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In the battle for the control of football, has Europe just massively raised the stakes?
You know, this strikes at the very heart of our game.
And the governance and due diligence has been abysmal.
So I think there was a real sense of unity amongst the 55 countries.
A threat from European nations to boycott the World Cup.
How will FIFA respond?
I think on this occasion, Infantino's got to back down.
A case of Europe 1, FIFA 0?
World Cup report on the BBC.
Yes, I'm Ed Butler.
And in the global fight for the soul of football, could we be heading to extra time and penalties?
We get the view of a corporate branding expert on the FIFA plan.
Also in the show, we're up close with some Chinese robots.
And as the bombs rain down once again on the Islamic Republic, we have a firsthand view of economic life.
Inside Iran.
So European football's governing body, UEFA, has announced that its members are going to boycott any future FIFA World Cup.
That's if FIFA goes ahead with its plans to sell off a $20 billion stake in a new commercial entity to run the World Cup and its other events.
The decision was taken at a virtual meeting of the 55 national associations, which are members of UEFA, on Thursday.
UEFA Vice President Laura McAllister said FIFA's proposal to sell stakes in the competitions to private investors posed a genuine existential threat to the game.
I'm delighted to say there was absolute unity about the need to stop this catastrophic proposal of selling off part of football to private equity.
Unity amongst all 55 nations and a threat of a boycott of FIFA competitions.
So that would be the World Cup women and men's.
Should FIFA not back down from this ridiculous proposal?
So it was a very productive meeting.
We made our voices very well heard from a Wales perspective, but also from my own position as a vice president.
You know, this strikes at the very heart of our game.
And the governance and due diligence has been abysmal.
So I think there was a real sense of unity amongst the 55 countries about the need to stop this.
Well, the former chairman of the Football Association in England, Sir David Bernstein, told the BBC that ultimately FIFA will have to back down.
I can't believe in the long term that there will be a schism of this sort, because it would be a lose-lose for everybody.
FIFA can't afford not to have European nations plaguing their competitions in the World Cup.
And frankly, we in a way, Europe, also really can't afford not to be part of it.
There's every reason to try and settle this.
But I think on this occasion, Infantino has got to back down.
Well, it's estimated that FIFA earned around $15 billion from the 2026 World Cup that was just held in Mexico, Canada and the United States, making the men's World Cup the biggest single sporting event in the world.
But with European participation in doubt now, is that economic juggernaut under threat?
Ricardo Fort is a former head of global sponsorships at Coca-Cola and Visa.
With experience working on World Cup deals, he's now an independent sponsorship strategy advisor.
The World Cup is the biggest and the brightest sports sponsorship that exists.
Very special and very exclusive for a very limited number of brands.
So what would your response be to the news that UEFA could be planning, this is all the European giants of football, could be planning to boycott the next World Cup if this proposal from FIFA goes through?
First of all, I hope it doesn't happen because the World Cup is such a special event and it will be a disaster for fans first, but also for commercial partners, for sponsors, because a World Cup without the European countries is a completely different event.
It is by no means a World Cup.
Yeah, I mean, one thinks of the rifts we've seen recently in golf, for example, or the splits and all those different belts that exist in boxing.
I mean, put together, they completely diminish the overarching strength of the sport itself as a unifying force for fans and indeed for marketers.
Well, I think that in general, more money flowing into sport is a good thing.
Now, of course, we have to think about how the governance of sport is going to evolve, how the events are going to be evolving and be different in the future.
There are good examples of investors entering sports and making it better.
So we have to learn from the experiences of Live Golf and Formula One to make sure that whatever changes impact football are to make it better, not the other way around.
Out of interest, what do you think of what you've seen of the FIFA proposal, the one to sell off 20% of future marketing rights for the World Cup?
Well, I think there are things that FIFA are saying that make sense.
So the separation between commercial arm of football, the one that implements the events and deals with sponsors and broadcasters, separating that from the football entity that manages the governance of football, the rules of the game, development, is something that in theory makes a lot of sense.
I guess the problem is how you implement this strategy, which partner you bring to be financially supporting it, the people involved, how these two organizations will interact.
And I think that there is a lot of criticism about the idea of selling football.
Selling football is a very catchy headline, but the concept behind it is not totally wrong.
We just need to discuss how to make it work in a way that benefits everyone.
Indeed.
And there is so little that isn't known, isn't there?
I mean, this seems that they're being asked to sign a blank cheque almost to a plan that they don't understand.
We don't know what the governance of this new body would look like.
We don't know who's going to be in charge.
Some people are saying it will be Gianni Infantino himself.
Some people are saying it will be someone else.
Correct.
And it's not very productive, all this speculation now, and people are making decisions based on limited information.
Hopefully, in the next few days and weeks, this is going to be better explained so that UEFA and the other confederations can decide what they're going to do based on facts.
