In late July 2026, FIFA unveiled a project meant to open a new chapter in how world football is financed. FIFA Forward Enterprise proposed carving out part of the commercial and operational activity linked to its tournaments into a FIFA-controlled company, and raising up to 4.2 billion dollars from investors in exchange for a minority stake. According to FIFA, the arrangement could substantially increase the funds distributed to its 211 member associations.
A few days later, the project was gone.
UEFA opposed it, together with all 55 European associations. Serious objections were also raised elsewhere in world football. The criticism was aimed not only at the business idea itself, but at the way it had been prepared and presented.
On 5 August, FIFA acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the process. In an official statement, the organisation noted that members of the FIFA Council and member associations may have felt insufficiently involved. An internal review of what had happened was announced.
This is the point at which the story stops being about a single multi-billion-dollar project.
It becomes a story about power.
The Project Collapsed. The Questions Did Not
The simplest reading of events goes like this: FIFA proposed a controversial business model, met firm resistance from its stakeholders and withdrew.
One could even argue that the system worked. The project was challenged, the associations spoke up, and the organisation reversed its decision.
That reading, however, skips a far more interesting question.
How did a project concerning some of the most valuable assets in world sport reach such an advanced stage, when several of the most important stakeholders, and people inside FIFA's own structures, later said they had not been properly involved?
The Associated Press and Reuters reported mounting tensions inside the organisation. Public voices distanced themselves from the project, and FIFA senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro stepped down. The criticism was no longer about FIFA Forward Enterprise alone, but about how decisions are made.
That is a meaningful difference.
The issue is not whether the idea was any good.
The issue is whether the system was able to test it properly before it became a problem.
FIFA Has Been Here Before
Today's governance crisis cannot be analysed without going back to 2015 and 2016.
After the largest institutional crisis in its history, FIFA went through a wide-ranging reform. The statutes were amended. Term limits were introduced. Independence criteria and eligibility checks for the most senior roles were strengthened. The stated aim also included a clearer separation of political functions from operational management, alongside greater transparency and accountability.
These are not the demands of today's FIFA critics.
They are elements of the reform that FIFA itself presented as the answer to its own crisis.
Eleven years on, the question is no longer whether world football needs good governance.
That much has been settled.
The harder question is different.
Does a formal governance architecture actually constrain power at the moment when it should?
FIFA has a Congress. It has a 37-member Council. It has committees. It has statutes. It has rules on conflicts of interest, eligibility checks and term limits.
On paper, the safeguards exist.
The FIFA Forward Enterprise crisis forces the question of how they work in practice.
Governance on Paper, Governance in Practice
Organisations like to measure governance maturity by counting structures.
There is a management board. There is a supervisory board. There is an audit committee. There is a conflict-of-interest policy. There are rules of procedure. Meetings are held. Minutes are written.
Everything adds up.
Then one genuinely difficult decision arrives, and it turns out that the formal map of the organisation says very little about where power actually sits.
Governance does not begin with the question of who is formally competent to decide.
It begins with less comfortable questions.
Who decides what information the board receives?
Who can effectively challenge a proposal from the president or the CEO?
Does a member of the oversight body have a real option to say no, or does the role end with approving a decision prepared in advance?
Does a dissenting view ever reach the people who decide?
Is it clear who carries responsibility if the decision turns out to be wrong?
And finally: what happens in an organisation when one person's formal position is further reinforced by relationships, access to information, political backing and control over the agenda?
An excellent set of statutes can coexist with weak governance.
One does not rule out the other.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Infantino
Gianni Infantino is the central figure in the current dispute, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.
It would still be a mistake to reduce the whole problem to whether he should continue to lead FIFA.
David Terrier, president of FIFPRO Europe, told Reuters on 12 August that the debate should move beyond a personal argument about leadership and address rebuilding the system, creating genuine counterweights to concentrated power.
That shifts the perspective.
