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JPMorgan Finds Itself in Another Global Soccer Fiasco

After promising to learn from its role in a failed “Super League” that fueled fan anger, the Wall Street bank is involved in FIFA’s latest meltdown.

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Tariq Panja has reported on FIFA and the business of sport for two decades.

Aug. 4, 2026

In April 2021, JPMorgan Chase found itself in the midst of a storm.

A plan for a breakaway Super League featuring the richest soccer clubs in the world, which would have unmoored the century-old structures of the sport in Europe, had folded in less than a week. Fans of rival clubs had poured onto the streets in protest, and their governments joined the condemnation.

JPMorgan had offered to provide the financial underpinning to the arrangement.

Chastened, the Wall Street titan issued an unusual apology for its role in the fiasco. The bank pledged to learn from how it had “misjudged” the effect the plan would have on the feverish world of global soccer. Even Jamie Dimon, the bank’s outspoken and all-powerful chief executive officer, acknowledged that the company had misunderstood the passions that would be aroused.

A half decade later, the largest bank in the United States again finds itself at the center of a major crisis in global soccer. This time, European nations threatened to boycott the biggest sporting event on the planet, the FIFA World Cup, and FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, is facing down demands that he resign.

JPMorgan was one of the key players in a plan that Mr. Infantino had worked on for more than a year with the venture capitalist Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. All of the commercial assets of FIFA, a Zurich-based nonprofit that runs global soccer, would be placed in a separate company. Mr. Infantino was looking to sell roughly 20 percent of the new business, which would include rights to the World Cup, to private investors for $4.2 billion, a deal that would value all of FIFA’s commercial business at $20 billion.

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JPMorgan’s role was to find other investors to join the deal with Thrive Eternal, a subsidiary of Mr. Kushner’s firm, Thrive Capital, to make up the $4.2 billion private investment.

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