This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Singapore, where business events can create lasting impact. ACR does it. So, we'll move on now to your podcast. global sports, the Men's World Cup. Could this be civil war in football? That's World Business Report from the BBC. I'm Ed Butler and today we're looking at football's big meltdown, the rich European governing body UEFA seemingly at war with the global head Gianni Infantino. Also in the show, Peru is welcoming its first female president. And what does the latest sell-off at SpaceX say about the wider market wobbles across the AI tech sector. Some of the theme music there of the recent FIFA Men's World Cup, which finished earlier this month in the United States. the president of the world football's governing body, Gianni Infantino, and President Donald Trump seem to have developed something of a close relationship during the event. As well as awarding Donald Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize back in December, Mr Infantino took the Men's World Cup trophy to show off at the Oval Office ahead of the tournament. Messi, Lionel Messi of Argentina. And here it is in the Oval Office in the White House. Can I keep it? what are you well you can we're not giving it back we're not giving it back this is that's serious though that it fits well it goes very well on the wall right over there put it right below the angels yeah the 2026 world cup tournament was a huge financial success for fifa world's football's uh governing body despite the rouse over ticket pricing the review of a u.s player's red card and much else besides the final tally is yet to be counted but it could have netted fee for around 15 billion dollars but this non-profit association of football associations around the world believes that it can make even more money right now and today it has announced plans to create a new commercial subsidiary valued at 20 billion dollars news that has not gone down very well everywhere i've been speaking to tarik panja he's the global sports correspondent at the New York Times. The plan in the most basic form is to sell off, at least in part, the most important property in global sports, the Men's World Cup. And this comes, what, two weeks after the World Cup in the United States in 2026. And you can't help but see how these two things are linked. I think FIFA were forced to publish today because Martin Ziegler in The Times of London reveals that Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, his brother's fund is going to be a lead investor should it go ahead. And when we're talking about these private equity companies, this is for about a 25% stake in FIFA's commercial business. Now, almost all of FIFA's commercial income really is from the Men's World Cup. Right. I mean, that's a lot of money, as you say. Now, it's supposed to raise $4.2 billion. And each federation around the world, the members of FIFA stand to receive potentially $20 million each in one off payments if they approve this plan of Infantino. FIFA is an association of associations and quite right. It's the members that essentially own FIFA, which let's not forget is a non-profit based in Zurich. But we also have remember that a lot of these federations are not particularly significant football nations. The majority of them are not. There's 211 of them. And there is a calculation here that most of them will be seeing their eyes bulge with the sight of a $20 million check and would be willing to tick this off. And this has been the whole issue over FIFA and the structure that each country has one vote at FIFA. So you can think about a small Pacific island like Guam will have the equivalent, say, is Brazil five-time champions and so on. And the calculation is there's probably more of those than the others. An awful lot of Guams are out there, all of whom would love $20 million. Right. The other big controversy over all of this for years, predating Gianni Fantino, it's very hard to see exactly where all of the money goes. And this is a big concern, potentially greater amounts of cash to be dispersed and the same light touch oversight. And what this does do potentially is solidify the position of Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, who at the moment is the only candidate as he seeks re-election for another term, which should be his final term. Now, the question that hasn't been asked at all throughout all of this is, does FIFA really need the money? It is swimming in cash. Now, the World Cup that's just finished could, in revenue terms, generate $15 billion. That's a huge amount. That would be double the previous four-year cycle that took in the Qatar World Cup, for example. It almost has more money than it knows what to do with. And we've already seen kickback already. UEFA have put out a furious statement there saying it's crossed a line and the World Cup and football shouldn't be sold to private investors. this is the same UEFA that I think what three or four weeks ago when the US president got involved in in the suspension and then lifting of the suspension of the US striker following Balogand said FIFA has crossed a red line so they crossed two red lines as far as UEFA are concerned in the last four weeks but what does it mean in practice so now we going to see when when rubber hits the rub what will UEFA do The most powerful thing potentially is say right OK well the European nations potentially if they're not into this, could leave FIFA. And then you have a serious situation here for this tournament that's 96 years old, for this organisation, which is more than 120 years old. This is very, very significant. Should this go through? I mean, is there a sense that any of that would potentially scare Gianni Infantino? It doesn't look like it. It doesn't look like it at all. He's kind of gone headlong forward. He seems to be impervious to any criticism. This is a man who doesn't really speak to the media anymore, if he can help it. So I think he is sensitive to criticism, but he doesn't care in terms of conduct and in terms of pushing through. That's Tariq Panjo of the New York Times. For