When Chelsea won the FIFA Club World Cup in July, the players were joined for the trophy lift by US President Donald Trump. Cameras caught the awkward glances as Trump refused to leave for the celebrations, painting an absurd but telling picture.
Trump had attended the match as the guest of Gianni Infantino, President of the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA). His attendance shows how FIFA has become a venue where global politics is conducted, and is often a player in its own right.
The global football body has also broken free of European governance. After decades of clashes with EU regulators and courts, massive injections of Saudi and Qatari cash have allowed FIFA to cut its reliance on the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and cast off European oversight.
“I do feel the Club World Cup was a game-changer,” Miguel Delaney, author of the book States of Play and chief football writer at The Independent, told The Parliament. “It feels like it's autocratic states who just get to use football for political purposes.”
The story of football in the past few years resembles the story of the global economy writ large: Europe’s shrinking economic heft has diminished its ability to set the global rules, business and politics have moved closer together, power and wealth have been centralised — and Donald Trump is stood in the middle, grinning.
Falling reliance on UEFA, increasing frustration with the EU
FIFA’s power used to be balanced by UEFA, which manages many of the world’s top clubs, leagues and players. This provided a platform for the European institutions to influence global football through the application of labour law and competition rules.
A series of rulings by the EU Court of Justice reshaped football governance from around 1995, when the landmark Bosman ruling ensured free transfers for out-of-contract players, fundamentally changing the labour market. The Meca-Medina case of 2006 confirmed that sporting rules could fall under EU competition law, giving the European Commission unprecedented leverage over football governance.
In December 2023, the Court of Justice found that FIFA and UEFA’s authorisation rules for new competitions, in this case the highly controversial European Super League, breached EU competition law.
Most recently, in October 2024, the Court ruled in Diarra v FIFA that certain transfer restrictions unlawfully limited players’ freedom of movement, disproportionately curtailing already short careers.
Stephen Weatherill, emeritus Jacques Delors professor of European law at Oxford University, said that FIFA had chafed against these restrictions and tried to minimise compliance. “Even when these few cases are decided by the Court of Justice, FIFA is really good at delaying reform and minimising reform,” he told The Parliament. “Court of Justice decisions … bring about change only slowly and only in a fairly ad-hoc kind of way.”
Even after 2024’s Diarra ruling, the global players’ union FIFPRO continues to support the player after what it described as “unsuccessful settlement negotiations with FIFA.”
“FIFA's continued resistance nearly a year after losing at Europe's highest court is only one of many examples that indicate the systemic problems we currently face,” a representative of FIFPRO Europe told The Parliament.
FIFA breaks free of European oversight
FIFA is built on a contradiction: it is both a regulator and a business. The conflict was most visible in this year’s massive expansion of the Club World Cup to a multi-stage competition with 32 teams. FIFA held talks with FIFPRO about fixture congestion and player fatigue, but nonetheless ended up pressing ahead with the expansion.
“The situation is intrinsically complex. It's almost a Gordian knot, knowing that FIFA is both judge and party in a given case,” Stefaan Van den Bogaert, professor of European Law and director of the Europa Institute at Leiden University, told The Parliament.
As FIFA has come to resemble a giant global business, it has become even less welcoming of European regulatory oversight. “For an institution or a president like Infantino, who only wants to talk to other world leaders, getting a slap in the face from a regional court like the Court of Justice is not something that they are all too happy about,” Van den Bogaert said.
The global governing body has therefore turned to a new set of allies to reduce its reliance on UEFA. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, was a sponsor of the Club World Cup.
PIF was also represented at the tournament by Al Hilal, one of the four Saudi clubs it owns. The TV rights were held exclusively by UK-based streamer DAZN, in which PIF recently acquired a $1 billion minority stake.
In late 2023, FIFA awarded Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup unopposed. An investigation by The New York Times suggested that Infantino had personally played a major role in that decision.
The newly entrepreneurial streak has led to FIFA being labelled “a disrupter more than a regulator,” said Delaney. For a body long suspected of corruption, including a well documented 2015 scandal, the shift raises uncomfortable questions about its power and who holds it to account.
Petros Mavroidis, a professor of foreign and comparative law at Columbia University, said that FIFA’s opaque rules and weak oversight had allowed this influence to take shape. “The moment the rules of the game are crystal clear, then autocratic and sovereign wealth funds will have to play the game by the book,” he told The Parliament. “The big problem is the total absence of accountability.”
The benefits flow both ways. FIFA enjoys the backing of states and sovereign wealth funds willing to bankroll its ambitions without demanding much in the way of regulatory oversight. That means less reliance on UEFA, and less accountability to the EU.
For their part, FIFA’s new backers get to increase their soft power and wash their image. The Saudi PIF bought English club Newcastle United while the kingdom was still under heavy criticism over the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup following a cash-for-votes scandal and the country’s influence permeates European football. Nasser Al-Khelaifi is chairman of the government-run Qatari Sports Investments (QSI) and also sits as the president of the QSI-owned Paris Saint Germain and as chairman of the European Club Association, the voice of Europe’s top clubs.
Football clubs hold the power, players face burnout
Football clubs could in theory push back against FIFA’s initiatives, rejecting the burden of extra tournaments by simply not participating. But the top clubs are no longer community-based groups of local players; they are international businesses worth billions of dollars, and managed accordingly. More tournaments mean more revenue streams.
“The clubs basically have the power to reshape the game, because they know that's where most of the interest lies,” Delaney said. “But essentially FIFA co-opted them with this Club World Cup.”
Unlike clubs, players cannot simply walk away. An ever-expanding calendar means more bonuses and prize money, but also raises the risks of burnout, injury, and careers being cut short.
“Shouldn't we think about how many days a player should take off? We kill players now by adding one competition after the other. Shouldn't they have a minimum days of rest? All of these things you have in a CBA [collective bargaining agreement]. I think this is to me where the change should happen,” said Mavroidis.
The EU has aimed to address these issues. A report on how EU policies can shape the European Sport Model is going through the European Parliament, with provisions designed to promote collective governance, athletes’ rights and fans’ voices.
The European Commission has joined social dialogue meetings with the European Professional Football Leagues (EPFL), the European Club Association (ECA) and FIFPRO, chaired by UEFA. This dialogue has resulted in standard contract levels for players, among other changes — but the results remain limited to Europe.
In US sports, CBAs have forced leagues to negotiate with players’ unions on salaries, rest days and workload. Global football has no such framework, leaving FIFPRO with limited leverage over FIFA. Rumblings about player strikes have taken place, but no action has yet been taken and players’ welfare remains secondary to FIFA’s commercial ambitions.
Could the EU be a fair global football regulator?
Some observers believe that the EU can and should still exert power over FIFA by setting and enforcing clear legislation.
“We need legislation standards setting out systematically how sports governing bodies should behave and how they should be structured and how should they represent all affected interests,” said Weatherill. “If the EU establishes standards, many of those are going to spill over and be adopted as global standards, not just European standards.”
“It would generate an awful lot of political capital for the EU if it did this and it did it well,” he added. “But it's not going to happen anytime soon, I'm realistic about that.”
The Parliament reached out to the European Commission for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication.
European attempts to regulate FIFA could also draw opposition from other footballing countries around the world, said Van den Bogaert. “To adopt such a regulation, you will need to have the majority of the member states going for it and I'm not sure whether this will be feasible,” he said.
But with growing pressure on players and the centralisation of power, football governance could be heading for a collision. “I think it's underestimated what a fragile and likely transformative stage of football history we're at, where you have all these factors coming together,” Delaney said. “I think we're at the brink of a huge change.”
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