivered with visible contempt, as if the ache itself were an indulgence that had to be tolerated rather than a basic human need. The implication is that even release, alone, in private, is something a coach permits rather than something a grown man is entitled to.
That is not sports science. That is a specific, gendered idea about discipline — the belief that denying the body what it wants is itself a form of moral and competitive superiority, and that a real professional proves his seriousness by how much he is willing to give up, regardless of whether giving it up does anything at all.
No equivalent rule has ever targeted sleep deprivation from a crying newborn, or the anxiety of a new relationship, or grief. Only sex. Only pleasure. The selectivity is the tell.
The WAGs Problem
If the men's side of this story is about abstinence and superstition, the other half of football's relationship with sex is about the women connected to the players — and it tells a different, considerably less flattering story.
The term WAGs entered football culture around the 2002 World Cup and exploded into the mainstream by 2006 in Germany, when the British press constructed an entire parallel narrative around the wives and girlfriends of the England squad — their shopping, their nightlife, their proximity to the team hotel treated as a subplot worthy of equal coverage to the football itself. The framing was rarely flattering. WAGs were positioned as distraction, as decadence, as evidence that a team's focus had drifted from the only thing that was supposed to matter.
The logic curdled further by 2022. When Germany were eliminated in the group stage in Qatar, a German tabloid ran the headline "What is actually wrong with our WAGs?" — blaming the squad's partners for insufficiently energetic partying, while crediting England's WAGs, who had reportedly been livelier, with somehow contributing to England topping their group. The implied mechanism was never explained, because there isn't one. It was scapegoating dressed up as sports analysis: easier to blame the women in the stands than the eleven men who lost on the pitch.
Look at both halves of the story together and the double standard is stark, and it is not subtle. Men are told that sex might weaken them, so the correct response is abstinence — desire treated as a threat to be managed and rationed by someone else. Women, meanwhile, are blamed for not being entertaining or energetic enough to inspire their partners to perform — desire treated as a resource they are responsible for supplying on demand. One half of the story punishes women by casting them as a danger. The other half punishes women by casting them as a service. Neither version holds the players accountable for their own performance. Both versions find a woman to blame first.
What both halves of this story share — the abstinence rules and the WAGs blame cycle — is the same underlying instinct: control the variable that feels controllable, assign it outsized causal power, and use it to explain outcomes that are actually decided by far more mundane factors like fitness, form, and the quality of the opposition.
What Actually Matters
Strip away the myth and what remains is something almost absurdly intimate: a grown man, a professional athlete at the physical peak of his life, forbidden from touching the person he loves. Not told to rest. Not told to recover. Told no — to the ache of wanting her, to the warmth of her skin against his after weeks apart, to the release that every other human body on earth is permitted without a coach's signature.
Picture it plainly. She has flown across an ocean to be near him. The hotel room is fifty metres away. Every instinct in his body — the same instinct that made him extraordinary on a pitch, the desire, the hunger, the refusal to hold back — is suddenly the one thing he is told to suppress. Not because his body needs it. Because a man in a tracksuit believes, without evidence, that wanting her too much will cost him something on Saturday.
The 2026 research says the body was never built to punish him for this. It never withheld strength as the price of intimacy. Ronaldo Nazário knew that instinctively in 2004, before anyone had bothered to check.
It is also worth asking, honestly, who the ban actually serves. It costs a federation nothing to impose. It requires no investment, no infrastructure, no expertise. And if the team performs badly afterward, the ban becomes retroactively useful — evidence, however unfounded, that whatever went wrong was a discipline problem rather than a tactical or physical one. A coach who bans sex has manufactured himself an excuse before the tournament has even started. That is not a coincidence. That is a remarkably cheap form of insurance, purchased at the expense of the players' autonomy and, if the science is right, their actual performance.
Football has always been comfortable asking players to give things up. It has been considerably less comfortable asking whether the things it asked them to give up were ever actually costing them anything — or whether the real function of the sacrifice was never physiological at all, but a story a coach could tell afterward about why the team lost.
misterillahi•Aug 30, 2026 The goalkeeper was already beaten.
