Venture capitalist Joshua Kushner has said he regrets agreeing to lead investment in Fifa president Gianni Infantino's now-abandoned plan to sell stakes in the World Cup, calling it a scheme he failed to foresee the political fallout from. It marks Kushner's first public comment since the Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) proposal collapsed amid backlash in July, triggering a wider crisis for football's governing body and putting Infantino under pressure to resign.

Kushner's firm, Thrive Eternal, had been set to lead a $4.2bn (£3.1bn) investment for a 20% stake in a new Fifa commercial subsidiary, which Fifa said would have roughly doubled funding to national associations. While defending FFE's aims of spreading football investment more evenly across all 211 member associations, Kushner admitted "we failed to appreciate the political dynamics of global football." His comments come days after Uefa, which has led opposition to Infantino, asked a New York court to approve subpoenas against Kushner and Thrive as it weighs a potential criminal complaint in Switzerland, alleging the World Cup was undervalued and that Fifa's leadership was not properly consulted.