Suppose, for a moment, that FIFA elects a new president tomorrow.
Does the flow of information automatically change?
Do the governing bodies become more independent?
Does the capacity to challenge decisions increase?
Are competences distributed differently?
Does the link between access to resources and political support disappear?
If the answer is no, we have changed the person, not the system.
This is one of the least convenient truths about governance. Organisations often try to solve structural problems with personnel decisions.
A new president.
A new CEO.
A new director.
A new board.
A new name provides a visible symbol of change. Rebuilding the machinery of power is harder, less spectacular and far more likely to create conflict.
Yet it is that rebuilding which determines whether the organisation ends up in the same place a few years later.
Loyalty to the Leader or to the Institution?
In the current FIFA crisis, Laura McAllister and Lise Klaveness have played a particularly interesting role.
Reuters described them as among the most visible figures questioning how FIFA is run. Both sit on the UEFA Executive Committee and belong to a very small group of women at the highest levels of power in world football.
It would be easy to turn this into an appealing story about women standing up to a powerful man.
It would be striking.
And far too simple.
What matters more is what their stance says about the role of an individual inside a governance system.
Klaveness pointed to checks and balances that were not working well enough. McAllister spoke about the need to change governance culture and to move away from a model in which sport is run as a set of personal spheres of influence.
This is an example of something that cannot be fully written into a statute.
The capacity to dissent.
A good board is not a group of people who can reach consensus efficiently.
A good board must also be a place where the direction proposed by the most influential person at the table can be challenged safely.
Otherwise unanimity may not be evidence of decision quality, but a symptom of a weak system.
Loyalty to an organisation does not always mean loyalty to its leader.
Sometimes it means precisely the opposite.
A Term Limit Is Only Text, Until Someone Has to Apply It
The current dispute around FIFA has produced one more instructive example.
On 17 August, the organisation FairSquare questioned whether Gianni Infantino is eligible to run again for the FIFA presidency in 2027. Its argument rests on the claim that his time in office between 2016 and 2019 should count towards the statutory term limit.
FIFA takes a different view.
Back in 2022, the FIFA Council confirmed the interpretation that the 2016-2019 period does not count as a term for the purposes of the limit in force. On that reading, Infantino may stand again.
There is no basis for presenting this dispute as settled.
Which is exactly why it is interesting.
A term limit looks like one of the simplest governance mechanisms available. Set a maximum period in office and write it into the statutes.
The difficulty appears when someone has to decide how the rule should be interpreted.
Who interprets the constraint?
How independent is that process?
Does the interpretation remain aligned with the purpose the constraint was created for?
Governance does not end at the moment a rule is written down.
A rule that limits power is only as strong as the institution able to apply it to the person who holds that power.
It Is Easy to Look at FIFA. Harder to Look at Your Own Organisation
A crisis at the largest football federation in the world offers a comfortable vantage point.
We can analyse billions of dollars, global politics, relations between confederations and decisions taken by people we will most likely never meet.
Let us scale the question down.
A sports club.
A national federation.
A regional association.
A foundation.
A league.
A small organisation where a dozen or so people have known each other for years.
The mechanics of power are not less relevant simply because the amount at stake is one million zloty rather than several billion dollars.
Sometimes they are easier to overlook.
The president has been with the organisation for fifteen years. He knows the sponsors, the local authority, the federation and the key partners. He is the one people call when a problem needs solving. He knows why a particular decision was taken five years ago. He has authority and results behind him.
That can be a huge asset.
It can also be the organisation's biggest risk.
Not because the president is doing anything wrong.
But because the organisation may gradually stop distinguishing its own capability from the capability of one individual.
That is exactly when governance should be at its strongest.
Not when the leader is weak.
When the leader is very strong.
The Ascendia Governance Stress Test
There is no single universal test that will tell you whether a sports organisation has good governance. There are, however, a few questions that quickly reveal where a closer look is warranted.
