IF WE CANT EVEN GOVERN WORLD FOOTBALL
- William Paton
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
It’s a Very Bad Sign
Summary
FIFA's global influence makes its persistent corruption especially damaging. From the 2015 bribery scandal to recent governance failures, political interference, national association scandals — and now a phone call that reverses a refereeing decision — football's governing body continues to erode public trust. Football deserves transparent, accountable global governance to demonstrate that we can indeed govern ourselves.
PHUKET — Nelson Mandela famously understood the impact football could have. The film Invictus dramatizes how "Madiba" used sport to help unite a deeply divided country by backing the South African rugby team, the Springboks, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. John Carlin's book gives a detailed account (1).
While I am a close follower of International Relations, I realize that most people care more about football than — say — the endless saga of United Nations Security Council reform. FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), although it is a non-governmental organization, is arguably the world's most important international governance organization today because, with its 211 "national" associations for football, (2) it is a powerful metaphor for global governance in general.
The entire world was watching last year when, after the Norwegian Nobel Committee overlooked President Trump for the Peace Prize, FIFA's president, Gianni Infantino, flew to Washington to present Trump with a FIFA Peace Prize he had invented especially for him. However, that piece of tomfoolery was nothing compared with the recent overturn of a referee's ruling against a U.S. player after Donald called Gianni to ask him to fix it before the USA's next game. Like many of the game's referee rulings, it was contentious, and some agree with the reversal, but it was hardly a president's call to make, especially to the benefit of his own country's team!
FIFA's performance represents how well the world's countries can organize themselves to do something many people, myself included, consider important. If this is the best we can do, it does not bode well for our future. FIFA continues to be a corrupt, greedy, and often silly organization, just as it has been for decades. The first major book on FIFA corruption was published in 2006 by Andrew Jennings: Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals. In 2014, Jennings went on to publish Omertà: Sepp Blatter's FIFA Organised Crime Family. Such exposés were only appetizers for the scandal that soon followed.
The Scandal on the Lake
In May 2015, at the luxurious Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich, Swiss police arrested seven senior FIFA officials. The U.S. Department of Justice alleged that senior football officials had participated in a 24-year scheme (1991–2015) involving more than US$150 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for media rights, marketing contracts, and the awarding of football tournaments.
More than 40 individuals and entities were indicted by U.S. authorities. The then president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, was suspended by FIFA’s Ethics Committee over a payment of 2 million Swiss francs to Michel Platini. Blatter argued it was a "deferred payment" for work done by Platini more than a decade before as a consultant, under an oral agreement. A Swiss court acquitted him.
The former FIFA vice-president, Jack Warner, spent the next decade hiding back in Trinidad and Tobago, fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering, until his lawyers convinced the Trinidadian court there were “legal flaws” in the extradition process. The U.S. has not withdrawn the charges. Jack was banned for life from football by FIFA in 2015 (3).
Nor does FIFA govern world football well
One might have then expected a major cleanup of the world's Football Federation, but that is not what really followed. The incoming President Gianni Infantino was soon accused of taking various measures to reduce transparency and accountability. Last year, more than 100 figures from football, academia, and civil society signed an open letter arguing that FIFA's governance had deteriorated and become less transparent than it was after the 2015 scandal and "reforms." The concerns focused on concentration of power, weakened oversight, and reduced accountability. The illness, it seemed, had been diagnosed by Doctor Infantino as a case of excessive exposure of FIFA's internal organs, and the cure was to better protect them from view.
Gianni Infantino's pay package is worth an astonishing SFr 4.8 million (US$6 million) for heading a non-governmental sports organization, quite remarkable, especially when you consider his predecessor stayed in the job for 17 years. Even more astonishing, the budget for the idyllic office, administration, legal, and governance activities of FIFA is more than $0.4 billion per year (4). There are entire UN organizations with large responsibilities that run on less than a tenth of that.
Corruption at the FIFA headquarters in Lausanne is underlain by constant scandals around the world in its national associations. Malaysia was recently found to have falsified documents to make seven foreign-born players eligible for their national team. As a result, some match results were overturned. In May 2026, a sports marketing executive was convicted of conspiring to bribe officials from CONMEBOL, the governing body of football in South America, in exchange for lucrative broadcasting rights. Already this year, the Argentina Football Association is reportedly under investigation over alleged money laundering involving commercial contracts.
Another issue is the usually hurried construction of new stadiums and other facilities. It is estimated that 170,000 people were forcibly evicted or displaced in connection with the 2014 World Cup and Olympic projects in Brazil, although estimates vary (5). FIFA is not governing football well. The goal should be to promote the sport for ordinary people right? All you need is a ball, right? The goal is certainly not maximizing profit at their expense.
Profit
While FIFA is nominally a not-for-profit non-governmental sports organization, its behaviour is extremely profit-seeking. Its current budget is $13 billion for 2023–2026, with too little of that going to actually support football at country level. Having just expanded the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams, it now seeks to expand further, to 64. Not only do countries spend suspiciously large sums on their mega-bids to host the World Cup ($50 million spent on one country's bid is common), but the winner often spends irrationally large sums to prepare to host the Cup. Qatar reportedly spent $200 billion for 2022 (6). In short, football is big business, very big business.
This is not just about football. The perception that the world's game is run by a corrupt mafia seriously corrodes the faith of sports fans and others that we can handle world matters in general. It is of global importance — the most important sport played because it is played in all states in a worldwide competition. Corruption is in FIFA's very DNA, so reforms will never succeed. The World Cup must be conducted with impeccable fairness and sportsmanship, an example of the world at its best. It has become too important to remain a "non-governmental" matter.
The record of the world's various International Organizations on fiscal and moral propriety is quite good, at least considering the large number of organizations there are, many for as long as 80 years or even longer, and especially accounting for the total sums of money involved. (7) They may not always be the fastest, but they have proved they are good at management and accountability of vast global undertakings and the special challenges they pose. Perhaps it is time to establish an Intergovernmental Football Organization and, once and for all, clean football's house. The world needs to see that important matters of global interest can indeed be well-governed together, through the enlightened cooperation of our own governments, living up fully to the principles of good sportsmanship and fair play.
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1. Carlin, John (2008). Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation.
2. They are in fact not all nations and include non-independent countries such as Wales or Curaçao, territories and special regions in addition to the United Nations' 193 member states:American Samoa, Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Curaçao, England, Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Guam, Hong Kong, Kosovo, Macau, Montserrat, New Caledonia, Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico, Scotland, the State of Palestine (also a UN non-member observer state), Turks and Caicos Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wales.
3. There is certainly no shortage of well-researched books covering the 2015 scandal at FIFA. This is not a complete list:
Bensinger, Ken (2018). Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal.
Blake, Heidi and Jonathan Calvert (2015). The Ugly Game.
Jennings, Andrew (2015). The Dirty Game: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA.
Sugden, John and Alan Tomlinson (2017 re-issue). Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting 'Badfellas’, the Book FIFA Tried to Ban.
4. See FIFA's revised budget for 2023-2026, https://inside.fifa.com/official-documents/annual-report/2024/financials/revised-2023-2026-budget
7. The Oil-for-Food Programme scandal in Iraq, now over 20 years ago, is still considered the United Nations' worst scandal and was as much due to the political nature of the war and Iraq's temporary occupying administration as it was to the UN's own weaknesses. Other major scandals have mainly been among national troops on loan to UN Peace-Keeping Missions, including such troops' responsibility for a cholera outbreak in Haiti and other accusations of sexual abuse or exploitation of women by troops, particularly in DR Congo. Yes, from time to time staff members are caught stealing and so on but, thankfully, it is relatively rare.
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