The FIFA president accused journalists and other detractors of having been “consumed by hate and criticism” during the World Cup. Those sitting “behind their pens”, he wrote, had spread false rumours while FIFA worked on the front lines to deliver the tournament. He reduced the relationship between FIFA and its critics to five words: “While you divide, we unite.”

Forty-eight hours later, FIFA asked those same critics, and the football world, to absorb a proposal that would fundamentally change how the sport is financed.

FIFA plans to create a new commercial company called FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE. The company would combine FIFA’s broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing rights with the operational delivery of its tournaments across men’s, women’s and youth football.

Private investors would be invited to buy minority interests. FIFA hopes to raise up to $4.2 billion on an initial equity valuation of $20 billion, meaning that outside investors could collectively acquire roughly one-fifth of the business.

Infantino described FFE as a “focused, dedicated business” whose value would be shared more widely across the game. The money raised would finance a new programme offering each of FIFA’s 211 member associations up to $20 million for major development projects. Infantino called it the “democratisation of football”.

Incidentally, Infantino stands to benefit colossally from this new arrangement, according to the Times, as he could become a chief executive of FFE, placing him in a commissioner-type role for world football once his term as FIFA president expires.

And the announced lead investor in this scheme is Joshua Kushner, brother to Jared, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump.

UEFA responded that the proposal “crosses a line”, pointing to the absence of transparency over who ultimately benefits.

The Sports and Crime Briefing breaks down the numbers and what they mean.

Takeaway 1: FIFA Is Selling Part of Its Commercial Future

FIFA is not offering investors shares in FIFA itself.

It is constituted as a Swiss association, governed through its member associations rather than conventional shareholders. FFE would be a separate company, initially owned and controlled by FIFA.

The scale of the proposed subsidiary matters. FFE would bring together FIFA’s commercial rights, including broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing, with the delivery of tournaments across men’s, women’s and youth football.

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That same day, Russia launched one of its largest combined attacks of the war on Ukraine. Ukrainian Olympic skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych counted the barrage on X: 600 drones and 90 missiles. “It’s sad to see childhood legends turn into moral bankrupts for whom nothing is more valuable than Russian rubles,” he wrote. “Shame.”

Pirlo rejected any political reading of the day. “We came exclusively for sport and for the children,” he said. “Football has the unique power to bring people together, to overcome borders and to offer a moment of joy, especially to young kids who dream of becoming footballers.”

Two months later, Pirlo’s job as an ambassador for Fonbet helped sabotage the most important coaching appointment in Italian football.

How close was Pirlo to the job?

Seemingly one signature away. After Pep Guardiola declined, technical director Paolo Maldini and advisor Leonardo settled on Pirlo, with Italian media reporting a four-year contract to the 2030 World Cup at no more than €1.5 million a season plus bonuses tied to Euro 2028 qualification. His backroom staff was already assembled, with Roberto Baronio lined up as his deputy. His agent Tullio Tinti had begun the paperwork to free him from his club, United FC Dubai. The announcement was expected around the FIGC Federal Council of July 28.

What exactly happened?

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The diagnosis, delivered to camera, was that Kane was suffering from magia negra (black magic), mal de ojo (the evil eye) and mala energía (black energy).

The segment went viral in late June, shortly after the World Cup began.

But the ritual had not originated in Peru. It was intended to reverse a curse supposedly placed on Kane some 4,000 miles away, in a shrine town in Ghana’s Ashanti Region.

Spain are world champions. But the 2026 World Cup was shadowed by a different game: traditional priests, curanderos, seers, shamans, witch doctors, tarotists and self-styled prophets attaching curses, blessings and predictions to almost every match. This article is Part One of a new Sports and Crime Briefing investigative series diving deep into these fraud schemes, how they are monetised, and how social media clicks are turned into paying customers.

How a curse crossed two continents

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Campaz, who had scored on his World Cup debut against Uzbekistan three weeks earlier, blazed the shot over the bar.

And while Campaz converted his penalty in the shootout, it didn’t matter and Colombia went out 4-3.

On the evening of July 8, a charter carrying the Colombian squad left Vancouver for Bogotá, landing at around 3 a.m. Colombia time. National icon James Rodríguez was on board, as were his teammates.

Campaz was absent.

The next morning, journalist Camilo Pinto revealed how Campaz's social media had been flooded with abuse since the final whistle.

Among the messages, one stood out.

