John Oliver has discussed this on “Last Week Tonight” a few times – he is insanely in love with football, and the World Cup, but recognizes that FIFA is, in his words, “a comically grotesque organization.” He admits that he is more than a little conflicted over it.
Well, the huge amounts of money are probably built-in, it’s a world sporting event, after all. But all the others? Those seem like purely human structural failures. Nothing says your organization officials have to be unelected, the power structure opaque, and the whole business be above accountability. Make it clear how someone gets into office, put limits on how long they can stay and exactly what they can do, and have clear requirements on who has to sign off on what the group plans to do, and you can avoid a lot of corruption, and certainly the most blatant corruption.
Moving this to the game room.
It’s not necessarily the case that Football Associations, which make up FIFA, aren’t elected (though in some countries they likely aren’t), but they are elected by other ways than direct election. The US Soccer President is elected by different stakeholders who have a certain percentage of the vote - the local youth boards, athlete’s council, etc. And a lot of times, no one really pays attention. The only time in recent memory that most people really cared about the US Soccer President vote was right after the US Men missed the 2018 World Cup and Sunil Gulati resigned.
Speaking of which, how many people even know who the head of their FA is (Cindy Cone for the US, btw).
I’m not a pie-in-the-sky idealist. I expect any organization to have some degree of corruption. But FIFA seems especially blatant to me. It’s like they’re free to give Europe the middle finger and tell them “To hell with your values, we’ll do what we want and you’ll just have to live with it.” And people just shrug their shoulders and say, “What are you going to do? FIFA is going to FIFA.”
Nice. And horribly apt.
An end to corruption may not be achievable, but at least we could make reforms to ensure that the event can only be hosted by reasonably functional democracies that respect the basic human rights of their citizens and visitors.
I think this could happen if UEFA threatened to leave FIFA. If FIFA calls their bluff, just open the UEFA Championships to any nation that doesn’t participate in the World Cup. I’m guessing that most of the major non-European powers would want to play against the best rather than dominating a lesser competition. Can’t find the cite, but I read that Denmark and some other small UEFA member were openly floating this idea after the rainbow armband debacle. The bigger European powers aren’t going there quite yet, but they are seething.
There were noises from the general direction of UEFA after the Qatar decision, about organising an alternative World Cup. But it was only sabre-rattling, really. The World Cup is priceless. It transcends mere soccer tournaments and, however much we despise what FIFA has become, it is their property. They’re sort of the IOC of football.
It’s really kind of the same deal as the NCAA. Everybody seems to have an issue with the NCAA, they’ve engaged in some shady business practices, and have been rightfully lambasted for their treatment of student athletes. But they remain the only game in town as far as big money college sports, and while you may occasionally hear someone making noise about starting a rival organization, no major athletic program has pushed back too hard against them.
But there’s a significant difference, in that no single one of the conferences which make up the NCAA has most of the talent and most of the money. UEFA potentially has a great deal more leverage than, say, the SEC would.
But there are a good deal of players in UEFA teams aren’t necessarily from UEFA countries. Would UEFA clubs be willing to lose all their South American talent?
I was just thinking in terms of international play, not club play. This wouldn’t necessarily affect professional play at all.
Of course, theoretically the South American federation could threaten to ban players who play in Europe. But I think a lot of players would blow them off, and more to the point I doubt South America would do any such thing. I think it’s a lot more likely that they’d want to play in the tournament with England and Germany rather than the one with Iran and Senegal, even if the latter is officially the World Cup ™.
As long as there’s money to be made, and spent by people who don’t care, these organizations are going to exist, like it or not.
The problem with FIFA is the same as the problem with the UN; every country gets one vote and is completely unaccountable for how they use that vote, because that’s how sovereignty works. Corruption can’t be eliminated worldwide, but the one-country-one-vote rule can certainly be reformed.
It has to. FIFA bans any player who plays in an unsanctioned event. This came up when the Super League was under discussion:
Breakaway ‘Super League’ players would be banned from World Cup - FIFA (espn.com)
So, you’d have European clubs who would have decide whether to field banned players - which would mean those clubs would be outside of FIFA and therefore any South American player playing on those clubs would be playing for unsanctioned teams.
But these “unsanctioned” teams would be playing in the richest leagues in the world, which would likely remove a lot of the sting.
I’m not super familiar with the relevant history, but isn’t that basically how the Premier League started? The richest clubs in what used to be the First Division announced they were rewriting the rules to better suit themselves, and everyone else pretty much had to go along with it because they had no real leverage to do otherwise?
It’s not as much a sting for the unsanctioned teams… but for the Brazilians, Argentines, etc, who would be banned from playing for their home country national teams.
The Premier League breakaway clubs got approval from the English Football Association (who was more than receptive to the idea because they wanted to weaken the Football League) before leaving the Football League. It’d be more akin to a Super League if the clubs got UEFA’s blessing before screwing over their national leagues.
OK, clearly I am out of my depth on that discussion, I didn’t know the FA and the Football League were even distinct organizations.
My point, though, is that I don’t see why, in this scenario, South America (or even just Brazil and Argentina) wouldn’t just leave FIFA as well.
There is not a single entity that exists on this planet where there is large sums of money and NO corruption.
Money and corruption go hand in hand. Can’t have one without the other.
Whatever organization replaced FIFA would probably just become as corrupt as FIFA eventually. On top of that, soccer and corruption/bad money have always gone hand in hand.