NEAR THE END OF MAY, investigators from the United States charged 14 people connected to FIFA, the world governing body of football, with corruption and fraud, and Swiss police arrested seven top FIFA officials in Zurich. The indictments confirmed suspicions of malfeasance that have dogged the organisation for decades, and prompted calls for an overhaul of how football is run. But on 29 May, 133 of FIFA’s 209 member associations voted Sepp Blatter, the organisation’s president since 1998, into a new term. The ballot was secret, but a large number of African and Asian federations publicly proclaimed support for him. As pressure from other quarters mounted, four days later Blatter announced that he would resign, but only after a successor was elected. Any election seems unlikely to take place before December, and for now Blatter clings on.
Football’s current governing order is badly shaken, but far from gone. How best to clean up football’s administration is an open question, and several answers have been proposed. The repercussions of any of them will, necessarily, be planet-sized. In last year’s World Cup, in Brazil, 32 national teams contested the tournament, including five from Africa and four from Asia. It was not always so—at the World Cups in 1970, 1974 and 1978, 16 nations competed, with only one team each from the two most populous continents. But football’s present reach and representative nature—it is among the few things that count as constituting a truly international culture—are results of fairly recent political processes. In overhauling the FIFA behemoth, some seem to consider this inclusivity expendable.
In the second week of June, Wolfgang Niersbach, head of the German football federation, put forth a reform manifesto that, alongside stringent checks against corruption, would change FIFA’s current one-member-one-vote system to allow greater influence to football’s established giants—that is, primarily, countries from Western Europe and the Southern Cone. “A certain weighting of the votes on the basis of size and the sporting relevance of the associations,” Niersbach said, would be “expedient.” Recent experience from another sport suggests it might not: the International Cricket Council, under N Srinivasan, has done away with electoral parity, introducing a sort of oligarchy led by India, England and Australia.
The minnows of world football came out fuming at Niersbach’s suggestions. In an interview with Reuters—one of many similar ones the news agency conducted across Asia, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean—Pakistan’s football head, Faisal Saleh Hayat, said, “if tomorrow one member association is going to be more equal than the other, then of course that is going to raise serious issues, and that would not be good for world football and that would not be good for FIFA.” Under Blatter, every FIFA member received an annual grant of funds for development, and held equal weight in the FIFA congress, which elects the president and the members of the powerful executive committee. The windfall this system guaranteed, particularly to smaller and poorer nations, secured their loyalty to the Blatter regime.
In the 29 May election, Pakistan openly sided with Blatter. So did India. The Asian Football Confederation congratulated Blatter the next day, after earlier declaring it would vote for him en bloc. The AFC’s vice president is the Indian politician Praful Patel, who is also the president of the All India Football Federation. The AIFF has benefitted lavishly from Blatter’s policies. Last year, like all member federations, it received an annual grant of $250,000 from FIFA’s financial assistance programme, and a $750,000 share of the profits from the 2014 World Cup. In recent years, FIFA has also footed the entire bill for the AIFF’s new $1-million headquarters just outside Delhi, handed over $2.5 million to renovate stadiums, and also financed numerous academies. India is also due to host the under-17 World Cup in 2017, with FIFA support.
India’s South Asian neighbours have also been generously backed—and not, it’s been alleged, only through official channels. In 2009, Mohammad bin Hamman, a Qatari who was then president of the AFC and a member of the FIFA executive committee, transferred $100,000 to an account held by Gaurav Thapa. Gaurav’s father, Ganesh Thapa, then presided over the South Asian Football Federation, and still heads Nepal’s football administration today. Thapa claimed bin Hamman had simply extended him a personal loan. FIFA expelled bin Hamman for a breach of ethics in 2011. In 2014, leaked emails showed that he paid numerous national federations prior to a 2010 vote on hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which went to Qatar and Russia respectively. More recently, in Pakistan, soon after his interview to Reuters, Faisal Saleh Hayat was accused of embezzlement and voted out by his federation. To date, no South Asian federation has voiced opposition to Blatter.
