Wanting to 'Shoot' Infantino, Then Applause — Who Is Actually Selling Football's Property?

A Rome Evening, One Sentence, Two Hands

On that stage in Rome, the man in his sixties first closed both hands into fists, then opened them. Facing the cameras, he said: “I wanted to shoot Infantino.” Then, immediately, he raised his hands and applauded. “But I hold my hands up — he gave us an extraordinary World Cup.” A pistol and a handclap in the same sentence. A punch and a bow in the same breath.

I keep returning to the trembling hands before the first whistle. It is an old habit of mine. In 2026, when Abahani Limited beat Sheikh Russel KC in the Bangladesh Premier League and a seventeen-year-old debutant named Rakib Hossain scored in the 88th minute, I did not write about tactics. I wrote about how his hands shook, and how his mother wept in the stands. Since then I keep notebooks filled with players’ hands, eyes and small rituals. This is the first time the trembling hand belongs to an owner — and the shaking is not in the grass but in football’s title deed.

Aurelio De Laurentiis — film producer, owner of Napoli, the most volatile and simultaneously the most durable proprietor in Italian football. The platform was chosen deliberately: the annual awards evening of the foreign press association, an audience of international journalists, not Italian supporters. His message was never meant to be domestic.

The Context: From Bankruptcy to Two Scudetti

Napoli’s story begins in rubble. In 2026 De Laurentiis bought a bankrupt club that had sunk into Serie C1. Two decades later there are two Serie A titles — 2026-23 and 2026-25 — plus five domestic cups. Look closely at the pattern: roughly two league titles in twenty years, one roughly every ten years. This is not a dynasty. It is a punctuated reign — a club that guarantees European qualification, occasionally climbs to the summit, and then settles back into its tier.

That profile sets the tone of everything he says. An owner who cannot chain titles together is not playing governance politics for sport. For him, football’s financial plumbing is a question of survival. Four themes ran through the speech, and although they sound like separate grievances they are four faces of one pressure: FIFA’s exploration of selling shares in competitions to private investors; the dismissal of the Europa League and Conference League as “vote collection” devices; the claim that FIFA and UEFA operate “beyond any legislative oversight”; and open war on organised supporter groups, where he named three organised-crime syndicates and appealed directly to police chiefs and ministers.

The Real Story Is Not on the Pitch — It Is Property

What is actually happening? An institution is trying to convert its future income into present cash. “Private investors would have bought shares in the World Cup and other competitions” is not a new sentence. Around 2026 a consortium of roughly USD 25 billion was floated to back a revamped Club World Cup and a new global Nations League. It never happened.

The mechanism is identical in every case: an uncertain, long-dated future revenue stream is converted into upfront capital in exchange for permanently surrendering a share of that stream. Europe has already walked this template repeatedly — La Liga’s deal with CVC at around EUR 2 billion, Ligue 1’s CVC arrangement at roughly EUR 1.5 billion for about 13 per cent of a commercial vehicle, the Bundesliga’s rejected EUR 1 billion media investment, and Serie A’s abandoned media-company project. What De Laurentiis is resisting is not novel. It is the standard liquidity-versus-control argument, and he is on the control side.

There is a blockchain-shaped instinct buried in this that nobody says out loud. Selling a share of future broadcasting income and tokenising a future cash flow rest on the same logic, and both raise the same question: who owns, and who merely rents? In the digital-asset economy, when an asset’s future yield is fractionalised and sold, control migrates to the issuer and its buyers. FIFA was preparing to do exactly that with football’s most valuable product. And the man who runs a club in a municipally owned stadium knows that a tenant cannot win an argument about the deed.

Serie A’s domestic broadcast income sits in the region of EUR 900 million a year, which caps the internal balance of the entire league. The Premier League’s domestic deal is in the region of GBP 6.7 billion across three years. That gap is the real enemy. And for anyone trying to place the reference to “this year’s World Cup”: Napoli played in the 2026 FIFA Club World Cup in the United States, which means the tournament he praised is most plausibly that one, not Qatar 2026.

Here is my second caution, and I will not bury it. The dating of this report does not hold together. The dateline reads 23 September with no year, yet one internal fact says Napoli have won two Serie A titles under this owner — impossible before May 2026. Another section echoes the 2026-era investment plan, which predates those titles. Either the remarks date to September 2026, or the report is a composite assembled across conflicting periods. Before treating any claim here as a live market signal, the publication year and the identity of the tournament must be verified. This is the single largest weakness in the sourcing.

