Good morning, happy Friday and welcome to FirstFT. In today’s newsletter:
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Adviser to Fifa president resigns over plans to bring in outside investors
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ExxonMobil and Chevron report windfall profits
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The return of Boeing
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The growing gap between wealth and income
You can listen to today’s top news stories with the FT News Briefing podcast.
The tumult at the top of world football deepened on Friday after a senior adviser to Fifa president Gianni Infantino resigned and criticised the plan to sell a stake in the commercial operations of football’s global governing body.
Carlos Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker, said Fifa’s plan was the equivalent of “mortgaging football’s future without any compelling justification” and made “little sense”.
Football has been thrown into turmoil this week after it was revealed that Fifa, the sport’s world governing body, was planning to create Fifa Forward Enterprise with an estimated value of $20bn and bring in outside investors to help fund the growth of the World Cup.
The deal was spearheaded by Infantino but has been criticised by governing bodies, supporters groups and even the UK’s new prime minister.
In a statement released earlier today, Fifa defended the plan and vowed to press ahead. “Nobody is selling football,” it said.
“We respect the feedback and concern aired in public and reaffirm our commitment to an open and democratic consultation,” it added.
Cordeiro, former head of the US Soccer Federation, is the latest prominent figure to voice opposition to the proposal. He had been a senior adviser to Infantino for almost five years and was a member of the White House task force handling the recent World Cup hosted in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Yesterday, Uefa, which governs football in Europe, said it would boycott the next World Cup, which Spain, Portugal and Morocco are due to host in 2030. “The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product,” it said in a statement.
Concacaf, its North America counterpart, then came out against Fifa’s plans, saying it was committed to “service, transparent governance and the long-term stewardship of football”. The Asian Football Confederation announced it was “deeply concerned that Fifa’s unilateral actions appear to undermine the foundations of continental football”.
JPMorgan Chase, which has secretly worked for months with Fifa’s advisers, has been central in the plans to raise $4.2bn from external investors. Thrive Eternal, a fund run by Joshua Kushner, brother of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, has been lined up as a lead investor.
But without the participation of European countries, which have collectively won five of the past six men’s World Cups dating back to 2006, Fifa will struggle to convince investors to back its plans.
The 211 member associations now have until September 19 to decide whether to back the plan. Fifa has said each member will receive an immediate $20mn payment if they support the proposal, plus a further $20mn in funding over the next four years.
Here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today and over the weekend:
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Results: Private credit giant Ares Management, Franklin Resources, Cboe Global Markets and Colgate-Palmolive also report second-quarter earnings.
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Interest rates: Colombia’s central bank is expected to raise its benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points to 12.5 per cent.
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US-Venezuela talks: US-backed negotiations between Venezuela’s interim government and a faction of the opposition will begin on Saturday, with the country’s most prominent opposition leader María Corina Machado absent.
Five more top stories
1. Exclusive: Donald Trump has said he has not decided whether he will allow Ukraine to produce Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles, casting doubt on whether Washington will agree to one of Kyiv’s top priorities. “It’s a very extraordinary weapon, and . . . we have to be a little bit careful of who we licence to. We don’t really licence equipment,” the US president told the FT in a phone interview.
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Gaza: Trump has said his Board of Peace reached an agreement for the “complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza”, claiming a major breakthrough in peace talks in the Middle East.
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More Middle East news: Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a maritime coalition to protect shipping and energy supplies in the Red Sea.
2. ExxonMobil and Chevron reported second-quarter earnings worth a combined $26.5bn, as they cashed in on surging crude and petrol prices caused by Trump’s Iran war. While the results will be cheered by investors, they put the companies on a collision course with the US president, who has accused the industry of “price gouging”.
3. Anthropic has disclosed that its Claude AI models hacked into three organisations while the start-up was testing cyber capabilities, a week after OpenAI reported a similar incident. “A misunderstanding” gave Claude access to the internet in its testing environment, when it was meant to be blocked, Anthropic said.
4. Ken Griffin’s Citadel has swooped in to buy a large portion of hedge fund Situational Awareness’s $16bn public equity holdings after Leopold Aschenbrenner’s investment firm was wrongfooted in the AI sell-off. Citadel, a $71bn multi-strategy hedge fund, forged the crunch deal within the past 24 hours, one of the largest rushed stock transactions in Wall Street history.
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Go deeper: With no trading experience, Aschenbrenner had become a Wall Street sensation but this week found himself on the wrong side of a brutal stock market sell-off.
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Kospi rebounds: South Korea’s stock market soared on Friday as AI-related shares rebounded from days of heavy selling, capping a rollercoaster week for chipmaking stocks.
5. Apple has forecast weaker sales growth and a hit to margins in the coming months from strains on tech supply chains caused by the AI infrastructure building boom, as Tim Cook prepares to step down as chief executive. The stock fell more than 6 per cent in after-hours trading as Cook warned investors that the impact from “less flexibility in the supply chain” would “increase significantly”.
The return of Boeing
Boeing this week reported improved financial results, but much more will be required if it is to fully recover from the existential crisis that began in 2018 when a 737 Max 8 plunged into the Java Sea minutes after take-off, killing all 189 people on board. Can chief executive Kelly Ortberg steer Boeing back to profitability and once again mount a serious challenge to European rival Airbus?
We’re also reading . . .
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US interest rates: If higher inflation persists or accelerates, Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh’s minimal approach to communicating with the market could lead to harmful volatility, says the FT’s editorial board.
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State subsidies: A dispute between the OECD and Chinese economists highlights why governments must not just contemplate tariffs, but the nature of their industrial policies too, writes Gillian Tett.
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AI: Are investors really getting cold feet about the AI boom, asks Richard Waters, or is it just a temporary summer tantrum?
Chart of the day
In a society where the gap between the comfortably off and the just-getting-started can be crossed in a decade or two of hard work, success feels attainable and incentives are strong. When those gaps are so wide that even a lifetime of striving doesn’t offer the prospect of feeling you’ve “made it”, things start to break down. This is essentially what has been playing out in many countries over recent decades, argues John Burn-Murdoch.
Take a break from the news . . .
Garmin watches remain the industry standard when it comes to durability, wearability and reliability. The clunky timepiece beloved by runners can ruin an outfit but it is a status symbol, a signifier of athleticism and, for Grace Cook, a conversation starter and an easy way to find common ground with strangers.