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“In light of the decision taken on Sunday to suspend the implementation of an automatic one-match suspension, we feel that it is time for European Football Associations, all of whom are member associations of FIFA, to intervene and ask that FIFA investigate the aforementioned decision-making processes,” they wrote.

It is one of the most concerted moves any European institution has made against a sitting FIFA president.

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Russian athletes can now qualify for the Los Angeles 2028 Games on a full national team. FIFA is considering doing the same thing.

Now, Russia’s suspension had nothing to do with doping.Russia was banned in 2023 for annexing Ukrainian sports organisations in occupied territory. According to the IOC, Russia has given up gave up its claim to those bodies and therefore, the IOC’s lawyers concluded the grounds for suspension were gone.

The Sports and Crime Briefing has previously revealed how egregious this is and the amount of death and destruction wrought upon Ukrainian athletes by Russian violence.

But Russia’s older problem, generations of a state-backed doping program, remains open. The IOC even said as much in its decision to reinstate Russia.

“To address the lack of confidence in the global sporting community relating to the return of Russian athletes to international competition and in view of the recent allegations regarding the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA)’s governance, and pending confirmation that reinstatement conditions concerning the World Anti-Doping Code have been met, all Russian athletes returning to international competition must meet relevant anti-doping requirements,” it read.

What are the allegations concerning RUSADA’s governance?

Those allegations concern Veronika Loginova, RUSADA’s director general, who is under two investigations by WADA, the global anti-doping watchdog.

In April, Insider reported that her long-term partner is a serving FSB colonel, Dmitry Kovalov, the very officer Russia’s security service assigns to defend its accused dopers in the Swiss courts.

Jens Weinreich’s Sport & Politics newsletter then tracked that the FSB unit running Russia’s Olympic doping operations also runs its political hit squads, including the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Loginova has been neither charged nor sanctioned, and nothing has been proven.

But her situation raises a more basic question than her own conduct: in the ten years since Russia’s doping exile began, has its anti-doping system improved at all?

There are four ways to check.

1. Did Russia ever hand over the evidence?

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FIFA ruled that Balogun’s automatic one-match suspension would be suspended for a one-year probationary period, clearing him to play in the United States’ World Cup Round of 16 match against Belgium. UEFA responded by accusing FIFA of going beyond a routine disciplinary judgment and undermining the authority of referees.

“Yesterday’s decision to suspend for a probationary period of a year the implementation of the one-match automatic suspension following the red card issued to the player Folarin Balogun crossed a red line,” UEFA said in a statement.

Belgium called the decision similar to April Fool’s. It then lodged a formal appeal within hours, claiming that FIFA had interfered in the integrity of the competition, perhaps at the behest of US Pr…

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The governor climbed aboard. The Netherlands was set to play Morocco in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León.

“Muy contento,” he posted on social media, “se me cumplió el sueño de subirme al Orange Bus.” (Very happy, I fulfilled my dream of climbing onboard the Orange Bus.”

The stunt on the Oranjebus was framed as a politician doing a PR coup by welcoming foreign supporters to his country and state.

But García, a Mexican presidential hopeful, is now in a spot of bother.

Why is he in trouble?

García had wanted this fixture for months. Back in January, he bet the equivalent of his monthly salary that the Netherlands would play in Monterrey.

He declared match day a public holiday, closing schools and non-essential offices. He arranged for free beer, cabrito and tacos to be handed out across Parque Fundidora and the Macroplaza, and booked Enrique Iglesias to perform.

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The video used the captain of Manchester United to lead punters most to a banned betting site.

It was the most polished example of a world of online disinformation that has dogged Portugal.

During the World Cup, after Cristiano Ronaldo put in a poor performance against DR Congo, a forged screenshot showed a demand from João Neves’ partner, the actress Madalena Aragão, that Ronaldo should retire. It was convincing enough to draw a public reply from Ronaldo’s fiancée before it was dismissed.

An ambiguous quote from Neves about Ronaldo was rewritten online into a dressing-room mutiny the players spent days denying.

Can this be stopped given the level of fan support for the World Cup?

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Wahi came off to applause, a France youth international who had switched to the country of his father. He had stalled at Eintracht Frankfurt, barely featuring in the Bundesliga, before a January loan to Nice revived him thanks to five goals in 14 games.

But two weeks before the applause in Philadelphia, Wahi was arrested in Marseille.

On 29 May, hours after he scored twice to keep Nice in the top flight, anti-corruption police detained him on suspicion of spot-fixing. He was questioned and released without charge, and the investigation remains open.