The Empty Stadium Then, the Ledger Now

In 2026, during the global sporting silence, I produced a radio documentary called “The Groundsman’s Rosary.” Md. Abdul Malek, a groundsman in his early twenties at Bangabandhu National Stadium, was still watering the pitch. No matches, no crowds, and still the grass had to be kept alive. In the empty stadium, the groundsman’s footsteps and the hum of the stands were the only audience. That was when I understood that football’s real property is not a logo or a broadcast contract — it is a patch of grass kept alive by absent hands.

This is precisely De Laurentiis’s problem. Napoli do not own the stadium they play in; the municipality does. And a club that neither owns nor modernises its ground has a hard ceiling on matchday and non-matchday commercial income. A stadium redevelopment is the single largest strategic decision available to the club — larger than any transfer. A “family-friendly” venue requires re-seating, re-pricing and shrinking the curva. In other words, the war on the ultras is not free-floating anger; it is most likely a precondition of the stadium project.

The Part Nobody Will Clip — and the Part That Matters Most

In the clip economy, the sound bite that travels is the shooting line. The most consequential passage in the report will get no traction at all: the ultras section. There, De Laurentiis stated plainly that certain ultras factions have links to organised crime and appealed to police chiefs and ministers for tougher public-order enforcement. Italy already has the legal machinery — Law 401 of 2026 and successive decrees empowering prefectural authorities to impose stadium bans (daspo) and matchday controls through the security analysis committee.

That framework suits him. He has reframed a supporter-relations dispute — a sporting matter — as a public-safety matter, which shifts responsibility from the club to the state. This is not bluster; it is a deliberate reclassification.

But one part of his framing overreaches: the claim that FIFA and UEFA sit beyond any legislative oversight. Swiss association law, EU competition law, national sports law and criminal law all reach them. On 21 December 2026, in the Super League case, the European Court of Justice held that FIFA and UEFA rules requiring prior approval of new competitions ran contrary to EU competition law. Oversight exists. It is simply slow, expensive and politically complex.

Who Is Talking to Whom, and Why

The architecture of the speech is revealing. He attacks UEFA’s structures — where he holds no formal power. He praises FIFA’s operational delivery — where his club has a direct commercial interest. That is not accidental coherence; it is a calculated asymmetry: roar where the cost is low, applaud where the benefit is real. Meanwhile, the anti-ultras stance creates genuine confrontation risk with his own supporter base, because in Italian football presidential attacks have historically been answered with matchday protest and public pressure.

His “Europe is in crisis, America is a shining beacon” claim has a structural core. US leagues are closed, centralised, salary-capped and draft-fed, with enormous national media deals (the NFL at roughly USD 110 billion over eleven years, the NBA at roughly USD 76 billion over eleven years — these figures require independent verification). European football is an open pyramid with no cap and relegation risk. But for that very reason European clubs carry the most volatile cost structures in world sport, and the advantage accrues to the highest-revenue league.

There is a thread back to our own reality. After Morocco beat Portugal at the 2026 World Cup in Qatar, I sat in a small café in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, and spoke to three supporters who had never been to Morocco yet felt seen by that team’s run. Why fans adopt a team is not a transfer-market question; it is a question of existence. The pitch is a page, and every tackle is a revision. The deeds to that page have never been handed to owners like De Laurentiis.

What to Watch

My expectation is blunt. A no-confidence campaign against a sitting FIFA president does not produce a resignation unless a criminal or electoral trigger exists. The realistic outcome is not a transfer of property but a diluted version of it — proposals softened, consultation widened, decisions deferred. The roughly USD 25 billion package of 2026 faded exactly that way.

What matters now is the member-association consultation requirement: who actually holds the right to sell shares in competitions — the executive, the congress, or the member associations who collectively own them? That is the legal battleground. Second, the planning and financing milestones of Napoli’s stadium project. Third, whether other Italian clubs copy his anti-ultras line — because if they do, Serie A’s crowd composition will shift from curva dominance toward families and tourists, changing ticket prices, stadium acoustics and broadcast aesthetics together.

The 94th minute tastes like over-steeped tea and unfinished sentences. The announcement round is over; the accounting round has begun. In the empty stadium the groundsman stands with his rake, and nobody asks where the men who make the decisions have gone. But in football, beneath every deed lies a groundsman’s footprint. The only question left is who wants to own that grass in the next ten years.