CLEANING UP WORLD SOCCERGOVERNANCE (JMD in TPQ)
James M. Dorsey | Monday,
September 14, 2015 | Download PDF in
English
Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA) President Sepp Blatter has used his last months in office to
ensure that proposed reform of the troubled world soccer body would address
widespread concern about financial corruption and lack of transparency and
accountability, but keep the two pillars of the group’s wider malaise intact: a
patronage system that secures FIFA administrators’ sway over a majority of
their financially dependent members and an incestuous, uncontrolled bond with
often-autocratic political elites.
In a farcical news conference in July that highlighted the FIFA
president’s strained relationship with the media, Blatter made clear that his
plans for reform would not tackle the problems that are at the core of the
group’s governance crisis. Blatter’s proposed reforms include establishing term
limits for membership of FIFA’s executive committee, independent integrity
checks on committee members, election of executive committee members by the
209-member general assembly rather than by soccer’s six regional
confederations, and disclosure of FIFA compensation to committee members. “With
this,” Blatter said, “I think we are on the right track with improved
governance and greater accountability (…) my responsibility and mission is to make
sure by the end of February when I come to the end of my career, I can say in
FIFA we have started again the reform and have rebuilt the reputation of FIFA.”[1]
“FIFA President Sepp Blatter has made clear that his plans for reform
would not tackle the problems that are at the core of the group’s governance
crisis.”
To be sure, the reforms, which Blatter had rejected prior to the
announcement in May of separate investigations into FIFA’s affairs by US and
Swiss authorities and the dramatic arrest of seven FIFA executives on the eve
of the group’s annual congress in Switzerland, go some way to enhancing
transparency in what is a secretive organization that had acted as if it were a
law unto itself. The shortcomings of the proposed reforms become evident,
however, when analyzing the impact of the decision to have the FIFA congress
elect the executive committee in the future.
FIFA doles out millions of dollars annually to member associations,
particularly in developing nations that are dependent on those funds to build
badly needed soccer infrastructure such as stadiums and administrative offices
and to develop their country’s soccer prowess.[2] Blatter
and his administrators have at times been willing to be less than stringent in
ensuring that donated funds were spent correctly.[3] As
a result, heads of national associations, grateful for assistance for which
they credit Blatter, have been weary of voting against his wishes in annual
congresses. Blatter’s proposed reforms do nothing to prevent his successor from
inheriting what amounts to a system of patronage. Little short of parking
development funds in a separate, independently administered entity will ensure
destruction of a patronage system that lends itself to corruption and
undermines FIFA’s governance and internal democracy.
Widening the Net
Destroying the patronage system is simple, clear-cut, and exclusively
dependent on the organizational will to act, something Blatter has so far
studiously avoided. More likely than not however, addressing patronage, much
like the reforms Blatter has embraced, will be imposed on FIFA by the ongoing
Swiss and US investigations. The Swiss enquiry is more narrowly focused on the
integrity of the winning bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.[4] The
US investigation potentially could widen beyond its current focus on the
Americas, a region that falls under its immediate jurisdiction because many of
the indicted are either US nationals or nominal residents who hold green cards,
and the fact that the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean
Association Football (CONCACAF) is legally incorporated in the US.[5]
The extradition to the US in July of FIFA Vice-President Jeffrey Webb –
the only executive in Switzerland to voluntarily agree to his transfer to New
York – constitutes the US Justice Department’s first opportunity to widen its
investigation.[6] This
first opportunity will depend on whether Webb agrees to cooperate with US
authorities and what information he is willing to disclose. But even without
Webb, other defendants like former FIFA executive committee member Jack Warner
who have yet to be extradited to the US are likely to want to use their
knowledge as leverage in their judicial proceedings. US investigators moreover
are likely to be able to expand their investigation by looking into the
dealings of Mohammed Bin Hammam, who is believed to be among the score of
unidentified co-conspirators in the US indictments. A Qatari national who
served on FIFA’s executive committee and as president of the Asian Football
Confederation (AFC), Bin Hammam was banned from involvement in professional
soccer for life by FIFA in 2012 on charges of having bought votes in his failed
2011 campaign to unseat Blatter in the group’s presidential elections.
A cache of documents believed to have been leaked off the AFC’s servers
and that was made public by The Sunday Times suggests that Bin
Hammam spent millions of dollars to ensure that FIFA’s executive committee
would vote in favor of the Qatari bid.[7]Recipients
of those payments include executives, like disgraced FIFA executive member Jack
Warner, who are among those already indicted in the US. US jurisdiction would
further be established by the fact that all US dollar-denominated bank
transfers are processed in New York.[8] The
Sunday Times documents are also certain to figure in the Swiss
investigation.
