It’s now settled that the proposal by Gianni Infantino, as President of FIFA, to convert ownership of the World Cup into a partly commercially owned venture has failed. Almost as soon as the proposition was uttered by the FIFA chief, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) made it clear that the World Cup “cannot be treated as an investment product.” Both the African and South American football associations said they would study and respond in time to the Infantino plan. Such a commercialisation of the World Cup, arguably the greatest publicly held world event, followed by hundreds of millions of people from all over the world, would surely, if agreed to, have untold negative consequences which cannot at this point have been fully appreciated. It’s certain that a structure based on commercial ownership, which must surely increase over time, would go against purely footballing objectives and the spread of the game around the world, as experienced at the recent World Cup.