The framework below draws on the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, the Code for Sports Governance published by UK Sport and Sport England, and the governance benchmarks used by the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations. It does not replace a professional audit. Its purpose is different: to start an uncomfortable conversation.
1. POWER
The question: Is there a strategic decision that one person can, in practice, push through without effective control by another body?
We are not asking only about the statutes.
We are asking what actually happens.
Warning sign: formally the decision belongs to the board, but in practice the board never rejects a proposal from the president or the CEO.
2. INFORMATION
The question: Does the body overseeing the leader receive material information from sources the leader does not control?
You cannot supervise someone effectively if that person decides what the supervising body gets to see.
Warning sign: the board learns about the organisation almost exclusively from materials prepared by the person running it day to day.
3. CHALLENGE
The question: When was the last time a significant proposal from the president, CEO or a director was genuinely challenged?
This is not about conflict for its own sake. It is about the organisation's ability to test its own assumptions.
Warning sign: the most important strategic decisions are routinely taken unanimously, with no record of the alternatives considered.
4. ACCOUNTABILITY
The question: Before a strategic decision is taken, is it clear who answers for the outcome?
Accountability established only after a failure turns very easily into a search for someone to blame.
Warning sign: after a failed project the organisation can name the people who took part in the decision, but cannot name the person or body that was responsible for it.
5. CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The question: Can the system stop a decision by someone in a strong position when an actual or potential conflict of interest appears?
A conflict-of-interest policy is worth little if it only bites on people without influence.
Warning sign: the organisation has a procedure but cannot point to a single case in which applying it genuinely changed how a decision was made.
6. SUCCESSION
The question: What would happen tomorrow if the most important person in the organisation suddenly left?
Not in six months. Tomorrow.
Who knows the key relationships? Who has access to the information? Who understands the history behind the major decisions? Who can take responsibility?
Warning sign: the answer starts with the words, the president knows all of that.
If several of these questions cause discomfort, that does not yet mean the organisation is badly run.
It means you have found a place worth examining.
That is precisely what governance is for.
Not for confirming that everything is fine.
The Most Dangerous Leader Can Be a Very Good Leader
There is one more mistake that is easy to make in governance debates.
Treating control as a response to a lack of trust.
A strong control system should not exist because we distrust a particular president. It should exist regardless of who holds the office.
The greatest risk from concentrated power does not always appear when an organisation is run by someone incompetent.
Often it is the opposite.
An effective leader earns trust. Results reinforce the mandate. Partners want to talk to that person specifically. Decisions get taken faster, because the leader has been right many times before.
Gradually, procedures start to feel like an obstacle.
Control feels like bureaucracy.
Dissent feels like disloyalty.
And questions feel like something slowing the organisation down.
No rule has to be broken.
It is enough that the safeguards stop being used.
Mature governance is therefore not a system designed against bad people.
It is a system designed for ordinary people operating under power, pressure, ambition, incomplete information and conflicting interests.
The FIFA Test Is Our Test Too
We do not yet know the long-term consequences of the FIFA Forward Enterprise crisis.
FIFA has announced a review of the process. Its critics are calling for deeper reform. A dispute over the future of the current leadership is also under way.
Its outcome should not be prejudged.
One lesson, however, can already be drawn.
After the crisis of a decade ago, FIFA built a new governance architecture. Rules, limits, structures and mechanisms were created to protect the organisation from an excessive concentration of power.
The current crisis is therefore a test of more than one decision.
It is a test of whether governance reform can survive contact with real power.
That question is worth asking in far smaller organisations too.
The easiest response to a governance crisis is to replace the person at the top. A new name creates a sense of a fresh start.
It is far harder to rebuild the system so that the next leader, whatever their competence, popularity and political strength, has to operate within limits they cannot move themselves.
Perhaps that is how you recognise a mature organisation.
Not by how much freedom it can give a good leader.
By whether it still works on the day it ends up with the wrong one.