With FIFA's cesspool running over, sponsors must make a stink
Ah, the irony.
It took law enforcement in the United States, which much of the world dismisses as a soccer newbie, to bring the charges that have shaken the seemingly earthquake-proof foundations of the international soccer federation, known as FIFA.
Allegations that corruption riddles the upper echelons of international soccer governance have been made for years by journalists and some within the sport. None has stuck in a significant way, but none carried the legal weight of the Department of Justice indictments announced Wednesday after a lengthy investigation by the FBI and IRS.
A sensible person would think the DOJ bill of particulars covering major FIFA officials over 24 years and $151 million of wrongdoing would be enough to bring down Sepp Blatter, who has presided over this cesspool since 1998 and has been expected to be elected to a fifth term Friday.
Blatter, 79, was not named in the indictments as the cesspool ran onto the lawn of a luxury Zurich, Switzerland hotel where several of those charged were arrested Wednesday.
"I’m not able to comment further on Mr. Blatter’s status," Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney general, said at a Wednesday press conference in Brooklyn.
At best, Blatter turned a blind eye to the corruption, which mainly involved bribes to soccer officials for commercial rights attached to tournaments in the Americas but that the DOJ alleges also involved his election to a fourth term and the award of the 2010 World Cup to South Africa.
At worst, he condoned or abetted it.
"This is the World Cup of fraud," IRS official Richard Weber said at the press conference.
Speaking of the World Cup, Swiss authorities are investigating the longstanding allegations of vote buying around the award of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments to Russia and Qatar, respectively.
A sensible person would also think the future of the Qatar World Cup would be imperiled, since its selection has prompted the greatest doubt and it was a totally nonsensical choice, given the country’s hellish climate, homophobia, anti-Semitism and abuse of foreign workers building the 2022 stadia and related projects. There also is plenty of time for another country (England? the U.S?) to take it over.
A FIFA spokesman said Wednesday the scheduled presidential election and the 2018-2022 World Cups will go on as planned.
Its web site reads (insert laugh track here): "FIFA is firmly committed to the principles of good governance, transparency and zero tolerance towards any wrongdoing."
The problem here is common sense – or any real oversight -rarely applies to international sports federations and the miscreants involved in their leadership. FIFA is merely the most powerful and wealthiest of those federations, many of which undoubtedly are rife with such corruption, even if it is not writ quite as large.
Let’s take the case of late International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and the host city vote buying scandal.
It centered on Salt Lake City’s successful 2002 Winter Games bid but clearly had been part of bid selections going back at least to the early 1990s. Samaranch presided over the IOC from 1980 through 2001.
When the stuff hit the fan in late 1998, some called for him to resign, given that, like Blatter, he either knew and didn’t care or knew and gave his implicit approval.
Samaranch would admit only that he accepted "responsibility for the development of this crisis" and asked for a vote of confidence to lead the IOC through it. In March, 1999, the IOC members, many of whom owed their election to Samaranch, gave him that confidence by an 86-2 vote.
Blatter has earned his constituents’ apparently eternal support in a FIFA governance system that gives each of its 209 member countries the same power (one country, one vote) in presidential elections – so the Caribbean island of Montserrat, population 5,130, has the same clout as Mexico, population 122 million.
FIFA’s largesse in funding soccer federations and development programs in small nations, some (much?) of which money undoubtedly lines the pockets of local officials, have made more than enough indebted to Blatter to keep him in office.
The indictments and arrests Wednesday are just such abuse of power and influence on a much grander scale.
Blatter and FIFA will withstand the earthquake unless the multinational sponsors who feed from the trough of the World Cup’s massive money-making machine decide they no longer want to risk feasting on an organization with a poisoned reputation.
They likely will be satisfied with issuing self-righteous, self-serving statements about ethics, as Adidas and Coca-Cola already have. There is a reason why people and companies who reap such financial benefits are called filthy rich.
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