Implicit in Niersbach’s suggestions is the view that Europe is best placed to cure FIFA’s current rot. Just how he proposes to rank footballing nations by size and relevance is uncertain. Would China, India, the United States and Indonesia—the four most populous nations on earth—be guaranteed proportional clout? Probably not, since none of them count as footballing royalty. By Niersbach’s twin criteria, the behemoth of the sport would undoubtedly be Brazil—with a population of over 200 million people and a dazzling five World Cups. But Brazil’s administrators themselves share deep links with the current FIFA regime and its alleged corruption—not least in preparing the 2014 World Cup. Ricardo Teixera, who was the president of the country’s football federation from 1989 to 2012, resigned after Swiss investigators found that he and his father-in-law, João Havelange—FIFA president from 1974 to 1998—pocketed over $41 million to influence the award of World Cup marketing rights. José Maria Marin, who followed Teixeira and stayed in office until this April, was among those arrested in Zurich in May. If the South Americans cannot be trusted, and the rest of the world is not sufficiently “relevant,” where else to turn but to Europe? And what European nation, if not Germany, boasts the most compelling combination of population size and footballing glory?
UEFA, the confederation of European football associations, stands in higher repute than FIFA, and its methods of evaluating hosting bids for tournaments and awarding commercial and broadcasting rights are more transparent than those of the global body. Still, UEFA is no shining moral example either. Niersbach’s manifesto included a suggestion to hold all footballing nations to standards of human rights. UEFA plans to hold part of the 2020 European championships, to be hosted across 13 countries, in Azerbaijan, which has been under brutally repressive rule for decades. Niersbach himself recently faced uncomfortable questions about the 2006 World Cup. Last month, German newspapers flagged a number of strange coincidences, including a German government shipment of rocket-propelled grenades to Saudi Arabia, just days before the FIFA vote that awarded hosting rights to that tournament to Germany. Niersbach categorically denied doing any wrong.
What Europe can offer are examples of administrative practices to reign in malfeasance, and those can and should be imposed to equal effect on all football administrators, wherever they are from; because for most of the footballing world, ceding power to Europe on grounds of its assumed superiority would mean not moving forward but going back.
In the wake of the Second World War, European countries made up over half of FIFA’s membership. As independence movements swept through the colonial world and new nations joined the organisation’s ranks, by the 1970s, European representation was less than a third. The continent’s power shrank proportionally, as the FIFA constitution granted all members an equal vote. The South Americans, ever sensitive to European slights, nursed a long list of complaints, not least that no non-European had ever held the FIFA presidency. The English administrator Stanley Rous, the FIFA president from 1961 to 1974, ruled over an organisation in historical denial, making little concession to the organisation’s changing dynamics.
Enter João Havelange. The Brazilian was elected after the 1974 World Cup, with crucial support from developing nations, on promises of giving them a better deal. The British sociologist and sportswriter David Goldblatt writes in Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer:
Havelange brought to the institution the unique imprimatur of Brazil’s ruling elite: imperious cordiality, ruthless clientelistic politics and a self-serving blurring of the public and private realms, institutional and personal benefit. Havelange stepped down almost two decades ago, but business at FIFA is still conducted in the mould which he cast.
Financially too, FIFA was revolutionised. Havelange oversaw the dawn of the age of corporate sponsorship, tying Coca Cola, Adidas and others to FIFA tournaments for no mean price. Those shunned by the old order now had funding to develop the game. Not all used it well. As the game flowered and the budgets bloomed, so too did the allegations of corruption at all levels of its administration. At the World Cups, the number of participating teams grew, as did television viewership and revenues.
By 1998, the tournament was contested by 32 nations, with four from Asia and five from Africa. No team from outside Europe or South America has yet lifted the trophy, but the continents that were once perennially at the fringes of the tournament are now more competitive than ever—a strong example of the progressive effects of providing opportunity where earlier there was none. Turkey and South Korea have both reached World Cup semi-finals; Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal have all been to the quarters.
Havelange handed the reins of globalised football over to his protégé, Blatter, soon after the 1998 World Cup. Havelange had been re-elected every four years for 24 years running. Blatter has now held power for 17. Though he is Swiss, his power base has always been outside his home continent. For all this time the bulk of the football world has felt no desire for a return to European control.
Niersbach and other reformers must juggle two imperatives if they wish football to change for the better: rooting out corruption, and preserving, if not expanding, international participation in playing and running the game. This will not be easy. As Blatter’s re-election showed, most national federations are perfectly happy with the present way of things. Europe, with all its clout, is well placed to lead reforms, but it has no case for imposing itself more strongly at the head of the system. In blind disregard for the politics of the game’s planetary spread, some football commentators have already mooted the possibility of Europe breaking clear of FIFA entirely, perhaps in alliance with South America, to start a rival governing body from scratch. Thankfully, this idea has so far gained little purchase among Europe’s football administrators—perhaps a sign that some of them at least understand that responding to a crisis of corruption with revanchism is no way to safeguard the global game.