FIFA offers incentives over "stakeholder" plan

0:03Hello and welcome to News Hour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. It is the world's favourite sport. There's no dispute about that. Football has more fans, more participants than any other game on the planet. But where there is dispute, and a furious one right now, is over who owns that sport. The easy answer trotted out by everybody from the sodden supporter freezing somewhere halfway up the windswept stands to the cosseted executives in their executive boxes is that football belongs to the fans. But the latest wheeze from the global governing body FIFA has sparked a raging backlash, a charge of betraying the game and the fans.

0:48FIFA wants to set up a commercial subsidiary to run its major competitions like the World Cup that we've all just sort of enjoyed. Private investors would then be able to buy in, led, it seems, by the brother of President Trump's son-in-law. FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has written to all 211 member associations, saying they will each receive$40 million if they back the plan by mid-September. European football's governing body, UEFA, is not happy. It's accused FIFA of using the sport to enrich themselves and their friends. Jim Boyce is from Northern Ireland and he was vice president of FIFA from 2011 to 2015.

1:27What is he making the plan? I'm totally against any sale off of FIFA than any private company. I think if Infantino had wanted to come up with something like this, he should have consulted, surely, all of the associations before something like this was announced. but from a personal point of view I agree entirely with what UEFA are saying. I think UEFA are the strongest confederation still in world football and if UEFA did decide that they're not going to take part in a World Cup because of these suggestions, certainly it would throw the whole thing into complete chaos. Do you think that is at all likely?

2:12It could get to the point where UEFA says, right, we are going to boycott the World Cup. I have to be honest with you, the strongest countries are UEFA countries. There's no doubt about that, apart obviously from Argentina. And yes, I think UEFA are so annoyed and so upset at what has been released here without at least the decency of consulting with the confederations. And I notice also that not only UEFA, but a few other of the confederations are against what is being suggested here at the moment. At the end of the day, money talks. Now, if this proposal is put and is put in such a way that the majority of the associations decide that they're going to go along with this plan, it's an awful lot of money.

3:01But personally, I think it's taken the game of football that I love, and I'm going tonight to see my local team play just in a pre-season friendly. I think it's taken the game away from the normal, ordinary football fan. And I know reading a lot of what I've read about this, a lot of them are absolutely astounded at this suggestion. So I guess one of FIFA's counter arguments would be, look, you know, we're just talking about the World Cup here. When we're talking about local clubs like the one that you're going to go and see later on today, they could end up benefiting because we're offering to reinvest tens of millions of dollars in every association's local games.

3:42Something like this should be discussed with the 211, I think it is, associations. It needs to have been put to them in such a way that they would know before something like this. I'm not saying it's forced upon them because at the end of the day they have the vote. But I think what has happened here is that this appears to have just been thrown at them without it even being discussed, I understand, by some of the vice presidents of FIFA who didn't know that it was happening either. So I think we need to actually get to the bottom of this. We need to find out what the exact criteria is going to be.

4:22And then people have to sit down and they have to sensibly look at things. But what must not happen is that the ordinary average football fan who loves the game has not been totally priced out and that this is not another FIFA money-making scheme. The big problem here that a lot of people are seeing is that Johnny Infantino, who I knew very well when he was general secretary of UEFA when I was at UEFA, and I found him a very decent, sensible fellow. I think what has happened here is that power appears, appear to have gone a little bit to Johnny's head. And his relationship with Donald Trump during that World Cup is nothing more than astounding.

5:05Do you think you were vice president of FIFA between 2011 and 2015? You know, this tension between FIFA being both the sort of the commercial arm of football, you know, that it's there to maximise profits, but it's also there to regulate the game, that there was too much of a tension there between both being the sort of the regulator and the commercial actor. Do you think maybe on reflection this is something that you could have sorted out when you were in charge? What I would say to you is, had I been there and something like this had been announced, I would have certainly brought up as to why something like this was put into the public domain without being discussed at that time by the FIFA Executive Committee.

5:53And it astounds me today when I hear that not only the associations, but obviously several vice presidents of FIFA say that they're totally unaware that this proposal was going to be put forward. Jim Boyce, the former vice president of FIFA. Let's pick up on that point I ended with Jim. the possible tension there is between FIFA's twin roles, both as a commercial revenue raiser and as the game's supreme regulatory body. Jan Zaglinski is an associate professor at the London School of Economics, where he specialises in international sports law and regulation. How far does he think it's inevitable that those two fundamental, rather different functions are going to be in conflict?

