In 2026, while following SHB Da Nang through a V-League season with eleven wins and watching a young Ha Duc Chinh score nine goals, I sat next to a man responsible for the club's finances at Hoa Xuan Stadium. He told me something I later encountered almost word for word in the debates in Zurich: "Football does not lack money. What it lacks is people willing to decide where that money flows."

Today's story is FIFA. Not a match, not a transfer, but a letter. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has sent a formal document to the FIFA Council and the 211 member association presidents, proposing an independent review of the organisation's governance structure. The move follows the shelving in July of the FIFA Forward Enterprise commercial project, and a public request from UEFA and Concacaf asking FIFA to analyse the use of its financial reserves and consider distributing them to member federations.

After forty-five years watching this industry at sixty-one, I have learned one thing: FIFA's biggest pivots rarely begin with a tournament. They begin with an administrative document. This time, that document is exposing a power line the entire football world has to face.

Context: from an abandoned project to a review proposal

To understand the weight of Infantino's letter, it needs to sit inside a sequence of events. FIFA Forward Enterprise was designed as a commercial vehicle involving private investment, tied to the commercial rights of FIFA competitions. The core idea was to open a new capital channel, converting future broadcast and commercial rights into assets that could be valued and partly sold to outside investors.

In July, the project was suspended after opposition from both inside and outside the organisation. What matters is not that it stopped, but how. FIFA published no detail on the investment structure, named no potential investors, and released no projected revenue figures. From what I have gathered through reliable channels, that opacity was the trigger for confederations, not simply the money question.

Weeks later, UEFA and Concacaf issued a formal request: FIFA should analyse its reserve usage and consider redistribution to the 211 member federations. That is highly significant, because both confederations are financially strong. UEFA is the richest confederation in the world. Concacaf controls a huge broadcast market in North America. When they publicly demand FIFA share reserves, that is a political signal, not an accounting request.

Then Infantino stepped forward with the independent review. The proposal centres on four pillars: the role of the President, the role of the Bureau, the role of the FIFA Council, and the role of Congress. In other words, he has put the entire power-sharing architecture of FIFA on the scales.

One mechanical detail deserves emphasis. The proposal is not immediately binding. The FIFA Council must decide whether a review happens, how it happens, and with what scope. Any statutory change would require Congress approval. The Council meeting scheduled for 15 October has been identified as the first checkpoint.

Infantino has also stated that FIFA Forward Enterprise was never formally presented for approval before it became public. That is a carefully placed sentence: it acknowledges a procedural problem while shifting responsibility to an undefined party.

Core analysis: the power structure and the reserves question

FIFA's power pyramid has four tiers. At the top sits Congress, with 211 member associations, each holding one vote. Below it is the FIFA Council, the standing decision-making body. Then the Bureau, comprising the President and vice presidents. And the operational tier, the general secretariat and administrative apparatus.

Running alongside this structure are six confederations: UEFA, Concacaf, AFC, CAF, CONMEBOL and OFC. Legally, FIFA is the apex body. In practice, confederations control regional competitions, regional broadcast revenue, and political influence over member associations in their regions.

The key fact sits here: the review Infantino proposes is a rebalancing of power inside this pyramid, not a technical reform.

When you put the roles of the President, Bureau, Council and Congress on the table, you are asking who decides what, when, and with what level of consultation. For FIFA, any change at this tier cascades downward: smaller member associations gain voice, larger confederations gain earlier influence, and the President loses part of his capacity to launch strategic projects unilaterally.

That explains why the proposal stresses an early consultation mechanism: confederations and member associations must be consulted from the earliest stage of strategic projects. In theory, that is a governance improvement. In practice, it is a brake on the speed of FIFA leadership decision-making.

Back to the reserves. In the document, FIFA stresses that a federation's stance on an institutional initiative should not determine its access to development and solidarity programmes. That phrasing suggests prior concern that some federations might face retaliation for opposing FIFA Forward Enterprise.

To me, this is the single most thought-provoking detail in the story. If the relationship between a federation and FIFA operates on a development-funding flow, then the independence of that federation's vote deserves serious scrutiny. How will a small federation in Africa or Oceania, with an operating budget largely dependent on FIFA's development programme, vote when that vote may affect its own funding?

The UEFA and Concacaf request to analyse reserves inverts the question. If FIFA can demonstrate sufficiently large reserves, the argument "we need the money for development" loses some of its weight. And if FIFA agrees to redistribute part of its reserves to 211 member associations, the financial dependency between member associations and the central apparatus diminishes.

This is why I treat this contest as structural, not personal. Infantino is the central figure, but the story is far larger than one man.

Reference experience from the V-League and Asian football

Across forty-five years of watching football, I have repeatedly seen how decisions at the highest tier flow down to the pitch through pipelines nobody sees. In 2026, as the V-League shifted hard toward digital platforms and younger colleagues began livestreaming on Facebook from the training ground at Hoa Xuan, I realised something: Vietnamese football is affected by continental and global decisions far faster than fans imagine.