more comment, I'm joined now by someone who's known, Gianni Infantino personally, Miguel Maduro. He's a law professor at the Cattolica Global School of Law in Portugal in 2016. He was also briefly elected as chairman of the FIFA Governance Committee, supposedly to reform the body. Shortly afterwards, though, he was dismissed from his post after blocking a Russian official from the ruling council. Miguel Maduro, thank you for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. First of all, what are your thoughts about this FIFA plan? I think it's one more example of a fundamental problem and systemic conflict of interest at the heart of FIFA. That is, FIFA is both the regulator of football and as a consequence of that refuses to oppose any form of public regulation over its activities and at the same time the main commercial actor. And what we see in here is that it increasingly is prioritising its commercial activities and its profit maximisation at the expense of its role as a regulator. Right, but I mean, surely FIFA will say we are simply distributing money to the grassroots and that's mostly going to places like Asia, Africa and Latin America where grassroots football needs more money. Yes, but as a regulator of the ecosystem of football, FIFA for example, will need to take into account the accessibility of football to all fans in terms of ticket prices for example, or in terms of TV broadcasting transmission of football events. It will need to take into account the promotion of competitive balance between all the teams. It will need to take into account in the calendars of its events, the athletes' well-being. by prioritizing profit maximization, it's overlooking all the other interests. It's to give you an example. It is like if a national government will say that the main objective of the national health system is to be profitable. And it's not. It needs to be balanced with other interests and those interests are no longer being paid attention by FIFA. And the reason, as Tariq Panja was describing, is because the system of power of FIFA depends on this. The president accumulates power by feeding this network of patronage and by giving money to these people in the National Football Association. OK, well, I mean, UEFA will say, right, I mean, you know, it's planning its lawsuits. And we've got the US House Finance Committee, of course, calling on Infantino to testify. There are various threats, allegations of corruption swirling everywhere. But ultimately, seriously, are there any actual legal means to stop Gianni Infantino doing what he wants to do here, Particularly, he will have the support, you think, of those smaller nation states. Yes, I think there is no chance whatsoever of reform from within FIFA. The only chance of reform is if public authorities, national government, the European Union, actually get their act together and finally decide to regulate FIFA and sports governing bodies in general. It's the only market in the world where you have both the regulator of that market being the main commercial actor. This is a serious problem that is at the origin of all this that we see. And the only way to address it is through public regulation. And I think that requires cooperation between national governments and particularly the European Union. OK, Professor Miguel Maduro, former chair of the FIFA Governance Committee. Thank you very much indeed for your thoughts. You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service. Now, the opioid epidemic has had a massive impact on communities across the US, especially with the rise of synthetic drug fentanyl. And today's Business Daily, Sam Fenwick, has been following the money behind the antidote naloxone, which is helping to combat overdoses. Dr Nab Dasgupta is a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina. he helped to set up a non-profit Remedy Alliance, which provides doses of naloxone to harm reduction programs. He explained what the medicine is and what it can cost. What naloxone does is it kicks the fentanyl out of the brain and revives the breathing and allows people to survive. It's literally a miracle medication that brings people's breathing back and saves their lives. The cost of the naloxone itself is about 25 cents or less. It's pennies compared to the lives that are being saved. So at just 25 cents for the drug, where does the bulk of the cost come from? Not the chemical, but the device. So the packaging of the product is really where the expense really heats up. With the nasal spray, the problem is that the actual plastic that does the spraying, the part that goes up someone's nostril. When it first launched, the breakthrough technology of nasal spray delivery came from one components maker, Aptar. It made the spray mechanism plastics for Narcan, the best known naloxone nasal spray since 2016. Since then, other nasal spray devices have come onto the market. So what does the finished thing sell for? Originally, when Narcan nasal spray, which is the biggest player in the market. When that nasal spray came on the market, they were selling it for $175 for two doses at the pharmacy. $175 with no shame. Generic competition and over-the-counter sales have brought that price down, but not as far as campaigners and researchers in this field had hoped. A study of more than 1,000 US pharmacies this year, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found the average price is still around $52. That was Sam Fennec talking to Dr. Nair Desgupta. If you want to hear more about the cost and challenges of getting naloxone to the people who need it, search for today's edition of Business Daily. Now, let's talk about the recent sell-off in the value of some of the world's biggest tech companies. SpaceX, for example, has fallen in value by over $1.2 trillion trillion since its highest point in June. Tesla has fallen sharply too, as of the value of many other chip makers like NVIDIA SK Hynix Intel and others So what going on I been speaking to the BBC North America business reporter Samira Hussain So it hasn been just today It been over the last you know several weeks