6:37In very concrete terms, that means it's going to look after rules, how many World Cup teams are admitted to the tournament, about how certain rules are applied. We've all heard of the new hydration breaks, which have been FIFA innovation. But then there is an increasingly important economic dimension to it. FIFA wants to make as much money as possible. It's going to commercialize its broadcasting rights. It's going to sell merchandise. It's going to be trying to generate money in all sorts of other ways. And I guess what you see, and this is not exclusive to football, that the two heads, if you will, can conflict.

7:26Sometimes it may appear that regulatory decisions are taken out of commercial interest. And that, of course, is a problem. I hear what you say about possible changes to the rules during the World Cup, but would it really matter through the rest of the game, all the way down through the different levels, different age groups? I mean, they're not going to start having hydration breaks, are they? We first of all have to understand that in addition to FIFA, there's of course other federation across the world. I think that's part of the reason why we have such a heated conversation right now about the new proposals.

8:02So FIFA really is in charge of the international game and the international game only. So FIFA is not everything, but FIFA of course has an incredibly important position as the top body in that famous football pyramid. If FIFA makes certain strategic decisions, these need to be followed by its member associations. And within these member associations, there's all sorts of clubs, players that will eventually be affected by that. And money, again, is a hugely important factor in all of this. Because part of the way in which FIFA is trying to sell its latest proposal is to say, look, we can generate more and more money.

8:44And that money eventually will end up in all of those beautiful grassroots clubs that desperately need the money. The problem with it is, though, that there's so much financial misconduct within world football. We've yet to see clear evidence that the money that FIFA is paying is actually arriving in the right places, in the right hands. In terms of the position of Gianni Infantino, he, of course, will say, look, I'm here at the service of the 211 member federations. And, you know, if they don't like this latest idea, they can vote it down in the middle of September. Is there a way in which he can be challenged from within the organisation?

9:31There are several ways in which this could happen. I think the most important route lies in the FIFA Congress. It contains all 211 member associations. Each has a vote. They typically meet once a year or more if there's an emergency. And at the end of the day, it's going to be the FIFA Congress that has to approve the plans or not. Now, the next one is scheduled for March 2027. The question now, of course, is why Infantino sets the earlier deadline of mid-September for the member associations. And I think the cynical answer is this is basically a form of blackmail. Infantino tries to say, look, you're either with us or against us.

10:17If you're not with us, we'll cut the money that you'll be receiving. So there's a real incentive for all of those countries, all of those national federations to be kind of on board with his plans. I didn't realise that, that the offer of this$40 million was contingent on saying yes, that if you if you said no initially, you would be getting less money. Is that right? That's correct. Ordinarily, this proposal should now be discussed for six to eight months. Then next March, we'll have an informed vote that's going to take place as part of the next FIFA Congress. But Infantino, of course, wants to galvanize momentum, probably wants to also make use of that summer break right now where a lot of people are on holidays.

11:00So he's going to say, oh, look, here's a commercially, financially very appealing proposal for you. You can make loads of money, but only if you're with us and if you communicate that clearly to kind of put pressure on the rest of the world to also say yes. All that you're describing, it just sounds as if this is the latest iteration of some people, fans, who say, you know, this is a betrayal of the beautiful game and others who say there's always been money floating around at the highest levels in all sport. Get used to it. I think that's right. There's no use in romanticizing the past. There have been plenty of problematic developments in decades past.

11:43But the last few years have really been quite unusual in the level of poor governance, in the level of political interference into the game. A lot of your listeners will remember the infamous reversal of the red card that had been given against the U.S. striker Balogun, where Trump famously called Gianni Infantino to get a positive decision for the U.S. team. There was the Peace Prize before that that was awarded to Trump. All of these things basically without any democratic approval from the member associations of FIFA. So there's a lot of critique, not just from the outside, but from within.

12:26So increasingly, not just from outside the world of football, but also from within, there is a sense that world football is misgoverned and that we need to do something about it. Jan Zaglinski, Associate Professor at the LSE. We have spent the day trying to get somebody from FIFA to join us here on NewsHour. We've yet to receive any reply to our inquiries.

13:00coming up on the program Yemen's Houthi group it's the Iran-backed militia is considering imposing fees on commercial ships sailing through the southern red sea how effective could that be we're totally seeing the Houthis plagiarizing I would even say copying the Iranian model, in which if they want$10 ,000 from you, they will kidnap your mother, hold her head for 10 years, they will negotiate with you, ask you for a million dollars, you will give them$100 ,000 and you will actually think you won. It's a very classical school of hostage negotiations. That insight into what the Houthis may be up to in about 20 minutes.

13:40Our main headline this hour, As we've been hearing, FIFA's member associations have been told they'll each receive$40 million if they back contentious plans to sell off commercial rights for its tournaments.