An Incestuous Relationship
The Bin Hammam affair that is at the core of the multiple scandals that
have rocked FIFA and global soccer governance, as well as the controversy about
the integrity of Qatar’s successful World Cup bid, feed into the second fundamental
problem that Blatter hopes to leave unaddressed: the political corruption
embedded in the incestuous relationship between politics and sports in general
and soccer in particular. If anything it is political corruption that has
enabled financial wrongdoing. Yet, the US and Swiss investigations are focused
– in part for legal reasons – on the financial rather than the political
corruption.
“A cache of documents believed to have been leaked off the AFC’s servers
(…) suggests that Bin Hammam spent millions of dollars to ensure that FIFA’s
executive committee would vote in favor of the Qatari bid.”
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach in a
historic statement last September acknowledged that sports in general is
entangled with politics. “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,” Bach said. He said politicians and business leaders
needed to respect the autonomy of sporting bodies or risk diminishing the
positive influence of politics and business.[9]
That is unlikely to happen without restructuring the relationship
between sports and politics to involve a system of governance, oversight, and
monitoring. In the case of FIFA, that would have to involve all stakeholders
including clubs, leagues, players, and fans in governance at all levels: clubs,
national associations, and regional associations.
Bin Hammam, like his successor in FIFA and AFC Bahraini Sheikh Salman
bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, and Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, Salman’s
protector, a recently elected FIFA executive member and one of international
sport’s most powerful men, symbolize the relationship between sports and
politics, as well as soccer’s affinity with autocracy. Men like Bin Hammam,
Salman, and Ahmad are products of autocracies whose rise in international
sports was further paved as far back as 1974. During that time FIFA threatened
but failed to follow through on threats to sanction the AFC for its expulsion
of Israel and Taiwan, in violation of the principle of a separation of sports
from politics. FIFA’s failure wrote Arab politics into the DNA of Asian soccer
and helped shape global soccer’s coziness with autocracy.[10]
FIFA’s and the AFC’s refusal to enact principles enshrined in their
charters has had far-reaching consequences over the years for global soccer
governance, no more so since Bin Hammam became AFC president in 2002. Men like
Bin Hammam, Salman, and Ahmad are imperious, ambitious, and have worked
assiduously to concentrate power in their hands and sideline their critics
clamoring for reform. Hailing from countries governed by absolutist, hereditary
leaders, they have been accused of being willing to occupy their seats of power
at whatever price with persistent allegations of bribery and vote buying in
their electoral campaigns.
Ambition, corruption, and greed led to Bin Hammam’s ultimate downfall.
Salman continues to be dogged by allegations that he was involved in the arrest
and humans rights violations of scores of athletes and sports officials accused
of having participated in mass anti-government protests in Bahrain in 2011.[11] Both
men have consistently denied any wrongdoing. Yet, their ascendancy on the
global soccer stage, like that of Ahmad, reflected not only personal ambitions
but also efforts by their home countries to exploit the world’s most popular
sport as a vehicle to polish tarnished images and project themselves as players
within the international community.
“If anything, it is political corruption that has enabled financial
wrongdoing.”
It also says much about the intertwining of sports and politics that is
nowhere more prevalent than in the Middle East and North Africa, whose 13
national associations account for 28 percent of the AFC’s 46 member
associations.[12] As
a result, the composition of the AFC’s executive committee speaks volumes.
Six of the AFC executive committee’s 21 members in the period from 2011
to 2015 hailed from the Middle East. They include Salman, a member of Bahrain’s
minority-Sunni Muslim ruling family; Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, a half-brother
of Jordan’s King Abdullah who has emerged as a reformer and the only
representative of an elite to have used his status to promote change; 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; 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; and Susan Shalabi Molano, a member of the executive
committee of the Palestine Football Association (PFA) that is closely aligned
with the Palestinian Authority.