Would you be advising those who might be investing in this new FIFA vehicle if it came to being?
I mean, do you think there would be a big appetite in the world of the sponsors who you speak to or have worked with, for example, to take a stake in this future World Cup vehicle?
Oh, absolutely.
If there was a vehicle that will be open for investments for brands that are sponsors as well, they should absolutely do it because that will make sure that they are more engaged with the company and the development of the workup and be an integral part of how the workup is implemented at the end of the day.
Do you think your former paymasters at Coca-Cola, at Visa, some of the other big sponsor names associated with the World Cup, do you think that they'll be on the phone right now to FIFA saying, sort this out, sort this out fast.
There is an awful lot at stake here.
All the sponsors, they are on the phone with FIFA every day because it's a very close relationship and they deal with each other on a daily basis.
So yeah, I'll be surprised if they have not called yet.
But they are probably just giving them time to figure out what they are going to do.
But there is nothing a sponsor can do to put pressure on FIFA to make decisions about this.
Sponsors are not invited to this conversation.
They are not part of this.
And they may complain privately or publicly.
But at the end of the day, this is a football administration issue that FIFA is going to decide along with the federations.
And eventually they will inform the partners what the final decision is.
Brand consultant Ricardo Fort.
And I should say that we recorded that interview before CONCACAF, the federation representing North and Central America and the Caribbean, also voted to reject this FIFA proposal.
So where does that leave the ideas that have been put forward by Gianni Infantino's FIFA?
Those close to it have been pushing back.
Former Liberty media president Greg Maffay, who's acting as a commercial advisor on the project, told the Financial Times newspaper the $20 billion plan does not amount to selling the World Cup, he says.
It would be good for grassroots football and would result in FIFA having majority control forever.
I'm joined now by Tarek Panjer, a global sports correspondent for The New York Times.
Remind us, Tarek, why is he wrong, Greg Maffei?
I mean, why is this FIFA proposal actually so terrible, according to those outraged voices we've been hearing from today?
Because it's precisely what it is doing.
It is selling 20%.
In FIFA's commercial activities to private investors and how this
Deal came about is also extremely opaque.
It was done in the shadows.
It was done in smoke-filled rooms, if people still smoke in those rooms.
And it was suddenly then sprung up.
But I mean, sports everywhere are getting into the corporate side, aren't they?
They're coupling up with finances to help monetise the huge assets that sport represents nowadays.
Yeah.
Some of those sports are in desperate need of cash.
You can, in a way, as a result of football's enormous popularity is across the airwaves.
It is dominating the conversation, maybe even on your show.
And we're not talking about other sports.
So they are kind of in need of cash injections.
COVID wasn't great.
However, this organization, FIFA, is swimming in cash.
It is absolutely full of money.
Now, this idea that Gianni Infantino wants to turbocharge the development of the game in certain countries, he can actually do that tomorrow with his own cash reserves.
There's actually no financial need or logic to do this.
Whereas some of those other sports you might have mentioned might have required that.
Also, FIFA is a not-for-profit, almost like a charity.
It's a development body.
The idea that, can you imagine UNICEF giving away 20% shares to, I don't know, Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia or whatever?
That would be really, really strange.
There's so many strands to this thing.
You mentioned at the start of this broadcast whether it's going to be extra time and penalties.
The one thing you didn't say is, is this going to be red card?
I think Gianni Infantino is in...
An extremely challenging position.
Well, I mean, let's get on to that then.
I mean, CONCACAF have said no, right?
We've already heard that on top of UEFA, who are unanimous, we're told, in rejecting these plans.
I mean, simply then, for the plan itself, do you think that is now dead in the water?
It...
For all intents and purposes,
Yes, you have had statements from UEFA about a boycott, which I believe, even if all 55 of these won't, when the rubber hits the road, won't be fully into that, maybe they won't.
But I think enough of the nations would be happy
To boycott under these conditions that kind of kills the World Cup as a competition.
I mean, you can't imagine investors being piling in right now, given the size and the value of those two territories that are pulling out.
To be honest with you, here's the reality here.
If, say, Germany, England, Spain and France, just those four countries...
Said you know what we're not going to play in the world cup this thing would be toast so so what you have here is is people kind of smelling the the the the
The air here, and knowing that this is the direction of travel.
And they're all pushing here.
CONCACAF, don't forget, is full of all of these small Caribbean islands, which ostensibly would be ones who benefit from this $20 million handout.
Now, if you've got these guys saying, yeah, we're not into this.
It almost kills this part of the conversation.
What it really does raise is the legitimacy, the future of Gianni Infantino as the front man for global football.
Really?
I mean, do you think he will be toppled by this?
I think this is a major, major threat to him being a credible leader for global football.
He has tried to do this in 2018.
That's the other thing.
We have really short memories.