14:00This is NewsHour, live from the BBC World Service with me, Tim Franks. There seems to be a pattern to news stories about artificial intelligence. We can be both hugely impressed by the latest capabilities and we can be hugely unnerved. The latest revelation from OpenAI seems to belong more to the latter category. The companies disclosed that an unprecedented cyber attack carried out two weeks ago by rogue chat GPT agents on another AI-related company was more extensive than initially thought. A company called Hugging Face was thought to be the only victim, but OpenAI now admits that its bot also hacked what it called several other unnamed publicly available services.

14:43The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has been speaking about the incident with the venture capitalist and podcast host, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. This is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. I've been a little surprised that more people don't feel it so viscerally. So, you know, we paused training, but then there's like long-term questions about what do you do if this is like going to be the new rate of progress or we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels. Sam Walton on that podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

15:21Joe Tidy is the BBC cyber correspondent. A little bit of extra information from OpenAI, but how far is it still unclear to what extent these AI agents went rogue? Yeah, I think if you ask a cybersecurity professional, a lot of them would say that this is an open AI mistake. There are errors here. Sam Altman is painting it as a situation where the AI is just so powerful and so sophisticated that there was no way to contain it. And that is very frightening in the way that he's describing this. But then also you have to bear in mind that this was meant to be a safe container. We call it a sandbox in computing where the AI, which was designed, of course, to be an expert hacker, the guardrails were taken off.

16:05It was given free reign inside that sandbox to prove itself as an expert hacker. And then, of course, it found its way out. So some would say that the container wasn't strong enough. And that's the criticism that OpenAI is facing. And we wait to see what their full report into the incident says. We know, of course, from Hugging Face, which was the main victim here, they have released, and they've been fantastic, actually, at telling the rest of the industry what happened. They've given a briefing to hundreds of cybersecurity professionals on a Zoom call recently, and they describe it as these AIs working in a swarm, very sort of haphazard, clumsy and sloppy at times, but occasionally brilliant.

16:41and the sheer number of them working in tandem, trying out different routes around the internet to try and hack them, meant they were overwhelmed and their cybersecurity was effectively knocked over. And the fact that these AI agents, I mean, presumably they'll get better at making those clumsy mistakes, but also they do not get bored, they do not sleep, they do not let these tasks go, do they? No, and that's the relentless drive that these agents have. They are set a task and they went off and they tried to complete the task. That was prove that you are an expert hacker. You can go through this exam.

17:15It's called Exploit Gym. It sort of tests the hacking models on how good they are. And it thought, well, actually, there's a shortcut here. If I break out a containment and go and find the answers from the internet, why not try Hugging Face? And that's why Hugging Face, we think, was in the firing line. Huge amount of damage done to Hugging Face. About a third of their infrastructure had to be rebuilt, they said. But they wouldn't say how much it cost. They wouldn't tell me that. But they certainly said that it caused a huge amount of trouble for them. And the fact that OpenAI are only now talking about other publicly available services, I mean, they're not being very forthcoming, are they?

17:48Absolutely not. I've been back and forth all day with OpenAI trying to find out what publicly available services means. I take that to mean companies or organisations. They wouldn't confirm that, but they haven't knocked down my reporting today where we said companies. There have been some reporting from Reuters that one particular company called Modal, I think it is, they might have been one of the ones that were breached. but we certainly don't know which other companies were attacked. The BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy. Since I spoke to Joe, we've heard that from President Trump, he was asked about these rogue AI agencies, said that his administration is looking at artificial intelligence controls and Sam Altman has announced that he's going to be meeting the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles next week.

18:35The Hollywood star and musician Jared Leto is facing allegations of criminal sexual conduct by four women who were all teenagers at the time of the alleged offences. The actor, who won an Oscar in 2014 for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, made his name with films like Requiem for a Dream, The Suicide Squad, and more recently, Tron Aries. His rock band, 30 Seconds to Mars, are planning a high-profile tour next spring. The women who spoke to the BBC said they encountered the 54-year-old between 2002 and 2014. Nomiur Iqbal has this report, and I should say it contains details of alleged sexual offences, which you may find upsetting.

19:14His band was having a concert. I was with another girl, and we were backstage. I was 17. He had sent an acquaintance of his, and he told me, Jared's seen you, and he was interested in getting your number. This is Clara, not her real name. She says she started texting Jared Leto in the mid-2000s when he was twice her age. Very handsome, great features, professional. And the Oscar goes to Jared Leto. The Oscar-winning actor, known for his roles in Dallas Buyers Club, The Suicide Squad, and more recently in Tron Ares, is facing serious sexual misconduct allegations in a new BBC documentary. We've spoken to 10 women, several of whom met Leto as teenagers through his band 30 Seconds to Mars.

