It is a few years now since Michael Hershman was brought in by Fifa to have a look at how it might improve its governance then left again when it steadfastly refused to implement most of the changes he recommended. Sepp Blatter was a key problem, he reckoned, with the veteran Swiss paying lip service to the cause of reform while obstructing and attempt to bring it about.
To judge by the latest report into corruption in global sport by Transparency International, the organisation Hershman co-founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, it’s hard to imagine that he is any more optimistic about Fifa’s future now, as it elects its new leader amid much talk a brighter, better future, than he was when he walked away from its independent governance committee.
The report, a collection of about 60 articles, most of them by academics in the growing field of sports governance, is not limited to football-related matters but after the year that’s been in it, it’s no surprise that Fifa features prominently. Sadly, there is no great sense of optimism conveyed by its various authors that the election of Blatter’s successor scheduled for today, February 25th, will deliver the much hoped for bright new dawn for the game’s deeply troubled ruling body.
In essence, the recurring theme of the reports is simple: there are too many administrators exploiting the lack of accountability within major sports organisations for personal gain. Many others, Blatter included perhaps, are primarily guilty of tolerating the corruption or simply obstructing those who would tackle it by defending the structures that prevent outside scrutiny. As Stefan Szymanski puts it in Compromise or Compromised: The bidding process for the award of the Olympic Games and the Fifa World Cup: “Historically, both Fifa and the IOC (International Olympic Committee) had operated as gentlemen’s clubs, and, according to the received ideology, gentlemen cannot be corrupted.”
That myth was exploded many years ago, of course, and many of the problems that have enveloped Fifa in the more recent past were, at least in part, the result of the “strong tendency towards horse trading” that existed among those running the game, whose willingness to do deals among themselves helped to keep the outside world at bay until the American prosecutors finally came calling.
Individual national sports bodies have seen it as being in their interests to embrace the culture of secrecy that reigned at Fifa and to resist outside supervision. At almost every level, though, there is the same sort of posturing about reform and so we are treated to the FAI’s chief executive, John Delaney, repeatedly calling last May for Blatter to go and for Fifa to make itself more transparent only for it to emerge that he had himself done a secret deal with the discredited Swiss worth €5 million to the association in the wake of Ireland’s controversial elimination by France in the 2010 World Cup qualification play-offs.
National sports bodies often have, as Robert Pielke Jr puts it, “less well developed mechanisms of governance than many governments, business and civil society organisations”.
With this in mind, one of the candidates for the Fifa presidency this time around, former French diplomat and one time Blatter adviser, Jerome Champagne, proposed as part of his manifesto that the world body establish a department to ensure that national associations are properly run and that the grant aid they receive is properly spent. It might just be one of the reasons why his campaign has received almost no support from the electorate – national associations.
Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa of Bahrain, meanwhile, (the frontrunner at the time of writing) has managed to build a considerable body of support, most particularly in Africa and Asia despite, as Steve Menary reports in For the Good of the Game? Governance on the Outskirts of international football, having been accused of suppressing a report by the consultancy firm PwC into the finances of the Asian Confederation (AFC) of which he is president, which “warned of possible tax evasion, money laundering, sanction busting and a series of illicit payments to national, regional and global football executives....” among other things. He is also alleged to have bought votes when running for the AFC presidency three years ago and, rather more seriously, to have been involved in the detention and torture of athletes who protested against the regime in his homeland.
Even at the highest levels, there can be a comedy aspect to the corruption of football officials as in the case of Chuck Blazer, the New York based Fifa executive committee member (he’s the one with the apartment in Trump Towers for his cats) who, rather foolishly, paid for millions of dollars worth of expenditure by Concacaf (essentially North and Central America’s Uefa) on his credit card so as to collect loyalty points while not making annual tax returns to the IRS.
These people contribute to very real and widespread misery too, however. In Qatar, some €25 billion worth of construction contracts were awarded in the aftermath of the country being awarded the right to host the 2022 World Cup in hugely questionable circumstances. The International Trade Union Congress has since reported that 200 foreign workers have been dying annually on the resulting building sites and Fifa has done little to improve conditions in a country where, the ITUC’s Sharan Burrow suggests in Sporting mega-events, corruption and rights: The case of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, “the government itself is responsible for modern slavery through the ‘kafala’ system, used widely across the Middle East, which ties impoverished migrant workers to their employer”.
Last summer, when the leaders of the European associations were falling over each other to call for Blatter to go, most, including Delaney, were adamant that Uefa president Michel Platini should replace him despite the fact that all knew he had voted for Qatar to get the tournament. Now he, like Blatter, has been banned from football and, barring a successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, his career in sports administration is over.
There will never be a shortage of willing replacements – these people have a tendency to treat themselves well – but the underlying message of this book is that unless we do much better as a society to regulate and watch over sports organisations that we fund to a very considerable extent through our taxes then, whether they are well-intentioned or not, there will no end to the scandals that have blighted the world’s favourite sport.
Emmet Malone is Soccer Correspondent
