What FIFA’s boycott threat teaches us about the negotiation before the negotiation

So you’ve got a great idea?

Maybe you want to restructure your business.

Maybe you want to put your prices up.

Maybe you want to sell part of one of the most valuable sporting assets in the world.

What's your next move?

Announce it to everyone?

Hold a press conference?

Tell the people who will be most affected after you've already made your mind up?

Absolutely not.

The first negotiation you need to conduct is with your own stakeholders. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is believing that because an idea makes commercial sense, everyone else will immediately see it the same way.

They won’t.

People don't oppose change because they dislike progress. They oppose change because they haven't been involved in shaping it. The recent reports surrounding FIFA President Gianni Infantino's proposal to explore external investment into the commercial rights of the World Cup offer an interesting example.

Whether the proposal itself was good or bad is almost irrelevant. The fascinating part, from a negotiation perspective, is what appears to have happened before the proposal became public.

Or perhaps more accurately...what didn't happen.

If you're planning to make a change that affects dozens of powerful stakeholders, you have to assume that your biggest negotiation won't be with the outside world. It will be with the people sitting closest to you. Too many leaders spend weeks preparing presentations and almost no time preparing people. That is a dangerous mistake.

Every major negotiation starts long before anybody sits around a boardroom table. It starts over coffee. It starts in one-to-one conversations, maybe during one of the hundreds of hydration breaks during a 200 minute long football match.

It starts by asking questions. It starts by listening.

At The Gap Partnership we often find that achieving alignment inside an organisation is considerably harder than negotiating with customers or suppliers.

Why? Because your colleagues already have opinions and they already have relationships. They already have political capital invested in the current way of doing things and unlike an external customer, they don't mind telling you exactly why they think you're wrong.

That is why preconditioning and influencing matters. Before presenting a proposal, you need to understand where resistance will come from.

Who feels threatened? Who feels ignored? Who has influence? Who can quietly build support for your idea? And perhaps more importantly…

Who can quietly destroy it? Or in the case of FIFA, can UEFA very loudly and publicly undermine you by announcing an immediate boycott. Surely even the lightest of canvassing UEFA officials would have alerted Infantino to this risk!?

Infantino should not have started by trying to convince people, by ‘selling’ his proposal, he should have begun with trying to understand the people he needed to make it a success, and those people were not the external investors, they were his colleagues around the world.

What are their concerns? What risks do they see that you don’t? What would they need to see before supporting the proposal?

Only once you understand those answers can you begin building a case that addresses them. Notice I didn't say "overcomes" them, because negotiation isn't about defeating objections, it's about removing reasons for people to object.

Perhaps governance needs strengthening, perhaps controls need tightening, perhaps the proposal needs changing altogether. If your stakeholders have identified weaknesses in your plan, don't see that as resistance, see it as free consultancy.

One of my favourite Nelson Mandela quotes still applies. “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.”

Here lies an important negotiation principle. People are far more likely to support an idea when they believe they helped create it. If someone gives you an idea that aligns with your thinking, celebrate it, build on it even credit them for it, this will allow them to become one of your advocates not one of your opponents. The best negotiators don't need all the credit. They need all the support.

This is where many leaders go wrong. They mistake communication for alignment. They think sending an email, delivering a presentation or standing on a stage explaining the logic of a decision somehow constitutes consultation.

It doesn’t. Communication and alignment happens after decisions. By the time you're explaining your proposal to everyone at once, it's already too late to negotiate, at that point people are defending positions rather than exploring possibilities.

So what should leaders do differently? Start by identifying every stakeholder whose support matters and speak to them individually, Infantino had five weeks to do this if he had surrounded himself with his footballing colleagues rather than sponsors and politicians.

Ask far more questions than you answer, find the areas where your thinking overlaps, understand where your interests differ and adapt your proposal where appropriate don't be afraid to concede on issues that matter little to you if doing so secures support on the things that matter most.

In other words…conduct the negotiation before the negotiation.

By the time the proposal reaches the wider organisation, there shouldn't be many surprises, most concerns should already have been aired, most objections should already have been addressed, most supporters should already have bought into the direction of travel. 

That's exactly what experienced commercial negotiators do before walking into an important customer negotiation. They don't simply prepare their arguments. They prepare the environment. They build coalitions. They create momentum. They make success feel inevitable. Because here's the reality. The quality of your proposal is only half the equation the quality of your internal alignment determines whether that proposal ever has a chance of succeeding.

The best negotiators know that deals are rarely won in the meeting where everyone is watching, they're won in all the conversations nobody else ever sees.

As Gianni Infantino, tries to gain the support of the football associations around the world in order to keep his job, he may have realised had he done more to seek their input to this proposal in the first place he may have strengthened his grip on power, rather than be in a desperate panic to cling to it.

How The Gap Partnership can help you

The Gap Partnership turns negotiation into a strategic advantage. With the scientific depth of Negotiation Academy Potsdam and the AI expertise of Passion Labs, we operate at the intersection of behavioural mastery, science and AI. We equip your teams with the skills and mindset to negotiate brilliantly, help you standardise negotiation for consistent results, and work with your leaders to build a culture where collaboration and alignment drive performance. Let us help you embed negotiation into your organisational DNA and unlock sustainable growth in every deal.

Ryan Gray is an Associate Partner at The Gap Partnership, helping retailers and CPG organisations improve commercial performance through more effective negotiation. With extensive experience in retail, sales leadership and commercial transformation, he partners with senior leaders to drive growth, align stakeholders and deliver lasting commercial value.