20:03So sometime after that concert... Clara was invited to an exclusive hotel in West Hollywood by Leto and brought along a friend. He kind of waved us over, we sat down, my friend and I, just having some general banter about things. We had kind of drifted into the realm to talk about the age of consent. I had mentioned to him that my dad was in law enforcement, that I knew with certainty that here in California the age of consent is 18. He just kind of shrugged it off like it wasn't a huge concern for him. She says Leto then invited the girls to his house. He suggested to my friend, you can wait in the computer room while her and I hang out.

20:44Clara says they went on to have sex. Her age at the time means this would be classed as statutory rape in California where the age of consent is 18. That's what I like about high school girls. I keep getting older and they just stay the same age. It's not the first time Leto has faced allegations of sexual impropriety against teenagers. An investigation by US publication Air Mail last year was met with a flat denial from the actor. And despite this and years of rumours, they have not held back his Hollywood career. But these new allegations could prove harder to ignore. Clara is one of four women accusing Jared Leto of criminal sexual misconduct from when they were teenagers.

21:30The other women's allegations include one of grooming and another of threatening sexual assault. Oh my gosh. You guys remember pictures? A fourth woman, who we're calling Isabel, told us how at 17, Leto visited the shop she was working at and asked her to meet him at his motel room after work so they could hang out. I didn't think much of it. I just was like, oh, he's still getting ready and we're going to meet up there and then we're going to go out afterwards. So this is where it gets hard. Instead, she says she was asked inside where he sexually assaulted her. You know, I'm in my 40s now. I don't think I ever so recently blamed him.

22:13I always blamed me. Despite repeated attempts to contact Jared Leto, he has not responded to the allegations put to him by the BBC. He's due to return to stage next year for a high-profile tour with his band, placing him back in the spotlight. Nomi Oekbao reporting, and since the BBC first aired those allegations, and just in the past few hours, Jared Leto has denied the allegations in a statement to US media. He said, I've never assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false.

22:54Welcome back to News Hour. In Spain, thousands of people evacuated from the path of wildfires have begun to return home. The government of Madrid lifted more than a dozen evacuation orders for municipalities west of the capital. But in southwestern France, firefighters are stealing themselves for worsening conditions. The Gironde and neighbouring L 'Honde departments are under an orange-level heightened warning with inland temperatures of 41 degrees Celsius. There's a fear that strengthening winds and falling humidity levels could fan embers and reignite blazes in some places. The BBC's James Waterhouse has been to the village of Blagon, west of Bordeaux.

23:39what we're looking at we're told is called noiring which literally means drowning they are trying to moisten the soil with their hoses these fire crews the dry vegetation the bark as much as possible to prevent flare-ups looking down the road there must be at least 10 fire trucks and they've come from cities elsewhere like marseilles and leon it really is a collective effort and they are all saying the same thing. Today is significant because of the temperatures peaking. Away from all of the activity lives Pierre Alexandre. He has invited us over. Officials have asked him to evacuate and he doesn't want to so we're going to find out why.

24:26We wanted to protect our house, we wanted to protect the forest, our village. So it's why when the police came, they said you need to leave. I said no. So at four o 'clock in the afternoon, we can come to catch you with the police. So I said to my wife and my daughter, go please. I said to my son, I know that you want to stay with me. I prefer that if you leave, please. But you have 19 years old. I know that you want to choose, but if you stay with me, be careful, because in front of us, it's a nightmare. We don't know the situation. We don't know what will happen. Do you think you could have stopped the fire?

25:05No, we are not firefighters. So you were willing to risk your lives? Yes, we took the decision to try.

25:17The images Pierre-Alexander showed us were pretty shocking. Shocking. He sat on the roof of his house in the middle of the afternoon and he's in pitch black. There's no doubt he risked his life by staying. More broadly, these fires are going to be fought for some time. And what we're hearing from the European Union, officials high up there, is that whilst they've been able to help France and neighbouring Spain, Their resources are already stretched with extreme weather conditions forecast for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. These wildfires aren't just going to become more common, but more widespread.

26:07A report from James Waterhouse in Western France.

26:23You're listening to NewsHour live from the BBC in London. I'm Tim Franks. The UN's Office of Humanitarian Affairs says the number of settler attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was the highest on record last month, with an average of six attacks per day, causing casualties or property damage. Settler attacks have risen along with a rise in Israeli settler outposts. They're illegal under both Israeli and international law. Israeli monitors say that more than 230 outposts have appeared across the West Bank under the current Israeli government. Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson has been talking to Palestinians in one village, or Maire, south of Nablus, about the rise in settler attacks there.