FIFA’s dismal record on corruption

A few years back, when asked about FIFA’s politics, Sepp Blatter, the four-term president who has just resigned amid a growing corruption scandal, memorably said: “We are conservative, like the Catholics, when it comes to the laws of the game and referees. Then we are liberal when we go to the market.” With deliberate irony, he added, “We are Marx and Engels when it comes to the distribution of the money, 70 percent of all income is distributed to the national associations for development programs.”

FIFA’s secretary general took a more practical view when discussing the tedium of having his Association’s lucrative extortion schemes — such as the construction of vast stadiums that would remain disused after tournaments were concluded — subjected to oversight. At a press conference in April 2013, Jerome Valcke observed that “less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup.”

The opportunism at the core of FIFA’s commercial success was evident throughout the reign of João Havelange, who led the Association from 1974 to 1998, modernizing its management and increasing the involvement of developing nations. Havelange’s tenure was marked by widespread allegations of corruption. In 2012 a Swiss prosecutor found that he and an associate had taken up to US$23 million in bribes from a marketing company between 1992 and 2000. Other controversies took place on the field, such as when Chile was able to advance in the 1978 World Cup thanks to an uncontested game against Russia — which had safety concerns about a crucial match. (The tournament itself was hosted at the height of Argentina’s Dirty War in which thousands of political prisoners were disappeared and tortured, circumstances that FIFA willingly overlooked.)

This sort of moral and financial corruption has been an open secret for decades. What makes this week’s arrests surprising is the ease with which prosecutors in one of the world’s least soccer-crazed nations were able to indict the bureaucrats who have treated the governance of international football as their private fiefdoms for so long. The scale of the wrongdoing is staggering. The US Department of Justice charges allege that corrupt officials extracted at least US$150M for the control of television broadcast rights, and an as yet unknown but likely much greater sum in bribes from nations seeking to host major tournaments.

What has made FIFA so lucrative for so long is that, like the International Olympic Committee, against which many similar allegations have been made, it is essentially a private club using an international role to shield its internal machinations from outside scrutiny. Its secret one-vote-per-country ballots practically guarantee the sort of intrigue that Jack Warner is threatening to expose. (In 1998, for instance, Blatter’s first election was heavily influenced by sub rosa payments to African delegates.) It is hardly surprising then that an institution which controls the purse strings of the world’s most popular sport, while operating with almost zero transparency and accountability, should turn out this way.

Even after the prosecutions of corrupt officials are underway, a great deal more needs to be done if FIFA wishes to restore confidence in its ability to govern world football. Credible bribery allegations hang over the allocation of the next two tournaments, an appalling record of exploitative labour in Qatar needs to be addressed, and the current system of revenue sharing will require immediate reforms to make it less susceptible to the horse-trading at which men like Warner and Blatter excelled.

Beyond this lie scandals such as the decision to pay the Football Association of Ireland €5M to prevent legal action after France beat Ireland in a play-off for the 2010 World Cup thanks to an illegal goal by the French striker Thierry Henry. As other skeletons tumble from the closet, FIFA will need to allow further legal actions, purge its current ranks mercilessly, and carefully repair its tarnished reputation. One positive outcome from the current chaos is that other closed institutions, such as the IOC, will now be aware that their own financial chicanery may soon be in the spotlight, and that it is time to clean house before they too face a wave of indictments and prosecutions.