While I’m not a soccer fan, it’s hard for me to miss the excitement of the World Cup every few years. I don’t follow the sport, or the governing bodies, but it’s hard to miss FIFA. EA Sports keeps making those FIFA video games every year and of course corruption. There seems to be little doubt that FIFA as an organization is about as corrupt and crooked as one can get. Sometimes it seems like a race to the bottom between FIFA and the IOC in terms of graft. With the controversies surrounding the latest World Cup, I once again ask myself, why is FIFA tolerated? Any answers? Too big to fail? Nobody cares about corruption?
It’s the only game in town.
In my opinion, FIFA needs to be brought down to its very screws. Not only did Qatar bribe their way into the World Cup, but so did Russia. I mean, Qatar? SERIOUSLY?! And now we’ve got slave labor on an epic scale to build the necessary infrastructure.
How would you eliminate FIFA? You’d have to convince soccer fans to stop watching FIFA-sanctioned games, and you’d have to convince advertisers to stop advertising to those fans.
FIFA, which means the sport itself, is controlled by the rich and powerful. Reform is virtually impossible. People want their “futbol”, and that means they will tolerate a lot as long as they get it.
I see it as a Facebook or Twitter situation: every country is member of FIFA, they claim to have more members than the UN, so there is nowhere else to go. Only if the situation becomes unsustainable to an extreme degree will people start to look for alternatives, otherwise they look the other way and justify it with whatever (“I don’t like it, but a journalist must be in Twitter” is a common phrase I read). But now Musk comes along and many people are switching (or twittering about switching) to Mastodon. We’ll see. And Denmark has stated they want to leave FIFA (but stay in UEFA, where Gianni Mafiantino started). I hope they start an chain reaction that leads to an avalanche of countries leaving, but I am not holding my breath.
ETA: And of course FIFA has tons of money to bribe people so they stop complaining about corruption.
Well… As has been done (successful or not) in other sports and int’l events, there’s nothing stopping anyone from starting a similar organization. Get enough countries to sign up and FIFA is gone. Didn’t TFG try to start his own Am-Football league? How many competing organizations are there in boxing (and as a result, I think they’re being booted from the next Olympics)?
The problem is getting enough countries to sign up. Quite a few FIFA members have a shaky relationship to things like fair play, democracy, anti-corruption. Can it really be a world cup with only 25-50 countries competing and leading up to the main event? It doesn’t matter that those countries will mostly be the ones that play fair or at least semi-fair.
Especially if you remember that Football giant France changed their vote to Qatar at the behest of Sarkozy who wanted a better fossil fuel deal. Platini wanted to vote for the U.S. as host. When you can’t even trust the leader of a nominally fully democratic country, I think it would be hard to challenge FIFA, without becoming as dirty and corrupt.
Nah, you’d just need the national football associations of the top, say, 20 countries to break away and form a new association, and then watch the other associations follow. But that’s a significant challenge in itself.
There have been 21 tournaments, 79 countries have qualified. Of these 13 have made it to finals and only 8 have won. They are:
Uruguay, Italy, (West) Germany, Brazil, England, Argentina, France and Spain.
If all of them left, followed by… (hm)… Netherlands, U.S. Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Australia, China, India, some of the West African countries, Canada, some from MENA, then maybe. I’m excluding Russia for obvious reasons and including some, since just their size maybe make them interesting for tv rights and sponsorship, even if they’ll never reach a final.
But as I noted above, even a country like France is not beyond graft and corruption. UEFA is arguably the most powerful part of FIFA and it is as corrupt, so they must be bypassed as well.
I’m all for burning it down and rebuilding. I just think there is too much money spread around to too many people for it to happen.
FIFA has the World Cup but not much else. It has tried to get a bit of the club football action with the Club World Cup, but nobody takes that very seriously. There are many major tournaments that are not run by FIFA (Champions League, European Championship, Copa America, etc.) and then there’s all the major national leagues.
So if you’re, say, a follower of English football, you can mostly ignore FIFA and instead direct your ire at the FA Premier League or UEFA, who are no saints themselves but not as bad as FIFA.
Not a football/soccer fan, but isn’t UEFA part of FIFA?
Yup.
- Asian Football Confederation (AFC; 47 members)[a]
- Confederation of African Football (CAF; 56 members)
- Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF; 41 members)[b]
- Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL; 10 members)
- Oceania Football Confederation (OFC; 13 members)[a]
- Union of European Football Associations (UEFA; 55 members)[
I went to a very memorable soccer match under the Fifa affliated Confederation of African Football in Zimbabwe.
Two issues arose. It was Zimbabwe vs Zambia, and I was hanging out with my Zambian friends (I am Zimbabwean) We had all taken LSD before the match (is that three issues?)
The Zambians easily won, at which point the Zimbabweans started hurling full soft drink cans into the Zambian crowds.
Quite an experience.
Even if you could get countries and teams to leave FIFA, how would you prevent the new organization from becoming just as corrupt? Tons of money, people and organizations angling for power, important decisions that have to be made. What oversight or controls would serve to prevent corruption?
It’s the same (or so I understand) with the Olympics and other similar organizations. Unelected officials, no transparency, no accountability, and huge amounts of money and power. Corruption seems inevitable.
Well FIFA is a federation, so it’s not like UEFA is FIFA’s European subsidiary. They are separate organisations, separate revenue, even different regulations in some respects (although member federations do comply with certain global FIFA regulations.)
I think this is a really good question and I am stumped as to possible solutions.
How are people selected to their national federations’ boards of governance and from there to FIFA representaion? The whole structure seems to be endowed with vast opportunities for good ol’ boy corruption.
If you can imagine a system that doesn’t allow for corruption, I’d like to hear it.
Well, I think it’s very fair to say FIFA is more corrupt than most big organizations. It’s uncommonly corrupt. It’s clearly possible to be vastly less scummy, because many big outfits manage it.
The problem is that large sports organizations confer LEGITIMACY. Legitimacy is everything. Why do more people watch the NBA than some other basketball league? Legitimacy; the NBA is just considered the basketball league that matters most. Why do the various gridiron leagues that try to compete with the NFL keep failing? Legitimacy. Why did the Olympics always outdraw the Goodwill Games? Legitimacy.
FIFA has legitimacy. The World Cup is, ya know, the World Cup; we all just understand it is the pinnacle of high level soccer competition. Winning the World Cup is what matters. If you tried a rival soccer organization and had an international competition called, say, the Global Series or whatever, even if you could get all the elite players on the national teams, it would not draw as well as the World Cup… because it’s not the World Cup. The World Cup matters. Its history matters; the history of WC competition is part of soccer lore and what makes it matter. I know who won the World Cup in 1994, and the fact billions of people know that confers meaning and legitimacy on the 2022 World Cup. “Because it matters” is a huge deal in pro sports.
The critical thing is these organizations are international.
There is reason to believe that the UK can police UK football to keep it clean enough. There is reason to believe the USA can police the MLS to keep it clean enough.
But there is no corresponding multi-national body that could properly police a UK + US joint football / soccer federation. There’s just too much room to hide the scummy parts in “don’t ask don’t tell” jurisdictions.
Now add another 100 countries, most of which have rather little interest in the rule of law and the situation is hopeless.
Corruption, or at least the possibility of it, is inherent when money and influence intersect. Like everyone assumes corruption is the reason Qatar was awarded this World Cup.
In the US, American football and basketball (at least on the men’s side) are the most corrupt sports. I haven’t heard of anyone throwing around money for college fencing because there’s little money in it.