That number has risen to seven in the executive committee elected in
April 2015, which includes Sheikh Salman and Shalabi Molano as well as Mohammed
Khalfan Al Romaithi, head of the UAE soccer association and Deputy Commander in
Chief of the Abu Dhabi police force, a law enforcement agency with a less than
stellar human rights record. The committee also includes representatives of
Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and the head of the Islamic Republic of
Iran’s Football Federation (IRIFF).[13]
If anyone has taken the Middle Eastern model of meshing politics and
sports global, it is Ahmad – a prominent member of Kuwait’s ruling family and
former oil minister – who is a member of the IOC and heads the Olympic Council
of Asia (OAC) and the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC). Like
the AFC, nine of the OAC’s board members hail from the Middle East. The
Kuwaiti, Bahraini, and Jordanian members belong to ruling families, while those
from Syria and Lebanon, like their Thai and Pakistani counterparts, are
military officers. Iran’s representatives include a former oil minister who
headed the country’s Physical Education Organization, the state entity that
exercises political control of sports, and the head of a state-owned soccer
club.[14]
Author and journalist Mihir Bose puts his finger on the conceptual
problem underlying FIFA reform by describing the group as a trade organization
that severely limits freedom of its members and a governing body that has no
regulatory power. Bose argues that FIFA can best be compared to the mother of
soccer – the British Empire. “Indeed FIFA has huge similarities with how the
British ruled India. The common perception is the British ruled all of India.
They did not,” Bose concludes.[15]
A historian of British imperial rule, Bose notes that almost half of
colonial India’s territory and almost a quarter of its population was ruled by
princes governing 680 autonomous states with their own laws and in some cases
armed forces rather than the Empire. Bose draws the comparison that regional
soccer confederations are the modern day equivalent of the princely states.
“This has given Sepp Blatter the right to argue that all the huge corruption
problems that have arisen have come in the confederations and not at FIFA
headquarters in Zurich,” Bose argues.[16]
“Qatar has come to symbolize all that is wrong with soccer governance.”
The solution to this state of affairs is a radical restructuring,
according to Bose, borrowed from the fate of the princely Indian states in the
framework of which issues of patronage and governance of the relationship
between sports and politics could be addressed. Bose advocates integrating the
regional confederations into FIFA in much the same way that the princely states
became part of India:
In Bose’s view this would involve not only parking development funds in
an independent organization but also moving FIFA’s commercial involvement into
a separate entity that would be managed in accordance with international best
practices.[17]
A Symbol of All That Is Wrong
Qatar has come to symbolize all that is wrong with soccer governance.
Yet the debate about Qatar has been skewed with ulterior motives, sour grapes,
envy, arrogance, prejudice, and bigotry often emerging as key drivers. The
skewing of the debate often masks legitimate criticism of human and labor
rights, the integrity of the Qatari bid, and which approaches are likely to
produce the most beneficial results, including whether taking a moralist stand
and depriving Qatar of its hosting rights should it be proven that it
effectively bought the World Cup.
On the surface of it, evidence published by The Sunday Times leaves
little doubt that Qatar and Bin Hammam wielded their financial muscle to ensure
the Gulf State’s bid would be successful. Qatar may have spent more on its bid
than others, but corruption of soccer governance meant that many bidders over
many years used financial and political muscle in their effort to secure the
tournament’s hosting rights.
In an illustration of the corrupting influence of the ungoverned
relationship between sports and politics, respected German weeklyDie 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 Schröder complied with a request
from the German Football Association to lift at short notice an embargo on
weapons 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 paper revealed further
that German 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.[18]
In a world in which a vast number of mega sports events leave debt and
white elephants as their primary legacy, Qatar, irrespective of how it secured
the World Cup, holds out the promise of hosting a tournament that sparks social
and economic, if not political, change. A Qatari World Cup that produces change
would be a far more valuable outcome than penalization, which would produce
anger and frustration in a Muslim world that feels it is being discriminated
against and stereotyped on multiple levels. Moreover, depriving Qatar of its
hosting rights is not what will curb corruption; structural reform of soccer
governance will. By the same token, any hope that labor conditions in the Gulf
can be changed would evaporate without the straightjacket of the World Cup.
“Depriving Qatar of its hosting rights is not what will curb corruption;
structural reform of soccer governance will.”
The Qatar World Cup’s potential of being an engine of change goes
further than immediately meets the eye. It goes far beyond the likelihood that
labor relations in the Gulf may fundamentally change. In fact, the debate about
labor conditions in Qatar has already had potentially far-reaching
consequences. It has breached Gulf States’ absolute refusal to entertain
domestic or foreign criticism with Qatar’s engagement with human rights and
trade union activists. That engagement has led to the adoption of standards for
the employment of migrant labor by two Qatari institutions, the Qatar
Foundation and the 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, that are
ultimately likely to be embedded in national legislation.[19] It
has also prompted all Gulf states to tinker with their labor regimes. Moreover,
it has served as a feeder for similar pressure on the United Arab Emirates,
where workers on a New York University campus as well as museums – including a
branch of the Guggenheim and the Louvre – toil under similar conditions.[20]
Ironically, pressure on Qatar and other Gulf states, as well as
companies they have contracted by human rights and trade union activists, has
been offset by the fact that their closest ally, the US, adopts a similar
approach towards migrant labor – or what it terms “third country nationals.”
