Reforming soccer governance: Tackling political corruption alongside financial wrongdoing
By James M. Dorsey
The mushrooming governance scandal in world soccer body FIFA
increasingly spotlights political in addition to financial corruption in global
soccer.
Revelations about government and corporate deals made to
secure Germany’s hosting of the 2006 World Cup alongside the prominence of
political figures in sports governance, frequently aligned with autocratic
regimes, emphasizes the need for a clean-up of soccer governance. Reforms will
have to regulate the relationship between politics and sports and guard against
political and corporate interference alongside the effort to eradicate related
financial corruption and dismantle patronage.
The German revelations together with an analysis
of membership in the executive committee of for example the Asian Football
Confederation (AFC), a regional confederation within FIFA that is likely to
become a target of US and Swiss investigations into soccer corruption, belies
the fiction upheld by the game’s top administrators that soccer and politics
are separate.
It also adds to Asian soccer’s looming troubles as a result
of AFC president Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa’s burial of a devastating
2012 independent audit of his group’s financial and commercial management. To
be clear, the period audited preceded Mr. Salman’s presidency.
If anything, sports in general and soccer in particular are
inextricably joined at the hip – a fact that albeit belatedly even the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) has acknowledged.
"In the past, some have said that sport has nothing to
do with politics, or they have said that sport has nothing to do with money or
business. And this is just an attitude which is wrong and which we cannot
afford anymore," IOC
president Thomas Bach said last September. He said politicians and business
leaders needed to respect the autonomy of sporting bodies or risk diminishing
their positive influence.
Recognition of the incestuous relationship between politics
and sports propels three fundamental reforms of soccer governance to the top of
any agenda designed to root out political and financial corruption:
- Development of a system of governance that oversees, monitors and governs the relationship between politics and sports in addition to that of the integrity and political independence of officials at all administrative levels of the game;
- Inclusion of all stakeholders, including clubs, players and fans in governance boards at the level of clubs, national associations, regional associations and FIFA; and
- Dismantling patronage by creating independent entities to distribute and monitor the disbursement of development and other funds to national associations by FIFA and confederations.
Revelations in respected German weekly Die
Zeit disclosed that a deal between the German and Saudi governments coupled
with investments by German corporates in South Korea and Thailand ensured that
Germany won its 2006 hosting rights by one vote in 2000.
Die Zeit reported that the government of then Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder complied with a request from the German Football Association
to lift at short notice an embargo on weapon sales to Saudi Arabia and supply
it with anti-tank rocket launchers in a bid to ensure that then Saudi member of
the FIFA executive committee Abdullah Al-Dabal would vote for Germany rather
than Morocco.
The incident highlights the complicity in political
corruption of the sport and the World Cup bidding process by both politicians
and soccer administrators. The same is true for the cosy relationship between
administrators and corporations as is evident in Die Zeit’s disclosure that
Germany companies such as Volkswagen, Daimler and Bayer promised to
significantly increase their investments in Thailand and South Korea to secure
the votes of two other FIFA executive members.
Die Zeit’s revelations position the incestuous relationship
between politics that often serves in global soccer governance as an enabler of
financial corruption as a global problem that is not exclusive to autocracies
like those that dominate the Middle East and North Africa, a region where the
sport is politically controlled, but also involves Western democracies.
An analysis
of the composition of the AFC’s executive committee and the boards of many of its
national associations, who include 13 Middle Eastern federations who account
for 28 percent of the Asian group’s 46 member associations, tells the story.
Six of the AFC executive committee’s 21 members in the
period from 2011 to 2015 hailed from the Middle East. They include its
president, Mr. Salman, a member of a minority Sunni ruling family that in its brutal
suppression of a 2011 popular revolt arrested scores of sports officials and
athletes among whom national soccer team players who were tortured; Prince Ali
Bin Al Hussein, a half-brother of Jordan’s King Abdullah who as a reformer was
a thorn in Mr. Salman and embattled, outgoing FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s
side; the United Arab Emirates’ Yousuf Yaqoob Yousuf Al Serkal who maintains
close ties to his country’s ruling elite; Sayyid Khalid Hamed Al Busaidi, a
member of Oman’s ruling family; and Hafez Al Medlej, a member of the board of
Saudi Arabia’s tightly controlled soccer association who made his career in the
kingdom’s state-run media.
That number has risen to seven in the executive committee
elected in April 2015 that includes Mr. Salman as well as Mohammed Khalfan Al
Romaithi, deputy commander-in-chief of the Abu Dhabi police force, a force
tainted by multiple allegations of abuse of human rights; and representatives
of Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia and the head of Islamic Republic of Iran Football
Federation (IRIFF), whose premier league teams are largely
government-controlled.
The close ties between sport and politics, particularly in
the Middle East, is also reflected in the composition of the boards of the
region’s national soccer associations and many of its major clubs. Almost half
of the West Asian Football Federation’s members are headed by members of ruling
families or commoners closely associated with them, including Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan as well as people with close government
ties as in Iran and Syria.
The Middle East’s incestuous political ties to sport are also
evident in the Olympic Council of Asia (OAC) that is headed by Sheikh Ahmed
Al-Fahad Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah, a prominent member of Kuwait’s ruling family and
former oil minister, member of the IOC), and head of the Association of National
Olympic Committees (ANOC), who recently suffered a humiliating political defeat
at home and is mulling running for the FIFA presidency. Mr. Ahmed is widely
viewed as one of world sport’s most powerful movers and shakers who played a key
role tainted by allegations of vote buying in Mr. Salman’s AFC election in 2013.
In a recently published memoir, former AFC general secretary
Peter Velappan put his finger on the problem. “Football enjoyed complete
patronage from the royal families and the sheikhs,” Mr. Velappan said.
James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the
same title.
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