He had dived the wrong way, the striker had rounded him cleanly, and the goal was — by every reasonable assessment of the situation — about to happen. The crowd had already started to react. The striker was composing himself for the finish.
I was the last defender. I had tracked the run, read the situation, and arrived at the goal line at the exact moment the ball did. I stood in the middle of it and headed the shot away for a corner.
We were winning 5-0 at the time.
Nobody mentioned the header afterwards. The final score was 7-0, and seven goals does not leave much room in the conversation for the one that did not go in. We celebrated the result, replayed the goals, talked about the performance. The corner that came from my clearance was somewhere in the second half, absorbed into a scoreline that had already made the match feel like a formality.
But I know what the scoreboard would have said without it.
7-1 is not 7-0. It sounds like a smaller difference than it is. One goal, conceded when we were already five up, in a match that was already decided. But 7-0 is a clean sheet. It is a different kind of result — one that needs no asterisk, no explanation, no "yes but." It is complete. 7-1 is a very good win with a footnote. The footnote is what I was there to prevent.
This is the thing about goals that nobody who scores them ever quite says out loud: they are the most celebrated event in football precisely because they are the most visible. The net moves. The camera cuts. The crowd reacts. A goal is an announcement. It demands attention, produces celebration, and is recorded in the statistics, the highlights, and the match report with equal weight regardless of how it happened.
The clearance that prevented a goal is none of those things. It is the event that did not occur. The statistic that does not appear because the bad thing never happened. The header that kept the scoreline clean, absorbed into a 7-0 win, mentioned by nobody.
The Scoreline You Do Not See
A 2-0 win is more convincing than 3-1. I will argue this until someone makes a sufficiently compelling case otherwise, and I have not heard one yet.
A 3-1 scoreline means the opposition scored. It means something went wrong at the back, someone was beaten, the goalkeeper had to pick the ball out of the net at least once. The three goals in front of it are doing cosmetic work — they are covering the evidence of a defensive lapse that the numbers record and everyone noticed.
A 2-0 means nothing went wrong at the back. One moment of quality at one end, and then ninety minutes of the opposition trying to find a way through and failing. The result is not comfortable — it is tight, controlled, resolved. The defensive performance is the result.
The problem is that the defensive performance is almost impossible to see on a highlights reel. You cannot package ninety minutes of good positioning, good communication, good reading of a situation into a thirty-second clip. You can package a goal in three seconds. Which is why goals have publicists and clean sheets have statisticians.
This is not a coincidence. It is a structural feature of how football is consumed. We watch the game through its most dramatic moments. The most dramatic moments are almost always at one end. The work that kept them from happening at the other end is invisible — not because it was not happening, but because invisible is exactly what good defending looks like.
Birthdays Are Overrated
Bear with me.
A birthday is a scheduled event. It is in the calendar. Phones send notifications. Social media prompts you. Florists, restaurants, and card shops have built entire revenue models around the certainty that the date will arrive and people will need to mark it. The infrastructure of birthdays is enormous. Forgetting one requires genuine effort against the current of everything reminding you.
Remembering a birthday is the goal. Everyone sees it. It produces a celebration, a post, a dinner. It is the announcement. It demands and receives attention.
Now consider a different kind of remembering.
Someone mentions, in passing, three weeks ago, that they are nervous about something at work. Not dramatically — just a sentence, maybe two, in the middle of a conversation about something else. You noted it. You did not write it down. You were just paying attention.
Three weeks later, on an unremarkable Tuesday, you ask how it went.
There is no calendar reminder for that. No social infrastructure, no prompts, no cultural expectation that this is a thing you are supposed to do. Nobody is watching. If you forget, nothing marks the forgetting. The person will not know you forgot because they will not know you were supposed to remember.
But if you ask — if you bring it back, specific and unprompted, at the right moment — something happens. Not a celebration. Not an announcement. Something quieter and considerably more durable. The evidence that you were actually listening. That the thing they said mattered enough to stay with you. That they existed, specifically and individually, in your attention.
That is the goal line clearance of human relationships.
Why We Cannot Value What Did Not Happen
Psychologists call it negativity bias — the well-documented tendency for humans to register negative events more strongly than positive ones. Bad things land harder than good things of equivalent magnitude. The goal conceded hurts more than the goal scored feels good. The forgotten detail stings more than the remembered one warms.
