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.
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