election, was supposedly meant to fund facilities in the official’s country. But if the official slipped the money into his jacket pocket, nobody would complain. In return, the happy officials voted for Blatter. Corruption was FIFA’s system.
The organization’s bribe-taker-in-chief was the Trinidadian Jack Warner, an alcoholic’s son who had risen from college teacher to global football powerbroker. Warner put together a block of thirty-one mostly tiny Caribbean national associations. In a congress of a little over two hundred countries, this was often the swing vote. And so Warner and his friends filled their pockets. Banned for life from football, he lives prosperously in Trinidad while the FBI battles to have him extradited to stand trial in New York.
His biggest paydays came when FIFA’s executive committee (Exco) got to choose a World Cup host. Indeed, for many Exco members, bribes were the main point of choosing a host. The tradition of exchanging hosting for bribes probably goes back to the mists of time. However, we know that Germany in 2006, South Africa in 2010, and multiple bidders for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups paid members of Exco to vote for them. (Only Brazil in 2014 didn’t have to stump up, simply because there were no other bidders.) The Exco members who took bribes didn’t necessarily do what they had promised, but that’s the risk every bribe-payer runs. In 2010, Exco chose Russia as host for 2018 and Qatar for 2022. Of the twenty-two men who voted on those bids, as of July 2017, seven had been charged or accused by US authorities of criminal wrongdoing; another, the German hero Franz Beckenbauer, is under criminal investigation in Switzerland and Germany regarding his country’s 2006 bid; Spain’s Angel Villar was arrested in an anti-corruption investigation; and five others have been sanctioned by FIFA’s own ethics committee. Meanwhile Havelange resigned as FIFA’s honorary president at age ninety-seven after new revelations about kickbacks. He died in 2016, aged one hundred.
Qatar undoubtedly sprinkled money and favours on some of these men, but so did the Western bidders. They just took care to sprinkle legally. England’s bid, for instance, paid various sums into Warner’s pet projects. He knew nobody was going to monitor how he spent the money.
None of this corruption was particularly secret. Yallop’s book appeared in 1999 (Blatter sued), and journalists, led by Andrew Jennings, have been revealing wrongdoing at FIFA since the 1990s. Yet, for most of the time, they were ignored.
At dawn on 27 May 2015 it briefly looked as if the old FIFA system was crumbling. Swiss police working with the FBI raided Zurich’s five-star Baur au Lac hotel and arrested seven senior international football officials. ‘Some of them were led out of back doors into waiting cars, and shielded from photographers by thoughtful hotel staff holding Baur au Lac bed sheets in front of them,’ writes David Conn in The Fall of the House of Fifa. One FBI official spoke of ‘the World Cup of fraud’.
The dawn raids felt reassuring: the American global police officer, though getting doddery, still seemed able to enforce international legal norms.
But FIFA signalled almost immediately that it intended to soldier on unchanged. Days after the raids, while FIFA officials were shredding documents at headquarters, the seventy-nine-year-old Blatter was re-elected to his fifth presidential term in an election out of a Ruritanian farce. Some delegates photographed their supposedly secret votes for him as proof of loyalty. They liked his patronage system, and they didn’t see anything wrong with it. After all, for most of them, it was how business and politics had always been done in their own countries. In much of the world – especially the developing world – crookery is normal.
It should be said that developed countries produce crooks, too, and fraud is not just about developing nations. According to the FBI, there were about 6 million criminals involved in ‘white-collar crime’ in the US in the period 1997–1999. There is no sign the numbers have fallen since. No wonder many football officials who are accused of fraudulent activities by Americans and Europeans dismiss this as just Western double standards.
In fact, Warner’s main partner in football’s criminal underworld was the fantastically obese New Yorker Chuck Blazer, who ended up living the grand life on an entire floor in Trump Tower in New York, with one apartment exclusively for his cats. His party ended one day in 2011 when the tax authorities tapped him on the shoulder as he trundled his mobility scooter down East 56th Street. Soon he was back on FIFA’s luxury-hotel circuit, but now as an FBI informer wearing a wire in a key fob. Blazer died disgraced in 2017.
Developed countries often appear cleaner than poor ones. But that’s partly because their forms of corruption tend to be legal rather than illegal. In the US, for instance, a former Congressman will lobby Congress for whatever company or country will pay him; meanwhile in a poor country, a politician pockets an illegal bribe. When Westerners watch FIFA, they see egregious forms of illegal corruption that (they often forget) were commonplace in their own countries in the nineteenth century, but have now been mostly wiped out. And frankly, with the election as president of a frequently bankrupted billionaire who allows his children to run his business while he runs the country and refuses to acknowledge conflicts of interest, the US’s grip on the moral high ground is becoming tenuous.
Blatter resigned as FIFA’s president in June 2015, only four days after being re-elected. The pressure from the media, the FBI and Switzerland (fed up with being embarrassed by FIFA) had become unbearable. Six months later he and UEFA’s president Michel Platini were jointly banned from football. Their falls were in character: Blatter, who doesn’t seem to have taken overt bribes himself, was found to have paid Platini two million Swiss francs. The Swiss claimed the money was for work that Platini had done for him thirteen years earlier. Platini doesn’t seem to have had the sense to realize that there was anything wrong with the transaction. Blatter’s demise felt cathartic, like the tumbling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq in 2003. But this time, too, it turned out that the US hadn’t restored a rules-based international order.
In February 2016, FIFA’s congress elected as president another Swiss bureaucrat, Gianni Infantino, after he told the 209 national federation presidents, to loud applause, ‘The money of FIFA is your money!’ Most of these people had repeatedly elected Blatter and were still around, still keen on patronage. As we write in 2018, the FBI and Swiss police continue to investigate. However, FIFA has barely reformed, Qatar and Russia keep their World Cups, and Western countries seem powerless to force change. In fact, the shift of power from the West to the Gulf countries and Russia manifested itself in FIFA before it hit geopolitics.
Most of the heat is now off FIFA itself. Almost no journalists cover the organization full time. The US may pipe down about reforms now that it hopes to host the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada. The Trump administration doesn’t seem hugely bothered about foreign corruption.
In any case, US power has declined since 1999, when American authorities pushed the International Olympic Committee to reform after its Salt Lake City bribery scandal. The IOC listened then because at the time more than 60 per cent of its income came from US TV and sponsors. By contrast, FIFA’s revenues today are spread worldwide. Sure, the federation has found sponsors harder to come by lately, what with all the scandals, and two straight World Cups being scheduled in unsexy non-democracies. But that won’t bother FIFA much, because it’s still a low-cost monopoly producer.
Reforming FIFA would have been quite easy had there been any will to do so. We know a lot by now about how to clean up organizations. For instance, you need an ethics unit that can investigate wrongdoing and is not under the president’s control – which would imply a big change from the Blatter-era FIFA. The problem is that nobody on the outside has the power to change the organization.
For all this catalogue of misdeeds, football probably isn’t an unusually corrupt sector by global standards. It might actually be cleaner than most, simply because journalists follow football. Criminals prefer to do their work when other people aren’t watching. That’s why most burglaries happen at night. So the corrupt will tend to prefer less transparent