But there is a related problem that gets less attention: the counterfactual gap. Humans are poor at valuing things that did not happen. The disaster that was prevented. The argument that was headed off. The clean sheet that was kept. The worry that was asked about.
We cannot feel the goal that did not go in. We can only feel the goal that did. So the clearance on the line registers as nothing — a corner, a statistic, an event in the game that produced no immediate outcome — while the goal it prevented exists only as an alternative timeline that nobody is thinking about.
The same mechanism operates in relationships. The small, consistent gestures of attention — remembering, noticing, asking — are almost invisible when present. They are the infrastructure. They hold things together quietly, without announcement, without the moment that demands a response. They are noticed, most clearly, when they are gone. When someone who used to remember stops remembering. When the attention that was always there is suddenly absent and the absence has a shape.
This is why grand gestures are overrated. Not because they are not nice — they are. But they are the goals. They are the visible events, the announcements, the moments that produce a reaction. They feel significant in proportion to how much they demand to be noticed. And demanding to be noticed is not the same as mattering.
The Infrastructure
I am a central defender. My job is not to score. My job is to make sure the bad thing does not happen — to read the situation early enough, get to the right place at the right moment, and resolve the problem before it becomes a crisis. I derive satisfaction from things that do not produce visible celebration. A clean sheet. A header on the line. A 2-0 that feels more complete than a 3-1 that everyone else finds more entertaining.
This is not a humble position. It is a specific one. I am not pretending goals do not matter — they clearly do, you cannot win without them. I am arguing that the architecture of football, and the architecture of most other things, massively overinvests in what is visible and dramatic and underinvests in what is quiet and structural.
The most important thing in any relationship is not the birthday dinner. It is the Tuesday in March when someone asked about the thing you mentioned weeks ago. The most important result in football is not the 4-3 that everyone replays. It is the 2-0 where nothing went wrong at the back and the result required no explanation.
The goal gets the camera. The clearance gets the corner.
The clearance is what made the clean sheet possible.
And the clean sheet — unglamorous, unannounced, recorded in a statistic nobody asked about — is what made the result complete.
Nobody mentioned the header after the 7-0 win. We were 5-0 up when it happened and the clean sheet felt inevitable by then to everyone except me.
I know what it was worth.
That is enough.
misterillahi•Aug 23, 2026 I have stood on a football pitch and felt my chest tighten before anything has even happened. Just the walk out, the sound of studs on concrete turning into grass underfoot, the smell of the field, the other team already warming up on the far side. Something in my body was already responding before I had consciously decided to feel anything.
I used to think that was just nerves. Turns out it's considerably more complicated than that — and once you understand what's actually happening inside you during a football match, the question isn't why people care so much about the sport. It's why anyone would expect them not to.
The Anticipation Problem
Here's something that took scientists a while to figure out: dopamine — the chemical everyone associates with pleasure and reward — doesn't actually fire when good things happen. It fires when good things might happen.
Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist, spent years mapping exactly when dopamine neurons activate. The finding that changed how people think about reward is this: the chemical peaks during anticipation and uncertainty, not at the moment of delivery. The goal itself produces a brief surge and then a drop. The build-up — the attack developing, the striker in space, the ball curling toward the top corner — is where your brain is most alive.
This is why a ball hitting the post can feel more intense than a goal. The goal resolves the uncertainty. The post extends it, for one horrible, wonderful fraction of a second, at maximum intensity. Your brain was primed for something, and instead of getting it, it got a near-miss — which is neurochemically the most potent version of the whole experience.
I know this from the other side of the equation. Playing as a central defender, 4-0 or 5-0 up, I once watched our goalkeeper get completely beaten by their striker. I ran toward the empty goal and stood there — just stood there, waiting, anticipating everything that might happen in the next second. When he shot, it came right at me. I headed it for a corner and fell down.
We won 7-0 in the end. That clearance meant nothing to the scoreline. It was the zero that never got broken — a statistic that nobody else in the match cared about. But the dopamine of that moment, the specific intensity of standing in an empty goal with a shot coming at you, has stayed with me longer than most goals I've scored. The near-miss, even from the defending side, even when it was meaningless on the board, was neurochemically the most alive I felt in that entire match.
