FIFA

Two cases against FIFA's own president reached procedural turning points during the tournament FIFA was running. Michel Platini sued Gianni Infantino in a Paris court on 8 June, accusing him of blocking his 2015 presidency bid, four days before the World Cup kicked off . FairSquare's separate complaint, over Infantino's Peace Prize award to Donald Trump, gathered fifty MEPs' backing on 6 July and moved on 8 July from a seven-month stalemate to a pledged IOC referral, one the IOC's own president said had not yet arrived as a filing .

Both cases share a structural problem for FIFA itself: its ethics process routes complaints about the president through a body he ultimately oversees. A criminal suit in France and a stalled international referral now sit alongside each other, testing whether FIFA can be seen to police its own leadership rather than merely its member federations.

Themba Zwane's three-match ban was upheld on 26 June without FIFA offering any explanation, six days after South Africa's federation lodged its appeal . Ten days later, on 6 July, FIFA suspended Folarin Balogun's own red-card ban after reports that Donald Trump had phoned Gianni Infantino, then threw out Belgium's appeal against the reversal as inadmissible .

Neither FIFA nor the White House has confirmed the call, and FIFA has drawn no comparison between the two rulings itself. The contrast, a silent uphold for one player against a fast, unexplained reversal for another, lands as a test of whether FIFA applies one disciplinary standard or several.

FIFA's own figures for its showcase tournament arrived through somebody else's wire copy. An attendance of 6,810,966, a revenue projection above seven billion euros, and an $871m prize pool reached the public via AFP on 20 July, a day after the final, rather than in a FIFA statement of its own, and FIFA itself called the revenue number anticipated rather than closed . Its ticketing operation faced separate scrutiny across the same period: a StubHub dispute over undelivered tickets drew a federal class action and a fresh Texan complaint on 15 July, with FIFA and the reseller still blaming each other .

A single quadrennial tournament is FIFA's main source of income, which is why how and when it discloses that tournament's numbers, and how it handles disputes over the tickets that generate them, matters more to FIFA than to any other actor in the World Cup's economy.