MONTE CARLO, Monaco -- On Wednesday evening, 24 hours ahead of the UEFA Champions League draw, European football's leading lights gathered at Le Meridien Beach Plaza, the only hotel in Monaco with a private beach, for the annual kickoff barbecue. (Purists will object that it's more of an outdoor grill buffet, but Monaco plays by its own rules.)
It was, in every way, the proverbial calm before the storm. By lunchtime on Thursday, UEFA would unleash two unexpected (but connected) legal assaults in two different jurisdictions directed squarely at FIFA president Gianni Infantino. And nobody was dropping hints. Instead, UEFA officials, who had previously pledged to boycott FIFA competitions as a result of Infantino's private equity proposal, were keen to explain they had dropped their boycott less than two weeks before the first tournament that would have been affected, the Under-20 Women's World Cup in Poland.
Multiple sources told ESPN that Europe's governing body didn't want to deny young women the opportunity to play (or postpone) it, and that they had achieved their objective of stopping Infantino's ill-fated FIFA Forward Enterprise. It felt the collective dissent had led to the plan being scrapped and, according to UEFA, had received "legal guarantees" from FIFA that such a proposal -- selling all or part of FIFA's revenue streams to private investors -- would never be considered again.
When challenged on what "legal guarantees" meant -- How would they be enforced? Would they be written into FIFA's bylaws? -- several UEFA officials simply said the equivalent of 'well, if worse comes to worse, we'll pull out of the World Cup, making it worthless, and [Infantino] will have no choice but to drop any such plans.'