The arrest in Zurich of top officials of football’s world governing body has brought the FIFA crisis to public attention in recent months, but the scandal has been active for the past three decades, Professor John Sugden of the University of Brighton says.
Sugden was the keynote speaker for the Australian Centre for Olympic Studies (ACOS) symposium, “FIFA in Crisis?” This critique of governance issues in global football also featured the journalist Bonita Mersiades of New FIA Now, and sport-media expert Professor David Rowe of the University of Western Sydney. The event was organised by Dr Stephen Frawley and chaired by Professor Tracy Taylor and Associate Professor Daryl Adair, each representing both ACOS and UTS Business School.
The symposium outlined key features of the current FIFA crisis with reference to the organisation’s post-colonial history, with President Sepp Blatter ingratiating himself with numerous developing nations in order to secure their votes.
Sugden set the story of Sepp Blatter’s and FIFA’s failed legal attempts to prevent his co-authored book Badfellas: FIFA Family at War (2003) from being published. The text tells the story of FIFA’s expanding fortunes, recurring crises and internal rivalries.
Sugden says that Badfellas unwittingly provided a route that led to the subsequent investigations that brought down FIFA’s house of cards.
“In publishing Badfellas, we’d actually placed a time bomb deep under the foundations of FIFA house. We know this because in 2003 FIFA and Blatter sued us…to try and prevent the publication” Sugden says.
That time bomb exploded on May 27, 2015 when the American FBI raided one of Zurich’s top hotels and arrested key FIFA executives. The strategic mistake that FIFA racketeers made was laundering money through US banks. This allowed the FBI jurisdiction to investigate the FIFA Executive and to lay charges against many of them.
So what happens should FIFA’s alleged crooks be jailed? The reformation and reconstruction of FIFA is a massive and formidable challenge.
Bonita Mersiades of New FIA Now is calling for an interim time-limited administration in order to develop a new constitution, governance arrangements and policies, and a revised process to conduct new elections. For now, Blatter is still President of FIFA, though has ‘promised’ to step down for the next vote.
For more information on the symposium, contact Daryl Adair.
Photo, from left to right: Bonita Mersiades, New FIA Now, Professor David Rowe, University of Western Sydney, Professor John Sugden, University of Brighton, Associate Professor Daryl Adair, University of Technology Sydney.