ABSTRACT
FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) was founded in 1904. It was the initiative of seven European countries, mostly national associations, though some represented several sports and Spain was represented by a single football club. At that time there were no continental confederations (the South American one dates its foundation from 1916; the other ve were founded in the 1950s and 1960s). The World Cup tournament was inaugurated in 1930 and was hosted and won by Uruguay. In its 112-year history, up to early 2016, FIFA had had eight presidents, all bar one (the Brazilian João Havelange) hailing from Europe. Havelange and his successor the Swiss Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter had, as this chapter was written, between them secured the presidency for 11 periods from 1974, Blatter having won his fth term in a presidential election vote conducted on the last Friday in May at FIFA’s 2015 Congress in Zurich. This electoral process had been marred two days before by the sensational arrest early on the Wednesday morning at an elite Zurich hotel of 14 people related to the football business of FIFA-aliated confederations. Four of these had held positions as president of a confederation: Jerey Webb from the Cayman Islands was the incumbent president of CONCACAF, the central and north Americas and Caribbean confederation, and Trinidad and Tobago’s Jack Warner had held that position before him; Uruguayan Eugenio Figueredo and Paraguay’s Nicolás Leoz had been presidents of the South American confederation, CONMEBOL. These positions had carried with them a vice-presidential position on FIFA’s Executive Committee (ExCo). A further ten individuals were arrested, four with strong FIFA connections: Costa Rica’s Eduardo Li had been about to join the ExCo as a CONCACAF delegate; Julio Rocha of Nicaragua had held a position as a FIFA development ocer, with a brief to introduce football projects around the world; and Rafael Esquivel and Jose Maria Marin are past presidents of, respectively, the Venezuelan and Brazilian football federations. The other six indicted individuals comprised British citizen Costa Takkas, personal attaché to Jerey Webb, and a former general secretary of the Cayman Islands’ football federation; and ve media/sport marketing executives (three Argentineans [one with dual Italian citizenship], one Brazilian and one US citizen). FIFA employs around 400 employees, and FIFA committees, commissions and bureaux were peopled by, in one 2011 count
(Tomlinson 2014: 35), 387 dierent individuals. FIFA supports an increasingly successful women’s World Cup, age-banded tournaments around the world and innumerable development schemes for the majority of its member (national) associations/federations. But the indictment of the FIFA 14 brought into unprecedentedly sharp relief for the global audience the malpractices and endemic corruption of highly placed FIFA-related and connected personnel; the voices of those who could claim to be untainted were drowned out in a tsunami of negative coverage and general condemnation of the overall organisation. Some such individuals may believe, genuinely, that their endeavours are idealistically channelled ‘for the game, for the world’, as the FIFA slogan trills, but few were willing to listen to arguments about the injustice of condemning the many for the crimes of the few. In the medium term, an understanding of the politics of FIFA’s aws and failures will need to explore with forensic precision the conditions and circumstances whereby and when the relative innocence of collusion contributes to the consolidation of a culture of corruption. The 40-year career of Sepp Blatter at the heart of the FIFA organisation oers a case study of unparalleled richness for such an understanding.
