Post by Sports World (@sportsworld)
Senior FIFA executive, Kevin Lamour, said him and his staff were deceived over President Gianni Infantino’s World Cup sell-off plan.
Zurich-based executive Kevin Lamour all but invited Infantino to fire him in a statement to the news agency "The Associated Press" this Friday that defended his colleagues amid intense fallout from the FIFA boss’s plan to sell stakes in future World Cup profits to private equity funds.
“It is the project of one person,” Lamour, a longtime colleague of Infantino at both FIFA and European football body UEFA, wrote. “Not only must this project not go ahead … but the time has now come for football political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions.”
Lamour’s statement came hours after Infantino’s senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker who represented the football body on the White House Task Force for the World Cup, resigned and urged other senior FIFA staff to speak out.
“I cannot stand by while FIFA considers selling a stake in the World Cup,” Cordeiro wrote in a statement. The former US Soccer Federation president said he was not included in talks about the plan backed by a New York investment fund created by Joshua Kushner.
“Let me be clear. I had no involvement in this proposal, and I oppose it unequivocally,” Cordeiro said. He called the $20bn commercial subsidiary “a bad deal for football.”
Lamour did not resign the post he has held since 2024, but said he had a duty to his colleagues.
“And if that means I lose my job then so be it” the French official said. “I will understand and respect that decision. At least I’ll sleep well tonight.”
Lamour came to football from politics two decades ago as an aide to then-UEFA President Michel Platini. He often had an international role in football politics, liaising with FIFA member federations in Africa and Asia who are currently weighing their own decisions about Infantino’s offers of $20m each by a September 19 deadline.
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