These individuals are hired to service US military facilities in the region,
including the forward headquarters of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) at the
Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
Third-country nationals are typically hired by private companies
contracted by the US military to provide services and logistics ranging from
construction, food preparation, entertainment, and firefighting to armed guard
duty. The US in recent years has sought to update legislation covering
third-country nationals, but its reform often falls short of measures being
taken by Qatar in the wake of World Cup-related criticism. Qatar, for example,
has adopted the principle of workers not paying for their recruitment, which
seeks to break the hold of middlemen who charge absorbent fees leaving workers
indebted for years. While enforcement of the measure has yet to be optimized,
US legislation only bans “unreasonable” recruitment fees.
Anthropologist and lawyer Darryl Li, in a lengthy analysis published by
the Middle East Research and Information Project, concluded that a bill of
rights adopted by the Pentagon that subjects wages, housing, and safety
standards to local laws of the host country missed the mark:
These protections
mean little in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the minimum wage is
below one dollar per hour. And Bahrain, Djibouti, and Qatar, for example, all
host significant US military forces but have no private-sector minimum wage
laws. Moreover, even this bill of rights lacks any clear enforcement mechanism:
the rules are imposed by the Pentagon on contractors, but provide no clear
basis for workers themselves to assert those rights in any court.[21]
US government attitudes towards third-country nationals is emblematic of
double standards in the Qatar debate. The international community has been
aware of abominable labor conditions in the Gulf for decades. Governments paid
lip service to the need for change; multiple reports by human rights groups and
independent media reporting had little impact. All of that changed only with
Qatar’s successful World Cup bid.
A Pandora’s Box
To be sure, Qatari opponents of labor reform take heart from the fact
that even the US fails to live up to its own standards by opportunistically
adapting to Qatari labor practices. They are bolstered in their concern that
Qatar’s engagement with its critics threatens to open a Pandora’s Box that
could change the nature of Gulf society in far more radical ways that could
affect the country’s demography, and the political and civil rights associated
with it.[22]
Perhaps, the most consequential fallout to date of the awarding to Qatar
of World Cup hosting rights and the focus on labor in its wake is the fact that
it has sparked unprecedented debate about the region’s identity and long-term
approaches to its demographic deficit, including the thorny issue of
naturalization. Nationals constitute a minority in at least three of the six
states grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The other states could see
their citizenry become a minority over the next decade as their reliance on
migrant labor increases.
Responding to concerns about the demographics of Qatar, the UAE, and
Kuwait, the GCC members in which foreigners constitute a majority of the
population, governments have lamented the decline of Arabic as the dominant
language of business. To counter that, the GCC is considering ways of promoting
the use of Arabic, particularly among youth who frequently are at least as
comfortable if not more comfortable with English than with Arabic. One
suggestion is the organization of Arabic language days. The proposal prompted
Sultan Al Qassemi, a prominent UAE intellectual with a track record of
broaching often-taboo subjects to quip on Twitter: “The Gulf States complain
that not enough Arabic is spoken and host ‘Arabic language days’ but continue
to refuse to naturalize young Arabs.”[23]
Writing in 2013 in the Gulf News, Al Qassemi first sparked
debate about the Gulf’s demographic deficit by noting that “the fear of
naturalization is that Emiratis would lose their national identity; we are
after all a shrinking minority in our own country. However, UAE national
identity has proven to be more resilient and adaptive to the changing
environment and times than some may believe.”[24]
Al Qassemi argued that the UAE had already taken a cautious first step
towards addressing the issue, by granting the offspring of mixed
Emirati-non-Emirati nationals the right to citizenship. He noted further
that the success of the US was in no small part due to the contribution of
immigrants. “Perhaps it is time to consider a path to citizenship for them that
will open the door to entrepreneurs, scientists, academics and other
hardworking individuals who have come to support and care for the country as
though it was their own,” Al Qassemi said.
Those are revolutionary words in one of the most conservative parts of
the world. Without FIFA’s awarding of the World Cup to Qatar and Qatar’s
subsequent engagement with its critics, debate in the region about the Gulf
States’ most fundamental challenge would likely have been put off into the
distant future. To be sure, change in the Gulf occurs at the pace of a snail.
