Futures

FIFA has weathered many storms, to invoke FIFA president Blatter’s favourite metaphor of survival, and has in many respects been a beneficiary of the phenomenon identified by Roman satirist Juvenal as panem et circenses (“bread and races,” more commonly given as “bread and circuses”). Juvenal was referring to how public entertainment or spectacle can be associated with a decline in political spirit; the populace looks for fun and ignores wider social or political issues. ¹ Indeed, when journalists or broadcasters turn their attention to the ethical problems of FIFA — endemic maladministration, little transparency, zero accountability, bogus idealism — they have habitually asked why all this matters, when the match goes on and the peoples’ game prospers. ² But the sheer scale, and increasing visibility, of the self-serving and ethically dubious practices of football’s world governing body have come more consistently under the interrogative gaze of reforming networks and campaigning, investigative journalists. ³ This also tarnishes the product and the image of the product, and big corporate players are far from happy to be associated with a flawed body exposed as hypocritical, ethically dubious and routinely unaccountable. This does not, though, guarantee instant reform within the organization; FIFAcrats are highly skilled, many reciprocally dependent on the benefits provided by their positions, and ruthlessly survivalist. This is not a point at which to witness a crucial turning point, a Salt Lake City moment, in the complementary story of the Olympics, when widespread condemnation of corruption among IOC personnel led to serious reforms. But the claims from within FIFA that a “road to reform” is being travelled ensures that the critical gaze will now be sustained, more than ever before. And the corporate partners will keep asking questions. What, then, are the likely directions that FIFA will take in the future? In this penultimate chapter I consider the potential influence of the sets of interests that are sometimes said to be the sources of serious institutional reform at FIFA — clubs, sponsors and states or 150governments — and then outline five future directions or scenarios that might shape, or indeed reshape, FIFA’s future.