Uefa's 55 member associations meet by video on Thursday afternoon, at short notice, and the item expected to dominate is a boycott of Fifa's tournaments. Two days earlier Fifa had announced it wanted to sell a stake in the World Cup's commercial rights to private investors. Football's most powerful confederation, home to five of the seven men's World Cup winners this century, is weighing whether to walk away from the tournament.
What is actually on the table
Fifa, a non-profit based in Switzerland, wants to create a subsidiary called Fifa Forward Enterprise and sell a minority stake in it. FFE would hold all of Fifa's commercial rights (broadcast, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing) across the men's and women's World Cups, the Club World Cup and the rest of the portfolio, and would run the operational delivery of those events. Fifa is working with the US bank JP Morgan on the structure; the venture is valued at around $20bn, of which roughly 20% would go to outside money.
The proposed lead investor is Thrive Eternal, the vehicle founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared. It is not private equity of the familiar kind but a permanent holding company, built to buy and hold indefinitely rather than exit inside a decade. The stake Fifa sells would be sold for good.