Cautious debate is one baby step, albeit a significant one. FIFA had little
idea of the Pandora’s box it was opening with the awarding of the World Cup to
Qatar. That fatal decision, no matter how flawed, has sparked cautious but
inevitable change within the world of soccer as well as the Gulf.
[1] “Extraordinary
FIFA Executive Committee Meeting – Press Conference,” YouTube, 20
July 2015,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbYAoxvIZmU
[3] Thailand and
Nepal rank prominently among numerous examples where FIFA oversight has often
at best been nominal. See for example: James M. Dorsey, “Investigation of Thai
soccer boss puts FIFA’s anti-corruption campaign to the test,” The
Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, 19 September 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2011/09/investigation-of-thai-soccer-boss-puts.html/ ;
James M. Dorsey, “AFC’s Salman re-elected amid renewed corruption and
governance questions,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, 2
May 2015, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2015/05/afcs-salman-re-elected-amid-renewed.html
[4] “The Office
of the Attorney General of Switzerland seizes documents at FIFA,” Federal
Office of Justice, 26 May 2015,https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-57391.html
[5] “Nine FIFA
Officials and Five Corporate Executives Indicted for Racketeering Conspiracy
and Corruption,” The United States Department of Justice, 27 May
2015, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/nine-fifa-officials-and-five-corporate-executives-indicted-racketeering-conspiracy-and
[6] “FIFA
official agrees to extradition to USA,” Federal Office of Justice,
10 July 2015,https://www.bj.admin.ch/bj/en/home/aktuell/news/2015/2015-07-10.html
[7] “The FIFA
Files: The Documents,” The Sunday Times, 7 June 2014,http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/fifa/article1417206.ece
[8] Heidi Blake
and Jonathan Calvert, The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World
Cup (London: Simon & Shuster, 2015).
[9] James M.
Dorsey, “Reforming soccer governance: Tackling political corruption alongside
financial wrongdoing,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, 6
June 2015, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2015/06/reforming-soccer-governance-tackling.html
[10] James M.
Dorsey, “Asian Football: A Cesspool of Government Interference, Struggles for
Power, Corruption, and Greed,”International Journal of History of Sport,
Vol. 32, No. 8 (April 2015), pp. 1001-15.
[11] Michael
Casey, “Bahrain Soccer Stars Pay Price for Protesting,” Bahrain Center
for Human Rights, 2011,http://www.bahrainrights.org/en/node/4556
[12] “Member
Associations,” The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), http://www.the-afc.com/member-associationx
[13] “AFC Executive
Committee,” The Asian Football Confederation (AFC), http://www.the-afc.com/afc-executive-committee
[14] “The Olympic
Council of Asia Executive Board,” Olympic Council of Asia, http://www.ocasia.org/Council/ExeBoard.aspx
[15] Mihir Bose,
“FIFA reform needs practical ideas not wild, stupid ones,” Inside World
Football, 23 July 2015,http://www.insideworldfootball.com/mihir-bose/17482-mihir-bose-fifa-reform-needs-practical-ideas-not-wild-stupid-ones
[18] Oliver
Fritsch, “Die Verkauften WM-Turniere,” [The Sold WC Tournaments] Die
Zeit, 4 June 2015, http://www.zeit.de/sport/2015-06/chuck-blazer-fifa-fussball-weltmeisterschaft-2022
[19] “QF Mandatory
Standards of Migrant Workers’ Welfare for Contractors & Sub-Contractors,” Qatar
Foundation, 20 April 2013,http://www.qf.org.qa/app/media/2379 / ;
“Workers’ Standards,” Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy,
February 2014,http://www.sc.qa/en/delivery-and-legacy/workers-welfare
[20] James M.
Dorsey, “Activists expand labour and human rights campaign beyond Qatar to
include all Gulf states,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer,
24 November 2014, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2014/11/activists-expand-labour-and-human.html
[21] Darryl Li,
“Migrant Workers and the US Military in the Middle East,” Middle East
Research and Information Project, No. 275 (Summer 2015), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer275/migrant-workers-us-military-middle-east
[23] Sultan Al
Qassemi’s twitter page, @SultanAlQassemi, https://twitter.com/SultanAlQassemi/status/623118671037071361
[24] James M.
Dorsey, “Qatar: Perfecting the art of scoring own goals,” The Turbulent
World of Middle East Soccer, 2 October 2013,http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2013/10/qatar-perfecting-art-of-scoring-own.html
CONTRIBUTOR
James M. Dorsey
James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and
Co-Director of the Institute of Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg.
He is also the author of the blog The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer and a forthcoming book with the same title.
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