How Can FIFA be Held Accountable?
Roger Pielke Jnr has very thoughtful article which deserves to be widely read. As well as his day job on environmental scientist he writes a interesting blog on sports, mostly football, which you can link to from Soccernomics.
I think Roger’s conclusion boils down to the argument that the UK government’s anti-corruption laws can be used to put pressure on FIFA in the way that US put pressure on the IOC after the Salt Lake City Scandal. I have to say I’m not very optimistic about this, given that the UK seems to have very little influence in FIFA, and certainly not the commercial clout of the US. If Germany, France, Italy and the UK together exerted pressure, then it might be a different story- but it seems to me the European associations have come to an accommodation with Blatter and his minions rather than enter resistance mode. The other obvious candidate is the EU, but without firm support of the member states there’s not much it can do I think.
I also think the fundamental problem about FIFA is not corruption in the organization itself, but in the member associations- as we have seen with the goings on of people like Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer, to name but two. In particular, when there are small associations which can be controlled by a small clique, who then have an equal say with the larger, and often more democratic associations I think corruption is almost inevitable. Why argue your case when you can just buy the votes?
I think another problem is that outside of the UK and US the image of FIFA is quite strong (and the image of the UK and the US , often enough, is not). I have met good people working in and around FIFA, so not everything coming out of Zurich is terrible, particularly at the lower levels of the organization.
So I’m not very optimistic about reform- but Roger’s doing everyone a service by talking about it.