This is an iteration of something he tried to do just a couple of years after assuming office, tried to sell football to SoftBank then.
But here, this is now because of the link to Trump's and Kushner's and all of this in light of the year he's had.
I think this is where the conversation goes now.
I think this competition or this idea is dead.
And now we will look at the future of Gianni Infantino.
Tariq Panja, Global Sports Correspondent for The New York Times.
Thank you very much indeed.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
That is the sound of US bombing on Wednesday night targeting Iranian targets in the Persian Gulf.
The US military said it has completed a heavy wave of strikes in retaliation for Tuesday's attempted ballistic missile attacks on American forces.
This will, of course, inevitably feel like another blow for the Iranian economy and the people of Iran who have had to live with the threats to their physical safety and their economic future for months.
It's in every Iranian's nature to adapt to the circumstances.
It was hard.
It was frightening.
We were worried.
We were anxious.
But we still tried to live within those very conditions, to have a life, to keep our daily routine, to remain hopeful for the future.
Wherever you go, people are talking about the war.
If you go to the bakery to buy bread, you see people talking about it.
You'll hear some say the Americans are going to attack either tomorrow or the day after.
The state of limbo.
It's worse than war.
Voices there from wartime Iran.
Well, the BBC's senior international investigations correspondent, Nawal al-Maghafi, has just returned from an extensive trip through Iran, travelling by train across the country and speaking to people from every corner of its society.
We got to speak to people on camera and we also gathered testimony for people who wanted to remain anonymous about how this war has impacted them, how they feel about it, how they feel about the regime.
So it was quite a fascinating look into what Iranians are feeling today.
How much do you think life has changed for people since February, since the bombing started?
I would say massively.
I mean, already people were suffering, of course.
We saw those protests in January.
Hundreds of thousands of people go out to the streets and call for a better life, for the economy to get better.
People were already feeling the strains of poverty.
The sanctions that have been imposed on them for years.
And they were the ones bearing the brunt of that.
But of course, then the war came and things only got worse.
And now we're seeing the closure
Or the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
And we think of the impact it has on the global economy.
But people forget that it's also impacting people within Iran too.
Yeah, I've seen a figure of...
87% inflation.
That was a recent number by one analysis.
There was close to 10% unemployment, now a rising figure.
I guess people in Iran have, for years, have had to learn to be self-reliant.
That economy has had to be
Self-reliant.
But I mean, how did you see signs of food shortages, of queues, of literally things fundamentally not functioning?
Well, first, on that point that you just made about a country having to become self-reliant, that's something that really took me by surprise.
I mean, wherever you go, all the shops, they were stocked up on Coca-Cola that isn't actually Coca-Cola.
It is made in Iran and produced in Iran or chocolate bars that look like chocolate bars we get here in the West, but actually were produced and are made by companies within Iran.
But in terms of queues, I didn't see any queues, but there wasn't a single person that I spoke to on that journey anywhere.
That wasn't affected by inflation in some way.
I spoke to this young girl called Supide on that train who is a beautician.
She does people's nails and eyebrows and hair for a living.
And she told me that she had to shut her business down as a result of this war.
She said, you know, things were already hard before this war, but now it's so expensive.
People can't afford to come.
For my services that I had to let everyone go and I had to shut it all down.
We also met this football team on that train and they told me, you know, we haven't trained in months since this war began and I said, oh, is it because it's too dangerous?
That's the first thing that came to mind and they said no because it's so expensive to travel from city to city to compete.
And so all our training has had to stop.
It is the first thing they talk about, the impact of inflation, the impact of the economy.
This has made things a whole lot worse.
Do you think that added hardship is reflecting badly on the regime itself?
Or is there a sense of togetherness in the face of bombardment from the US and Israel?
I would say that there has been a shift.
So initially, when we saw those protests in January, it was anger solely towards the government for the suffering that people were going through.
They felt like decisions that were being made by the government
They were having to bear the brunt of.
And I think that now, you know, you see the bombing of that school in Minab in which 120 children were killed.
People are seeing residential areas bombed.
People are seeing the way the United States is reacting to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by bombarding their cities.
And now that anger is not just being channeled towards the government.
But also towards the U.S. and Israel for their intervention.
They're starting to say, you said you were coming to help us.
You said you were coming to save us.
Now you no longer care about us.
That is exactly what one of the contributors told us.
He said the U.S.'s focus now is the Strait of Hormuz, money and oil.
They no longer care about the people.
The people have become irrelevant.
And that is something I heard time and time again.
The BBC's senior international correspondent, Nawal al-Meghafi, who is reporting from Iran on condition that none of her material was used on the BBC's Persian service.
These are restrictions that apply to all international media organisations operating in Iran.
You can watch her full report, Inside Iran, The People and the Power, on BBC World Service YouTube.
Now for some other market news.