What they were looking at was not a thrown match or a bought result. It was a single yellow card, the kind of spot-fix we have covered closely before at the Sports and Crime Briefing, picked up in a goalless game against Metz on the final day of the French season.

What happened against Metz?

In the final round of the Ligue 1 season, Nice received Metz at home in the Allianz Riviera.

Metz had nothing left to play for. They had been relegated two natchdays earlier, bottom of the table and already down.

Nice had everything to play for.

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There was the sitting president of the United States who had quietly bought stock in the UFC’s parent company while promoting the event. There was the federal lawsuit that tried and failed to halt the whole thing as “deeply corrupt”. There was the absence of any athletic commission willing to sanction the fights. There was a security bill of over 10 million USD the White House insisted cost the taxpayer nothing.

We were wrong. The full scale of the insanity did not reveal itself until the event itself.

On the night, a UFC commentator posted and hurriedly deleted screenshots that appeared to show Eric Trump asking him whether the fights were rigged. A victorious heavyweight used his live post-fight interview to inform the nation that Michelle Obama is a man.

A bonus for winning fighters would be paid in Trump’s own cryptocurrency. UFC fighter Sean Strickland was swarmed at the public fan festival and carried off by a multi-agency federal detail to chants of “USA”. And Alex Pereira had assured his followers that he had communed with nature and that it would therefore not rain.

Brace for the Sports and Crime Briefing’s takeways and why the UFC’s White House event was rather more worrying than weird.

Whose money were the fighters actually paid in?

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It is the latest chapter in a ticketing saga that had been unfolding for eight months, one that has drawn subpoenas from two American attorneys general, an investigation in Texas, a letter signed by 69 members of Congress, a formal complaint to the European Commission and a public rebuke from a sitting US president who is one of Gianni Infantino’s closest allies.

The Sports and Crime Briefing has told the whole story, from the beginning, of how FIFA, with an assist from the White House, became a tout.

The first World Cup with dynamic pricing

The 2026 World Cup is the first at which FIFA has applied variable, demand-based pricing to match tickets. The model will be familiar to anyone who has tried to buy a concert ticket in America in recent years. Prices float as demand pushes them up, and there is no ceiling.

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When Senegal arrived in New York on June 8, they were forced to undergo a security screening on the tarmac, not even inside the building.

When Uzbekistan stepped off their team bus ahead of a friendly with the Netherlands, they were met with sniffer dogs.

For more than a year, press freedom bodies and civil liberties groups warned that staging the World Cup inside the widest US travel restriction in modern history would see people turned away at the border.

FiFA promised the process would be smooth. The US government made some concessions toward athlete exemptions, but the deployment of ICE in stadiums and threats to specific nations showed the scare tactics were not going away.

Two days before the opening match, it’s all coming true.

The Sports and Crime Briefing tracks the most significant disruptions to date.

One of Africa’s best referees was denied entry

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By the time Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, faced the cameras on the morning of 31 May, the national bill was 890 people arrested, 480 of them in the Paris area, and 57 police and gendarmes injured. One man was dead, killed in a motocross accident on the edge of the celebrations.

The Paris prosecutor logged roughly half the charges as being for assault on police. Splinter groups had, in the prefecture’s own word, “systematically” torched cars, looted shops and lit fires across the city. A bakery and a restaurant near the Parc des Princes were left structurally damaged. A crowd tried to storm a police station in the 8th arrondissement. The ring road encircling the city was briefly blockaded before tactical units cleared it.

It was, almost to the letter, a rerun. A year earlier, PSG’s first Champions League title had produced a worse night: two dead, around 192 injured, more than 500 arrested and 264 vehicles burned. The 2026 arrest count was up 32% on that. Two summers, two trophies, two near-identical nights of disorder in the same streets.

The reason this should not be reported as a shock is that nobody involved treated it as one. The violence was prepared for, in detail, on both sides of the barricade.

How Paris prepared

To understand why Paris ringed itself with police this year, you have to go back to the night a year earlier and to the warnings the city had already been given even before that.

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On 24 May 2026, inside a purpose-built complex at Resorts World Las Vegas, the event built to make clean sport look obsolete delivered one disputed world-record claim, several clean athletes beating enhanced rivals, and flat performances from its marquee names.

But the Enhanced Games always saw the money coming from somewhere else.

When I interviewed him in October 2025, their founder Aron d’Souza said the Games would not earn money the way the Olympics do, through broadcast deals and tickets. D’Souza left Enhanced Games in November.

“We make money by selling the drugs,” he explained. Athletes would compete under medically supervised enhancement, their drug protocols would be published online, and the public could buy comparable treatments with a prescription.

