Fifa approved the sale. Fifa also owns what's being sold.

The story

Fifa has provoked a furious reaction with plans to sell stakes in the World Cup to private investors through a new vehicle, Forward Enterprise (FFE), which would bring together the tournament's commercial rights. The creation of FFE would lead to a significant increase in development funding, Fifa claims, more than $10billion (£7.5bn) to be spent over the next four years. News of the scheme was first revealed by The Times, which claims Fifa president Gianni Infantino personally stands to make tens of millions of pounds, and that he is seeking re-election as Fifa president next year. The proposal would see Fifa select long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE, with Thrive Eternal, a company launched by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, among the interested parties. Uefa warned the World Cup was "not an asset to trade" and said "this crosses a line governing institutions should never cross." Fifa's statement insisted "outside investors will have only a minority, non-operational stake in FFE and will not play any operational role. They are investing in a subsidiary of Fifa, and not in Fifa itself. For Fifa, nothing changes."

The reframe

Read Fifa's own defence closely, because it does the work for us. "They are investing in a subsidiary of Fifa, and not in Fifa itself" is offered as reassurance. It is also, on its own terms, an admission of exactly the structure this book describes as circular legitimacy: an institution that governs a public asset, approves the commercial vehicle through which stakes in that asset are sold, stands to see its own president profit personally from the sale, and then certifies, using its own authority, that the arrangement changes nothing about its own governance.

No single part of that sequence is obviously corrupt in isolation. Fifa is entitled to create subsidiaries. Investors are entitled to buy minority stakes. Presidents are entitled to seek re-election. What the sequence produces, taken together, is a transaction that Fifa both authorises and benefits from, with Fifa itself as the only body positioned to say whether the line between "subsidiary" and "Fifa itself" actually holds in practice. Uefa's objection, that the World Cup is "not an asset to trade," is really an objection to who gets to make that determination. Right now, the only entity checking Fifa's homework is Fifa.

Whether $10billion in promised development funding materialises as described is a separate question, and one the current arrangement is not well placed to answer honestly, because the same organisation making the promise is the one that profits from the promise being believed.