GENEVA (AP) — FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s plan to create a $20 billion company running the World Cup with private investors including the Kushner family was announced Tuesday — and immediately attacked by European soccer body UEFA.
“It is not FIFA’s to sell,” UEFA said in a statement. “None of us are the owners of football.”
Infantino's plans to form FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) running competitions like the World Cup and Club World Cup were first reported by The Times of London and the Financial Times.
FIFA said in a statement that FFE would raise up to $4.2 billion later this year to help fund development programs "based on an initial equity valuation of $20 billion by carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests.”
FIFA is working with J.P. Morgan while investors would include Thrive Eternal launched by Joshua Kushner, whose brother Jared Kushner is a son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The men’s World Cup that finished this month only deepened the political and personal ties between Trump and Infantino, and fueled concerns about those ties including from UEFA.
“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade — especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially,” UEFA said Tuesday, responding to the reports of selling stakes in FIFA competitions.
FIFA is currently a Swiss-based not-for-profit association of its 211 national member federations worldwide.
Those 211 members must approve any plan and would get the chance “to access up to $20 million in one-off capital,” FIFA said.
“This is about the democratization of football worldwide,” Infantino said in a FIFA statement.
UEFA, however, said it took reports of the project “extremely seriously. So should every national Football Association.”
“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” said UEFA, which comprises 55 of the FIFA members.
The project announced Tuesday is the second time in Infantino’s increasingly controversial 11-year presidency he has tried to push through a multi-billion dollar deal with private backers.
In 2018, Infantino proposed a secretive $25 billion offer over 12 years with SoftBank of Japan to create new global competitions, including an expanded men’s Club World Cup, seemingly backed by Saudi Arabian money.
That ultimately failed after meeting fierce resistance from UEFA, which saw threats to its prize assets: the Champions League and the European Championship.
Infantino still built closer ties to Saudi soccer and the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup and largely funded the revamped men’s Club World Cup hosted in the U.S. last year.
The financial success of the just-ended World Cup has looked likely to ensure Infantino is re-elected next year unopposed for a fourth and final term in office through 2031.
Speculation has swirled for years that Infantino might want a different global role in soccer beyond his FIFA presidency, which is due to end when he is 61.
The Times reported Tuesday that a CEO-like commissioner role of the new FFE operation could be created for Infantino.
“This has never been discussed,” FIFA said in a statement Tuesday. “However, the FIFA president and the FIFA administration will and must have leading roles in this entity — if approved.”
There was no timetable suggested Tuesday for debate and decisions by FIFA, its ruling Council chaired by Infantino, and the 211 members.
FIFA is scheduled to hold an online congress on Nov. 23 to confirm hosts of the Women's World Cup editions in 2031 and 2035.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino and President Donald J. Trump present the trophy to Spain's Rodri (16) after the World Cup final soccer match between Spain and Argentina in East Rutherford, N.J., near New York, Sunday, July 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
President Donald Trump, left, speaks with FIFA President Gianni Infantino as confetti falls at the conclusion of the World Cup championship final soccer match between Spain and Argentina in East Rutherford, N.J., Sunday, July 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
STARKE, Fla. (AP) — Florida is set to become the first state in nearly a decade to carry out two executions in a single day, planning lethal injections Tuesday for an ex-police officer convicted of a young girl's murder and an octogenarian who would be the second-oldest inmate put to death in modern U.S. history.
The planned injections come 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began stepping up executions at a rate unseen in modern times in Florida. Not since 2017 when Arkansas carried out two death sentences on the same day has a state planned back-to-back executions.
James Aren Duckett, 68, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at noon at Florida State Prison near Starke, followed about six hours later by 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone, who also would become the oldest prisoner executed in Florida's modern history.
Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while working as a police officer in a small central Florida city in 1987, and Occhicone was convicted of the 1986 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents.
They would become Florida’s 11th and 12th inmates to be executed this year.
The Florida Supreme Court denied appeals for both men last week. Duckett’s attorneys had asked for another stay, claiming that Duckett is innocent and that the state’s handling of the DNA evidence is the reason for the inconclusive results. Occhicone’s attorneys argued that several age-related ailments, including kidney and prostate problems, could make his execution especially painful, constituting cruel and unusual punishment.
Both men still had appeals pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
A Florida prison official said Tuesday morning that the department was confident in its readiness to carry out both executions.
The governor hasn’t said why he scheduled two executions on the same day.
DeSantis, who leaves office in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous high was eight executions set in 2014.
If Tuesday’s executions proceed, that would bring the total for DeSantis’ final two years in office up to 31 overall, compared to just nine executions during the first six years of his administration. Another execution is scheduled for August.
DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, setting a March execution date. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days before that date to allow for DNA testing of old evidence that couldn’t be performed at the time of the original trial because of technical limitations. The results were inconclusive, meaning they did not exonerate Duckett or definitively connect him to the crime. Judges have allowed the jury verdict to stand.
When Occhicone's death warrant was signed late last month, his was the only execution scheduled for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court removed Duckett's stay on July 8, DeSantis signed a new death warrant and added Duckett to Occhicone’s execution date, which hadn't been done in Florida in more than 60 years. Florida Department of Corrections records show multiple executions on a single day were more common in the past, with the last being on May 12, 1964.
Nationwide, it's not uncommon for two different states to hold executions on the same date, but it's less common for a single state to perform two. Before Arkansas executed two inmates on the same day in 2017, Texas executed two convicted killers on a single day in 2000, the year it put to death 40 prisoners.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has urged DeSantis to halt both executions.
“July 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty,” the group’s executive director, Grace Hanna, said in a statement. “These are two profoundly different cases, but they point to the same troubling reality: Florida continues to expand the use of capital punishment, despite mounting evidence that it is not what Floridians want.”
The governor's office has rarely commented on executions over the past 18 months. DeSantis has previously said his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for sentences to be carried out.
“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” the governor said in 2025. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”
Occhicone would become Florida's oldest inmate to be executed, just weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that spot, the second man just a week older than the first at his time of death. Recent executions have highlighted the nation's aging death-row population and renewed questions about the humanity of administering capital punishment to inmates who might die soon from natural causes.
Occhicone also would become the second-oldest prisoner known to be executed in modern U.S. history after 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr. in Alabama in 2018. Moody was condemned for a wave of mail bombs in 1989 that killed a federal judge and wounded a Black civil rights attorney.
Florida executions are all by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.
FILE - Clouds hover over the entrance of the Florida State Prison in Starke, Fla., Aug. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Curt Anderson, file)