If you look at the way SpaceX has been trading it been on the downward trend for quite a while Look, I think this is something that we're seeing that's really impacting a lot of AI companies, is that investors are just getting really, really skittish because we're talking about eye-watering sums of money that these AI companies are spending on their AI build-outs, so on the infrastructure and the technology. And now investors are like, okay, we've been with you on this ride as you've been spending gobs on AI, saying that, yeah, the returns are going to come, the returns are going to come. Well, but now that we're talking about trillions of dollars, a lot of investors are now saying, OK, well, show me what's coming my way in return. Right. And was there a sense with SpaceX specifically that it was oversold in the IPO? I think that has certainly been a question that a lot of people have been asking about SpaceX specifically. And I think we're probably going to get more information regarding that later on this week. Right. Well, let's talk to one of Wall Street's most bullish Czech cheerleaders, Dan Dan Ives is a partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives. Eye-watering sums, says Samira. Eye-watering losses, Dan. I mean, are you getting anxious? Look, I think it's all part of this arms race that we're seeing play out. Because the trillions of dollars being spent, these companies, whether it's SpaceX, whether it's Anthropic, whether we see with Alphabet, Microsoft and others, they cannot slow down. Because if they do, they get out of line. And when they get out of line, they don't have the compute power, they don't have the chips. And that's ultimately what's going to be fueling this AI revolution. Right. SpaceX, though, let's just talk about that specifically. It's raised more than $1.2 trillion in market cap. I mean, that's almost the value of Tesla itself, isn't it? I mean, it is huge. And you do wonder about what this is all premised on. That's supposed to be a space company, but it seems to be more an AI company in everyone's opinion. Yeah, I think this is much more of an AI data company than a quote-unquote space company. But investors that bought into the IPO, longer-term investors, they're ultimately viewing not just Starlink, but really it's much more of a data play as this plays out. But go back to Amazon in the first, call it a few months, the first year of the IPO. Look at Meta or Facebook at the time. with these transformational names, you're going to go through these gut check moments. And that's what we're going through, especially with the lockup. Is there a risk though, with, I guess, all the talk about bubbles and so on, that we move further towards, especially if we move further towards potential recession territory in the wider economy, with people talking about the Gulf and the price of oil and so on, the NASDAQ could tip, it could become almost a self-fulfilling kind of panic? Look, I think we will go through these sort of gut check moments, But the reality, we're still only 15% through the AI revolution span. And as someone like myself that's covered tech stocks going back to the late 90s, this is not a dot-com bubble moment. I view it much more as a 1997 moment than a 2000 dot-com bubble moment. Okay, Dan Ives, partner there and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives. My thanks to you. Let's turn to George Conboy, chairman of Brighton Securities, based in Rochester, New York. Dan Ives, obviously somebody who has always talked a good talk when it comes to the value of tech stocks. Is that the wider view now? I mean, how would you gauge the mood on Wall Street around particularly semiconductors? Mood on Wall Street is skittish when it comes to technology right now. But the good news is there's good news for bulls like Dan and there's good news for the bears. And by that, I think some of these companies will be wildly successful, but some will fail utterly. How many of us use Google and how many of us use HotBot or InfoSeek? Roll the tape back 25 years, HotBot and InfoSeek were the thing. Not anymore. when this little bubble bursts, some things will fail, but some are going to do great. It's funny, isn't it? Whilst NASDAQ and some of these other specialist markets looking at semiconductors and the wider tech infrastructure, those are the ones suffering right now. Several other companies are doing quite well, aren't they? Unilever, for instance, its strongest volume grow from more than a decade. Yeah, you know, for a few years now, the Unilevers, the Procter & Gamble's of the world have had a little rough go as a lot of the money has focused on technology. And now all of a sudden people seem to be remembering we need soap and shampoo and toothpaste. And some of the money that's come off the profits, really big profits on some of these tech stocks, is finding its way back into what we used to call consumer non-durables like Unilever, which is a really well-managed company. I guess Unilever, and we are, as you say, thinking about household products, basic stuff, soap, shampoo, I don't know, all kinds of household products like that. Those are the types of things that consumer spend is still going on. Because of course, we are talking now about a pressurized consumer, aren't we, with rising prices elsewhere? Right. You look at consumer products, and you've got your Unilever, and you've got your Procter & Gamble and you've got your Colgate, Palmolive and what have you. But you don't have a thousand big ones and you're not going to have a thousand big AI companies. You're not going to have a thousand big chip makers. Markets refine themselves and the huge spend on chips and AI will make a fortune for some companies and some investors, but others, it's going to get lost. It's like the auto industry 120 years ago, a hundred automakers. You don't have those anymore. The Federal Reserve has now kicked off its two-day policy meeting, hasn't it? It's going to culminate tomorrow with a decision of some kind on interest rates. Everyone always looks at that with huge interest, especially right now with a new Fed