One concrete example. When the AFC adjusts the World Cup qualifying calendar, it is not only the national team that is affected. The V-League calendar has to shift, clubs must renegotiate player contracts, and sponsors must recalculate brand activation plans. That chain of consequences runs for months, and it starts in a meeting no Vietnamese reporter is allowed to enter.

For this FIFA story, the potential consequences are larger still. If the independent review leads to changes in the solidarity payment mechanism or the international match calendar, smaller member associations like Vietnam will be among the first to feel it, positively or negatively. I have seen small shifts in FIFA Forward criteria force grassroots projects in Da Nang to adjust disbursement plans. Changes in scale, disbursement thresholds and counterpart-funding deadlines can matter more than a national team win.

My experience tells me this: the FIFA governance debates that sports media rarely cover are the ones that affect Vietnamese football most directly.

Contrarian angle: who really benefits from an independent review?

The first reaction of most observers is to assume an independent review strengthens transparency. That is intuitive. But watching sports across decades gives me a different angle.

The first question to ask is: who chooses the reviewer, who pays the reviewer, and who defines the review's scope? Under the current structure, the FIFA Council decides whether a review happens and how. If the Council is dominated by the incumbent apparatus, the review's independence is not structurally guaranteed, no matter what the label says.

This is not personal cynicism. It is an internal-control principle proven across many large sports organisations. When the party under evaluation controls the evaluation process, the evaluation tends to preserve the existing structure.

The second contrarian angle concerns small member associations. Many assume the 211 federations will side with reform. But if early consultation slows development projects, the federations dependent on development funding are the first to lose. A federation in Asia or Africa, with youth development largely financed by FIFA, has little to gain from a slower process. It needs money to flow faster, not more transparently.

That is the paradox. The review larger federations want may slow the money smaller federations need. And Infantino's choice to write directly to the 211 member presidents, rather than only through the confederation channel, may be a tactic to build direct support at the member-association tier, bypassing the confederation tier.

The third contrarian angle concerns UEFA itself. UEFA is the richest confederation in the world. If FIFA redistributes part of its reserves to 211 member associations, including UEFA's own member associations, UEFA benefits indirectly through its national associations. This is a short-term argument in UEFA's favour, but it may also be a long-term strategy to reshape FIFA's power structure in a more decentralised direction. Both readings can be true, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Scenarios and what to watch

Three scenarios are possible for the review.

The downside scenario: the FIFA Council indefinitely delays or rejects the review proposal. The gap between Infantino and the confederations widens. External pressure, including political pressure from governments, rises.

The central scenario: the Council approves a review with a limited scope. Consultation begins. Statutory reform is slow and modest. The power balance is broadly unchanged.

The optimistic scenario: the review is genuinely independent. Early consultation mechanisms are established and operational. Institutional trust improves. FIFA strategic projects take longer to launch but are more politically sustainable.

The nearest checkpoint is the FIFA Council meeting scheduled for 15 October. If the Council merely postpones, tensions may escalate. If the Council approves a review with a clear scope, the consultation process begins.

Separately, the reserves dispute between FIFA and UEFA and Concacaf is a parallel risk. If those two confederations continue publicly demanding reserve analysis and redistribution, pressure on FIFA's central apparatus will not ease, whatever the review outcome.

Transmission effects on regional football

At the macro level, this story affects how global football money is allocated. But the effects do not stop there.

If new consultation mechanisms slow FIFA's commercial projects, private capital may become more cautious about engaging with initiatives tied to FIFA competition rights. I consider this a fairly likely medium-term consequence. Private investors need a stable, predictable decision environment. An organisation whose decision process depends on consensus among 211 member associations is not an ideal environment for large commercial projects.

For Vietnam, the most direct consequence lies in development funding and youth training programmes. If FIFA adjusts the solidarity payment mechanism in a more decentralised direction, the VFF and youth academies such as PVF or the Hanoi FC Academy may gain access to additional resources. If FIFA tightens approval processes, disbursement timelines for grassroots projects may lengthen.

I return to the story at Hoa Xuan in 2026. Standing in the stands watching Ha Duc Chinh make runs in a training session, I thought of what stood behind him: an academy, a federation, a chain of decisions at a higher tier that players never see. A review in Zurich sounds distant, but the road it travels can reach a youth training ground in central Vietnam.

Reflection

What I learned after mispronouncing Karim Ansarifard's name three times in the first half in Saint Petersburg in 2026 is this: every small mistake exposes a hole in the system. I had to spend two weeks reviewing broadcast tapes and asking twelve colleagues to flag my pronunciation errors so I could build my own transliteration table. My personal error could be fixed, but to fix it I had to accept a review process outside my own ego.

FIFA is at exactly that point. The organisation can accept a genuinely independent review, with a clear scope, an externally chosen reviewer, and fully published recommendations. Or it can choose a controlled review to ease political pressure this season and let the story pass.

The difference between those two options is not in the statement. It is in what is published after 15 October, and in who is empowered to ask the questions. World football has been through similar reform cycles before. This time, the signal to watch is not the content of the proposal but how the FIFA Council handles it in its first session. When an organisation agrees to write about its own power structure, the hard part is not the writing. It is allowing others to read.