Kerry Leahy is with us, an economist at Columbia University.
Another big results day on Wall Street, Kerry.
An amazing bounce for Microsoft, too.
It was incredible.
They were up 16%, and it was due to two things.
One, cloud revenues were very strong, and probably even more importantly to the tenor of the market, their AI business is booming as well.
Investors have been trying to figure out who the weakest of the big firms are, particularly regarding AI, and they dumped on Meta when Meta's stock was down 8% because the cash flow was very close to zero, meaning if you include the cost of AI expenditures, they aren't making any money even though they're generating tons of revenue.
Their probability is being gobbled up by AI.
Yeah, Amazon beat expectations reporting growth in cloud and artificial intelligence.
It's chips division.
Gosh, I remember when Amazon used to be an online retailer.
Do you remember?
That's right.
I remember when they were the world's largest bookstore.
You got to admire their ability to diversify.
And they were like a mini Microsoft today.
They were up only 9% off of a lot of that retail.
Good news.
But they've proved to be a formidable competitor in just about every slot one can think of, whether it's selling Pampers or doing AI.
It's very up and down, isn't it?
I mean, how do you invest in a marketplace?
Well, I think you need to decide that the money that's going into this area is money, and I'm not being facetious when I say this, you can afford to lose.
You probably want to have a small amount of your portfolio just in case things explode.
But once again, the general view among economists and analysts is that you don't try to find a needle in a haystack.
You just buy the haystack, and one of the needles will really make a lot of money.
Yeah, money in your pocket and a strong stomach.
US economy grew less than expected, 1.5% in the second quarter.
Is this disappointing?
Not really.
The market expectation was 1.75%, and it was a drag from inventories.
Once again, you can produce output by actually making it, which increases GDP, or you can draw down inventories.
Inventories are being drawn down.
The actual consumer sector was doing better than one would be suggested.
So I think the underlying demand in the economy is still well above 2%, which in this slow growth world is pretty good stuff.
Let's look at Japan just for a moment.
The yen jumped 3% as speculation over government intervention there in Tokyo has been swirling.
I mean, it's surged against the US dollar by the most since 2022, which looks like a pretty big jump.
I mean, what's going on here?
Well, I think it's what you just mentioned, that they are thinking about intervening.
It's also the fact that inflation has picked up.
It's still quite low.
And the administration seems to be committed to some form of deficit finance, which tends to raise interest rates and make the currents more valuable.
At the same time, I think they got a helping hand from the
Fed yesterday because the markets were left with the feeling the Fed may not be as tough on inflation as they thought.
And that would actually be helpful to the end.
I think the end reacted to the end after a day of thinking about it.
OK, thank you very much.
That's Kerry Leahy there, an economist at Columbia University with the market news.
Now, Washington has this week moved to block new foreign-made robots from the US.
Over market, over national security concerns.
The rules cover everything from humanoid and warehouse robots to some robotic vacuum cleaners.
These measures could hit Chinese manufacturers the hardest and Beijing says it may retaliate.
China has, of course, long been a world leader in warehouse robotics and its technology is being used by major retailers around the world.
But as automation spreads, so do questions about what it means for the workers and the robots that are replacing and how far the technology might go.
Our Asia business correspondent...
Suranjana Tiwari has been to the city of Hefei in China to find out more.
This is the headquarters of Geek Plus in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei.
The company has become the world's largest supplier of autonomous mobile warehouse robots, with customers including Decathlon, Tesco and Walmart.
The robots don't follow rails or conveyor belts.
Instead, they navigate using cameras, sensors and QR codes stuck to the warehouse floor.
Yan Yu Liu is head of communications for Geek+.
At the early stage, the challenge is to have the customers to recognize and believe those kinds of robot technologies can really create values.
But right now, what we see in the market is most of the companies, they see the trend and they use smart robotics to transform their logistics.
Warehouse automation has existed for decades.
What's changed is that software can now coordinate hundreds of autonomous robots at the same time.
And so companies can deploy them without having to build special infrastructure.
Other Chinese companies are going even further.
Humanoid robots with two arms and two legs are being tested inside factories, where they're inspecting products and carrying out simple tasks.
The ambition is to build robots that can work in spaces designed for people, without factories needing to be rebuilt around automation.
Warehouse operators say today's autonomous robots remain far more practical for moving goods around.
Human-like robots may be the industry's long-term goal, but there's still some way from becoming a common sight on factory and warehouse floors.
That's Surinjana Tiwari with that report from the heartland of industrial China.
And that's it for this edition of World Business Report on the day that European footballing nations threatened to boycott the FIFA World Cup.
From me and the rest of the team here in Salford, thanks very much for listening.
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Hello, Greg Jenner here.
I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously.
Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history.
And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey.
And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us.
And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch.
We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parris.
So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you.
Bye.