chair. I mean, what do you expect the Fed's next move is going to be? I think that Warsh has gone a long way to try to establish his own independence. He suffered early on with being seen as Trump's man in the Fed. And I think for his own reputation, as well as for the good of the U.S. economy, Warsh wants to establish himself as an independent, not somebody's puppet. And we're going to find that out in the coming days. But what's the money on, a hold or a hike? What do you think? I mean, it seems to be one or the other, doesn't it? Yeah, it's not going to be a cut. It will likely be a hold. And I think you've got a two-thirds vote for hold and one-third vote for hike. and I don't think we see a hike yet. But don't be surprised if we see one or two small ones before the end of the year because the US economy is really spinning We don have a slowdown And even with higher oil prices we haven slowed down So could be a hike but it won be this week George Combai Thank you very much George Combai, chairman of Brighton Securities, based there in Rochester, New York. that is Keiko Fujimori swearing herself in there as Peru's first ever female president this was just a few hours ago she is the latest in a series of conservative leaders to be elected I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Sing and on Good Bad Billionaire we're exploring the life and fortune of music megastar Sir Paul McCartney Macca As one of the primary songwriters in The Beatles and with an extensive solo career his work generates vast and continuous royalty streams but were song royalties alone enough to break the billion and earn him the title of the first British billionaire rock star Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts Across Latin America, many of whom attended the inauguration ceremony in Lima today. Ms Fuchamori has promised to fight crime, weak economic growth and political instability. She now faces the challenge of uniting a divided country whilst reassuring investors and of course delivering on those promises to improve security and economic growth. Alfredo Thorne is a Peruvian economist. He served as the Minister of Economy and Finance in Peru under a previous administration. They need to generate new agents of growth. We Peruvians have been very lucky because we have had the best commodity prices since the Second World War. We are facing excellent copper prices, excellent gold prices. But these are things that are, in our view, they are not going to last forever. And the main challenge that Fujimori has is to take advantage of this commodity prices. And second, unlock many of the mining projects that are stacked for regulation and many other reasons. I mean, it was crime, weak economic growth and political instability, wasn't it? These were the things that led to her winning this election, or at least marginally. It is a divided country, though, isn't it? Do you think that that will make it harder for the incoming administration? Well, yes, we've been a divided country since 2016. Her main challenge is to essentially pacify the country and try to reconcile these two extremes. She has won an election against the radical left, and the radical left got 50% of the vote. She got the other 50%. So I think our main challenge on the political side is a reconciliation of these two extremes. And it's a very informal workforce, isn't it? Which has been a problem as well. That kind of sense of job insecurity and instability for many Peruvian ordinary working class people. Yes, we've been very successful in reducing poverty. We reduced poverty from around 55% in the 1990s to 21%, that's the lower. The irony of this is that most of the people that were brought out of poverty end up being informal population. People that have no access to social security, has no pension, has no permanent jobs. And one of the key challenges that she faces is to reduce that informality. And that informality cuts across every single sector. We have high informality in mining, high informality in transport. So I think what that means is that she has to focus in generating prosperity, in stimulating private investment, and in general, private entrepreneurship. Some people are talking about a push towards the right across Latin America. Do you think that that's what's happening right now? Well, yes. Well, that's in the numbers. We have a right to inform Peru, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Colombia. And the reason why the right is winning is because the population are given a chance to the right to prove that they have a way of generating prosperity and generating sustained growth in the future. Does that also bring perhaps the promise of a slightly more friendly relationship with Washington and Donald Trump? Well, these days we are very, we are great friends of Donald Trump. We have bought, I think, 24 fighters. We're investing in a naval port in El Callao. So I think the friendship has gone a long way already. But the problem is that Peru is a country that has a belief very much in multilateralism. There is not a single country that accounts for more than 70 percent of the total trade. And that has been part of our success, the fact that we have many free trade agreements and that we trade with many countries. So bending too much in one direction into one country is not good for the long run of Peru. The thoughts of the former Peruvian finance minister, Alfredo Thorne, on the inauguration of the new president, Keiko Fujimori, in Lima. And that's it for today's World Business Report from me, Ed Butler, and the rest of the team here in Salford. Thank you very much for listening. I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Zing. And on Good Bad Billionaire, we're exploring the life and fortune of music megastar Sir Paul McCartney. Macca. As one of the primary songwriters in The Beatles, and with an extensive solo career, his work generates vast and continuous royalty streams. But were song royalties alone enough to break the billion? And earn him the title of the first British billionaire rock star. Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