Football is essentially a machine designed, accidentally, to exploit this. Goals are rare. They're unpredictable. You never know when the next one is coming. That pattern — irregular, uncertain reward — is the same pattern that makes slot machines hard to walk away from and social media notifications hard to ignore. Your brain doesn't get to settle. It stays alert, anticipating, for the whole ninety minutes.
And when the big moments arrive — the penalty, the final minutes, the goalkeeper coming up for a corner — adrenaline joins the picture. Your heart rate goes up. Blood moves to your muscles. Your body is physically preparing to do something, even if you're sitting in a seat and the closest you'll get to involvement is screaming at a television. The body doesn't really care about that distinction. It's responding to threat and possibility the same way it always has.
The Part That Actually Hurts
Not everything football produces in you is good. Some of it is just stress, dressed up as something worth having.
Cortisol is the body's stress hormone. In short bursts it's actually useful — it sharpens focus, raises energy, and helps you commit to action before you've had time to overthink it. The defender making a last-ditch tackle isn't thinking through their options. The cortisol has already made the decision for them.
But cortisol doesn't know the difference between a useful spike and a destructive one. A team fighting relegation for six months. A season where every result feels like life or death. A fan whose mood on Monday is determined entirely by what happened on Saturday. That's a cortisol story — and it's the kind that wears you down rather than sharpens you up. Chronically elevated cortisol suppresses your immune system, disrupts your sleep, and makes you worse at the kind of clear thinking that might help you process the very situation producing it.
This is why a bad defeat — especially a late one, after hope had built — leaves you genuinely tired. Not just emotionally drained. Physically tired. Your body went through something real. The exhaustion is not a metaphor.
The clearest version of this I've experienced was not a defeat but a near-one. We were losing 3-0 to a team we should have been beating — complacency, pure and simple. I wasn't even starting. My centre back partner called me on, and I came on. The defence started to organise. We conceded a fourth, which sounds catastrophic, but it was actually the moment everyone woke up. Right before half time we scored through a free kick. Then 4-2. Then something shifted at half time — in Indonesian there's a word for it, kesetanan, which roughly translates as being possessed, playing like something beyond yourself had taken over. One of our strikers scored a hat-trick in the second half. We won 5-4.
What I remember most is not the goals. It's the cortisol of watching the scoreline at 3-0, the specific shame of losing to a team you had no business losing to, and then the strange, almost chemical reversal as the possibility re-entered a situation that had felt closed. The fourth goal we conceded hurt — and then it became the thing that woke everyone up. That shift, from cortisol despair to dopamine possibility, is one of the most distinct feelings I've had on a football pitch. The body genuinely felt different on either side of it.
Serotonin runs underneath all of this, quietly governing your baseline mood across the longer arc of a season. Winning streaks raise it. Prolonged losing depletes it. This is why a bad run of form can genuinely darken a person's general outlook beyond the football itself — the neurochemistry of losing accumulates in the same way the neurochemistry of winning does. And why a promotion or a title can produce a sustained lift that doesn't fade quickly. Something real changed. In the brain, quite literally.
Why the Stadium Feels Different
Everything so far explains what watching football alone does to you. It doesn't explain why watching it with sixty thousand other people is a completely different experience.
Oxytocin is the bonding chemical. It's released during shared emotional experiences with people you feel connected to — physical touch, synchronised movement, collective ritual. It produces trust, warmth, and the specific sensation of belonging to something larger than yourself. And a stadium full of people experiencing the same match simultaneously is one of the most powerful oxytocin environments a human being can walk into.
The collective gasp at a near-miss. The eruption at a goal. The silence after a bad result, shared by tens of thousands of people who don't know each other but are feeling exactly the same thing. These produce oxytocin responses that watching alone simply cannot replicate. The sociology of it has a name — Émile Durkheim called it "collective effervescence," that heightened emotional energy generated when large groups gather around shared experience. The neuroscience just puts a chemical name on what Durkheim described a hundred years ago.