“As The Enhanced Games becomes more popular, that is going to eliminate the black market. Are you going to take poorly controlled steroids when you can just go to a licensed doctor and get them with the full backing of a major international organization?” added d’Souza.

Enhanced’s own materials call it a performance-products company spanning live events, media, telehealth and performance medicine. Its consumer arm, Live Enhanced, already sells testosterone injections, testosterone cream, enclomiphene and low-dose tadalafil through a subscription that bundles lab work, a consultation and the medication into a monthly fee.

So can the Enhanced Games work as an advertisement for selling enhancement to everyone else?

Here are a few ways to look at it.

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On April 29, Arsenal and Atlético Madrid drew 1-1 in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final. The night before, Kagame had taken in the other semi-final Parc des Princes, where Paris Saint-Germain beat Bayern Munich 5-4, seated between Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and a former French president.

Every team in the last four of the Champions League football carried some form of Visit Rwanda marking, on sleeves, training kits, perimeter boards or backdrops. Rwandan media called it “the Visit Rwanda Derby.”

The semi-finals were the high-water mark of a strategy that began in 2018, when Arsenal sold its first sleeve patch to the Rwanda Development Board on a deal SportsPro reports was worth £10 million (US$13.5 million) a year.

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The match was the Riyadh Derby between Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal.

Al Nassr had been one goalkeeping error away from sealing their first Saudi Pro League title in seven years. They were denied in the 98th minute, when their own keeper Bento collided with Iñigo Martínez and shovelled the ball into his own net. The final whistle blew at 1-1.

The fight in the boxes had, by most accounts, started before the equaliser and intensified afterwards.

The response from authorities seemed muted. The Riyadh Region Police and the Ministry of Sport issued a joint statement, confirming that several people had been arrested after the brawl.

The main story being broadcast on Saudi social media is that an Al Nassr supporter in one of the VIP boxes tried to wrench an Al Hilal flag out of a rival’s hands. The collapse of Al Nassr’s title celebration in stoppage time only fueled matters further.

Why is there a rivalry between Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal?

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But Slavia’s Tribuna Sever ultras had already gathered behind the advertising boards. In the 97th minute, they stormed the bit, carrying flares and smoke bombs, and charged the other team and the away section.

Sparta goalkeeper Jakub Surovcik was struck by a pyrotechnic and had beer thrown over him. Forward Matyas Vojta was shoved. Riot police entered the field only after the crowd had breached the barriers. The match was abandoned and Sparta’s team bus left under police escort.

Czech authorities launched criminal proceedings on suspicion of rioting. Slavia could face sanctions and has vowed to ban the guilty fans for life.

“The values of Slavia are not hatred and violence,” said Slavia chief executive Jaroslav Tvrdík. “We accept responsibility and draw conseque…

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The dump appeared on PwnForums over the weekend of 25-26 April, six short weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off on 11 June.

The actor behind the post goes by “fuckiewuckie.” He credited ShinyHunters, the notorious breach collective whose administrators were arrested in France in June 2025. H

Foot Mercato named Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Heung-min Son, Kang-in Lee, Sadio Mane, Aymeric Laporte, Marcelo Brozovic, Mehdi Taremi and FIFA President Gianni Infantino as appearing in the trove.

What is actually in the files?

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Within 48 hours of the Muddy Waters and Callisto Research short-seller reports that wiped over 22% off Sportradar’s share price, at least eleven American law firms announced securities fraud investigations into the company.

Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl responded with an open letter on LinkedIn calling the reports “entirely false, poorly researched, deliberately taken out of context.”

Amid this noise, it is important to remember that no formal complaint has yet been filed against Sportradar. No government regulator has publicly opened an investigation.

But some legal machinery is now in motion, and understanding what it is, how it works, and what it is likely to produce is important for anyone following this story.

For readers who have not yet seen it, our article, The Sportradar Scandal, in 10 Key Takeaways sets out the full substance of the short-seller allegations.

1. What is a “securities fraud investigation,” and why did eleven of them appear overnight?

The phrase sounds official. It is not.

None of the eleven announcements come from the Securities and Exchange Commission, from the Department of Justice, from any state gambling regulator, or from any arm of any government anywhere.

They come from private plaintiffs’ law firms, securities class action specialists, that monitor the NASDAQ and NYSE for large single-day stock drops. When a stock falls sharply enough to suggest significant shareholder losses, these firms issue press releases announcing “investigations” and soliciting affected investors.

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