It is a well-established law of nature that whenever a man in a tailored Swiss suit steps onto a podium and uses the words “monetise,” “synergy,” or “unlocking value,” somewhere in the world, a puppy gets kicked.

And so it was last week when Gianni Infantino—a man who looks like a villain from a low-budget James Bond film—announced his latest stroke of absolute genius: FIFA Forward Enterprise. The plan, cooked up in secret with a squad of Wall Street bankers and a venture capital firm linked to Donald Trump’s family, is to sell a 20 percent slice of the World Cup’s commercial soul to private equity for $4.2 billion.

Naturally, Gianni claims this is all done out of pure, unadulterated benevolence. He wants to “democratise” the game by handing $20 million cheques to member associations in small island nations so they can build pitch lighting and shiny new headquarters. 

Meanwhile, UEFA has threatened a full-blown revolt, European leagues are threatening strikes, and fans across the globe are united in a singular thought: Is this man completely out of his mind?

Now, you might be sitting there thinking, “Well, hanging on a minute, Yunus. Football is the most popular sport on the planet. The World Cup is brilliant. Surely injecting billions of dollars into it can only make it more brilliant?”

Wrong.

To understand why this latest brainwave is dead on arrival, we have to travel back a few years to the legendary catastrophe known as the European Super League. Do you remember that? A dozen extraordinarily wealthy football club owners gathered in a dark room, puffed on expensive cigars, and decided they would create a closed-loop billionaire’s playground where nobody could ever be relegated. They genuinely thought fans would clap like trained seals. They believed that because Real Madrid playing Juventus every Tuesday night sounded like “premium content,” the world would fall to its knees and empty its wallets.

What happened? The fans filled the streets with flaming pyrotechnics, politicians threatened emergency legislation, the players revolted, and the entire multi-billion-dollar house of cards collapsed in less than forty-eight hours.

The suits made one fatal, hilarious error. They believed the ancient corporate slogan: Content is King.

They thought as long as you put eleven million-dollar superstars on a patch of grass, it didn’t matter how you packaged it, who ran it, or how blatantly you insulted the intelligence of the people watching it. They learned—at immense public embarrassment—that content is merely a peasant if the context is rubbish.

Context is the kingdom.

Football is not toothpaste. It is not an app you download to track your daily calorie intake. It is a fragile, chaotic ecosystem built entirely on trust, tribalism, rivalry, and the sacred belief that the sport hasn’t been completely rigged by a shadowy cartel of bankers.

When you take magnificent content and drop it into a context defined by backroom deals, opaque political alliances, and a president who seems to view the global game as a personal election campaign, the content instantly spoils. It doesn’t matter how good the initiative is. If the context smells like a toxic spill, nobody wants to drink from the well.

And the tragic part about all of this is that the content itself—with a little fix here and there—would be in fine shape. But frankly, football doesn’t need a corporate reboot from private equity asset strippers. It just needs custodians who aren’t perpetually trying to sell the family silver to buy bigger megaphones.

Look at what happened when Formula 1 was taken over by Liberty Media. They didn’t rewrite the rulebook and included a hydration break, or make races shorter for teenagers with six-second attention spans. They didn’t try to bribe small racing tracks with lump-sum handouts behind closed doors. They simply fixed the context. They opened the pit lanes, built brilliant behind-the-scenes storytelling, engaged modern audiences on social media, and made people care about the human drama behind the sport. The sport didn’t change; the way we were invited to experience it did.

Look at New Zealand Rugby. When they brought in Silver Lake, they didn’t try to hijack the World Cup or bypass the players’ union in a midnight raid. They sat down with the union, hammered out strict safeguards, and drew a massive, impenetrable iron curtain between the money guys and the actual game. The investors get to sell t-shirts and digital apps; they don’t get to touch the soul of the All Blacks.

Even the Women’s Tennis Association managed to bring in private capital without causing a diplomatic crisis, simply by talking to their athletes first and being transparent about where the pennies were going.

It turns out that if you treat your stakeholders like human beings rather than algorithms with bank accounts, you can actually build something that works.

But Gianni and his circle don’t want to do that. They want to bypass the continental confederations, wave massive piles of cash under the noses of smaller associations to buy their votes, and hand a slice of global sport’s greatest asset to American venture capitalists.

It is arrogant, it is cynical, and above all, it shows an absolute, catastrophic misunderstanding of what makes sport valuable. You can own the content. You can own the broadcast rights, the digital trademarks, and the stadium hot-dog stands. But if you destroy the context—if you destroy the trust, the tradition, and the delicate balance of competitive fair play—you are left holding a very expensive, empty box.

And on that bombshell, it’s time for Infantino to put the clipboards away, step out of the boardroom, and leave the game alone. Or even better, leave for good.