It also explains why losing hurts differently depending on context. The same defeat, in an empty stadium versus a full one, is not the same emotional experience. The shared cortisol of expectation, the broken oxytocin of collective belonging — when those things collapse together, in front of sixty thousand people who all felt the same hope and now feel the same despair, it's a combined neurochemical weight that being alone simply doesn't produce.
The other side of this is what happens when it goes right. In our fourth year as a 7-a-side team, we won the championship. We had never reached the final before. We were the underdogs — some quality players, but not the favourites. What we had, and what we believed in going into that tournament, was togetherness. Not as a cliché. As an actual plan. When things got difficult, we trusted each other rather than the individual. That trust had been built across four years of showing up on the same field, losing together, winning smaller things together, becoming people who knew how each other moved and thought and responded under pressure.
When we won, what I felt was not primarily joy. It was something quieter and heavier than joy — the specific oxytocin of something collective being confirmed. Four years of shared experience crystallising into one moment, on a 7-a-side field with no crowd, no stadium, no television cameras. And it felt like more than any individual achievement I have produced on a football pitch, before or since. Because it was not mine. It was ours. And that distinction, it turns out, is neurochemically everything.
And then there are the songs.
Endorphins — the opioid-like chemicals released during exercise and laughter — are also released during synchronised movement and vocalisation. When sixty thousand people sing the same thing at the same time, something happens in each individual body that doesn't happen when one person sings alone. The collective ritual produces endorphins that the individual version of the same action doesn't. This is why the terrace songs matter beyond their content. Why singing with a crowd feels physically different from singing at home. The endorphin response is real, and it's specific to the collective.
Why Nothing Else Quite Does This
Dopamine fires at slot machines. Cortisol spikes in job interviews. Oxytocin floods through parents holding newborns. Endorphins arrive during a long run. Serotonin rises with sunlight. Adrenaline comes with any situation that feels dangerous enough.
Every chemical in this piece exists outside football. None of the individual experiences are unique to it.
What football does — what almost nothing else manages — is produce all six of them, simultaneously, across ninety minutes, inside a social structure (the club, the rivalry, the history, the season) that gives every individual neurochemical moment a meaning beyond the moment itself. A film can produce oxytocin and cortisol. A concert can produce oxytocin and endorphins. A casino can produce dopamine and adrenaline. For me, nothing else comes close — that pure ecstasy of every emotion and every chemical hitting at once, in the same ninety minutes, sometimes on a 7-a-side pitch with no crowd at all. That's the thing about football — it doesn't need a stadium to do what it does. It just needs you to care.
Football fans are not irrational. They're not "too" invested, or too emotional, or taking it too seriously. They're responding exactly as you'd expect a human being to respond to something the brain was specifically built to respond to — uncertainty, belonging, collective experience, the possibility of something extraordinary happening at any moment.
The whistle blows. Ninety minutes of everything ends. The chemicals settle, slowly. The brain, having been through all of that, starts waiting for next week.
It always does.
On the 19th of July 2026, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium — Ferran Torres scoring in the 106th minute to give Spain their second World Cup title. Gianni Infantino stood on the pitch alongside Donald Trump — the man he had awarded a specially invented prize two months earlier. The “FIFA Peace Prize” had not existed before Trump mentioned he was disappointed not to have won the Nobel.
Eleven days later, Infantino announced he was selling the World Cup.
Not all of it. Just the commercial operations — broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticket sales, licensing — bundled into FIFA Forward Enterprise, valued at $20 billion, with up to 20% available to private investors. The lead investor: Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared is married to Ivanka Trump. The person reportedly slated to run the new company as commissioner after Infantino’s FIFA presidency ends in 2031: Gianni Infantino, at approximately $64 million a year.
UEFA’s response, within hours: “It is not FIFA’s to sell. None of us are the owners of football.”
CONCACAF rejected it unanimously — including the United States, Canada and Mexico, the three countries that just hosted the $15 billion tournament Infantino was now proposing to monetise. Football Supporters Europe posted two words: “Game over, Gianni.”
What Infantino Is Actually Proposing
FIFA currently owns the World Cup as a non-profit. Every dollar it generates is redistributed back into football development across its 211 member nations. Infantino wants to create a new company that takes over the World Cup’s commercial operations — broadcast rights, sponsorships, ticket sales — then sell 20% of that company to private investors for $4 billion.
