Jonathan Wilson
speaker
963 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4d ago
Jonathan Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the business argument for this move makes very, very little sense.
I guess if you want to try and defend him, and I think there is actually a genuine point here that we are in a very awkward situation within football, not just with UEFA, with the Premier League, with various other bodies, where they are simultaneously the upholders of the laws of the game and the spirit of the game and commercial entities seeking to make a profit.
If you can try and separate those out, that is probably a good thing for the future of football.
Now, I think actually the relatively simple things you can do to say you would possibly split FIFA into three.
One would be the law-giving body, one would be the commercial entity, one would be the disciplinary arm.
So, yeah, maybe you'd have to run those in separate countries.
But, yeah, if that was actually your aim, the things you could do...
But you just had a World Cup that's made $15 billion, more than double what the previous World Cup made.
So why then would you be seeking to sell off 21% of your product to external investment?
Well, the reason people sell off a percentage of their companies is to get investment immediately because they need it now.
And they might need that because they have debts, because maybe it's a young company, there's been startup costs that they need to cover.
It may be that there's a new technology you need to invest in, or you think a huge marketing push could take you to the next level.
What's the next level for football?
According to FIFA, 1.5 billion people watch the World Cup final.
Do they really think that 1.8, 2 billion are possible?
You're coming off the back of a World Cup that's just doubled the previous record, which is the previous World Cup, which itself was significantly greater in terms of profit than the previous World Cup.
FIFA's on this incredible upslope.
Nothing else in the world dominates from a cultural point of view as football does.
Why are you trying to make this bigger?
So all you can conclude from that, unless somebody from FIFA wants to make a business case and tell me why I'm wrong, is you want the money up front.
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