The moment that happens, the World Cup has a new constituency with a legal financial interest in its decisions. Private investors whose obligation is not to football but to their return. They do not need to develop the game in smaller nations. They need to maximise the profit of the asset they purchased.
UEFA named it precisely: “The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product. It has been built over generations by players, national teams and supporters across every continent. No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. Football will never be for sale.”
The Structure of the Bribe
The plan requires a majority vote from FIFA’s 211 member associations. Infantino’s letter to all 211 included the following: approve FFE and your development funding doubles — from $10 million to $20 million per association.
By the following day, the offer had doubled again to $40 million.
That escalation is the most revealing detail in the story. Doubling within 24 hours is a textbook loss aversion response — when the initial incentive fails, increase the stakes rather than reconsider the premise. The only argument he has for this plan is a financial one, and when it wasn’t working, he made it larger.
Africa holds 54 of FIFA’s 211 votes — the largest continental bloc — and each association could receive up to $40 million if the plan passes. African federations are among the most financially constrained in the world. The path to approval was engineered to run directly through the nations least positioned to evaluate the long-term consequences of what they were approving.
CONCACAF’s statement contained the most damning line of the entire dispute: “Concacaf was only made aware of this matter through media reports and, subsequently, via a media release.” The confederation that hosted the tournament found out about the plan to monetise it from a press release.
The Transaction
Step back and look at what was exchanged across six months, and the Infantino-Trump relationship resolves into something cleaner than friendship.
What Infantino gave Trump: The invented FIFA Peace Prize. The overturned Balogun red card suspension. Maximum visibility at the most watched sporting event in history — sitting beside him at games, standing beside him at the trophy ceremony.
What Trump gave Infantino: Political cover for the Balogun decision. Connection to Joshua Kushner’s investment firm as the FFE deal’s anchor investor. Public endorsement as Trump’s preferred candidate for UN Secretary-General — describing Infantino as “respected by everyone around the world” with “a special ability to bring people together.”
The UN role is unlikely to materialise — the Security Council’s permanent members each hold a veto. But the endorsement is the point. This was never friendship. It was a transaction: two people using each other’s institutional power to advance their own interests, with the World Cup as the vehicle and the Peace Prize as the receipt.
Paul Piff’s research on power and rule perception explains the underlying psychology: people with sufficient institutional power do not experience rules as constraints. They experience them as suggestions — applicable to others, negotiable for themselves. The Balogun phone call, the invented award, the FFE plan — all of it follows the same logic. The rules apply until they don’t, and they stop applying the moment they become inconvenient.
The FFE plan was the transaction’s largest instalment — and the clearest expression of moral licensing: Infantino used the World Cup’s financial success as justification for a plan that would personally benefit him most. Good stewardship of the tournament became, in his framing, entitlement to profit from it. The relationship that produced the Balogun phone call was always heading somewhere. This is where it was heading.
Football Wins
It only took four days.
On Tuesday the 29th of July, Infantino announced FIFA Forward Enterprise. By Friday the 1st of August, he had scrapped it. UEFA threatened to boycott every FIFA competition. CONCACAF rejected it. The Asian Football Confederation rejected it. The UK Prime Minister condemned it. FIFA’s own chief operating officer told the Associated Press that staff had been “deceived” and “deserve better than contempt and intimidation.” His senior adviser resigned and called it “a bad deal for football.”
The opposition worked because it was unanimous and public — social proof operating in reverse. One federation saying no is ignorable. Ninety-six saying no in four days, including FIFA’s own senior staff, is not. Once the coalition formed, the cascade became unstoppable.
Infantino’s Friday statement: “Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.”
Translation: he ran out of road, he ran out of options.
Football is a game created by people with nothing — played on streets and waste grounds long before any governing body existed to put its name on it. The World Cup belongs to the kid learning to play on a dirt pitch, the Sunday league player who has never watched a board meeting, the neutral fan who needed the rules to mean something. It does not belong to venture capital. It does not belong to anyone’s retirement plan.
Football is created by the poor, the streets. This week, the rich tried to steal it.
The game won. Football wins.
