It is one week since Sepp Blatter shocked the world by promising to step down and a fortnight since the crisis gripping world football was precipitated by the arrest of seven Fifa executives in dawn raids on the Baur au Lac hotel on the shores of Lake Zurich.
As the shockwaves continue to reverberate, football’s biggest beasts have gone to ground to calibrate their next moves.As the FBI and Swiss investigations continue, the clear and present danger is that Fifa’s muscle memory will see those who favour maintaining the house that João Havelange and Blatter built try to close ranks while promising to refurbish from within. Already, Blatter loyalists are plotting to maintain the status quo while western governments push for reform.
Any new Fifa must be a genuinely global organisation. In an ideal world, here’s what it might look like …
1 Deal with the past
Fifa cannot address the future while still in denial about its past. When the criminal law professor Mark Pieth was appointed to oversee the sham of a reform process announced four years ago by Blatter, he provoked widespread derision when he said he would only focus on misdemeanours committed from that point on. Eventually, the supposedly independent ethics committee was split in two and Michael Garcia, as head of the investigatory arm, was given a mandate to investigate the contentious dual race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. But £6m and 18 months later, he quit in frustration at the way his report was summarised to effectively clear Qatar and Russia.
Under intense pressure, Fifa was eventually forced to promise it would publish the entire report – but even when it does finally emerge, it is not expected to produce a smoking gun given Garcia’s inability to seize bank accounts, emails or phone records. Russia were given a free pass after insisting they had lost all their emails. But with both US authorities and Swiss prosecutors now actively investigating the convoluted, chaotic bidding process – marred by endless allegations of collusion and corruption – there is a strong chance new evidence will emerge.
Criminal proceedings are likely to drag on for years. A new, independent body must take responsibility for definitively deciding whether there should be a re-vote on the 2018 and 2022 tournaments and clearing out the dead wood without fear or favour. For too long, Fifa’s disciplinary processes have been used as a mechanism to punish those who threatened Blatter rather than to root out wrongdoing. A genuinely independent ethics body, with strong links to law enforcement and separate guaranteed funding streams, is a long overdue prerequisite.
2 Governance
The executive committee and other key committees, such as those that oversee finance and TV rights, must be swept away and entirely reconstituted. Ideally a respected organisation such as Transparency International would be ushered in to oversee and sign off on the process. Those in key executive positions, such as the secretary general role once held by Blatter and then by his key lieutenant Jérôme Valcke, should be appointed on a set contract of five years and then reviewed at the end of that period. Other basics of good governance, including a proper “fit and proper” test and transparency of salaries and bonuses, need to be brought in.
All key positions should carry term limits (two or four years, maximum) and the main executive committee needs to become at once more diverse and more representative. Slimming it down from its current size of 27 to, say, 15 would make it less unwieldy and while the confederations should still be there, so too should representatives of players, sponsors and fans. It got rather lost in all the noise, and smacked of special pleading given the culture he spent 40 years nurturing, but Blatter was right when he said the confederations hold too much sway.
The six confederations would remain a powerful voice but the individuals who used their power for personal gain would be stymied by the fact that they no longer hold the balance of power and have to step down after eight years. Fifa should set an example and demand the same standards of the six confederations beneath it, or forbid them from sitting around its table.
Broadcasting meetings live on the internet could help restore public trust and ensure the key committees, including the finance committee and those responsible for TV rights and ticketing, contain independent non-executive directors who are able to offer expert advice and scrutiny.
That Julio Grondona and Jack Warner were chairman and deputy chairman of the finance committee for so long is in itself a sick joke. Ensure that executive committee meetings are genuine forums for debate rather than a rubber-stamping exercise. In short, let the light in – perhaps the Dr Strangelove style bunker in which they meet could be blown up as a symbolic gesture.
3 Football development
Blatter has often dispensed Fifa’s funds as though they were his own, standing up at Fifa’s overblown congresses to announce special “bonuses” and flying around the world in his private jet to open the technical centres and artificial pitches that result.
The link between votes and reward must be definitively broken. But, if anything, the flow of development cash to where it’s most needed should increase rather than decrease. For all Blatter’s rhetoric, Fifa spends just a fifth of its income on football development and the total is roughly the same as it spends on salaries and operating expenses.
In a well-run Fifa, commercial and broadcasting revenues would increase and mechanisms must be built to hugely raise the ambition for projects throughout the developing world. Money should still be disbursed via both national associations and centralised programmes but it needs to be far better audited and tracked from the top down and the bottom up. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water – some of these projects are excellent and must be nurtured and built on, while rooting out corruption and kickbacks.
If countries cannot prove that funds were spent on the promised projects – with a concentration on grassroots facilities and coaches over technical centres and FA headquarters – then they should face consequences. New, ambitious global projects to improve the quality of local leagues and grassroots coaching could start to help redress the balance of the game. Long-term funding streams should be established on a strategic basis, rather than turning the money tap on and off to suit the president’s political ambitions.
4 Cut the fat and maximise assets
The endless, pointless committees through which Blatter has traditionally dispensed patronage – and with it flights to Zurich, five-star hotel rooms and generous per diems – must be culled. Instead, why not use video conferencing and technology to bring together global communities of referees, administrators, medical staff and so on? They could still meet in person, perhaps on a regional basis, just less frequently. Instead of being handed places on pointless committees, member associations must be made to feel more involved in decision-making, beyond the opportunity to vote for the president every four years.
That could go some way to breaking down the distrust that exists – and which has been exploited and fostered by Blatter – between the rich European club game and the rest of the world. Over each four-year period, Fifa spends an extraordinary £131m on committees and congresses. That is more than the £123m invested in the Goal development programme. That mismatch can’t be allowed to continue.
Endless glossy reports and the weekly Fifa magazine are testament to the organisation’s endless ability to churn out expensively produced propaganda. That money could be put to so much better use and lead to a more modest, less endlessly bombastic organisation.
In putting football, rather than Fifa, first there must be a way of reclaiming it for the many excellent administrative staff in lower and middle management who work tirelessly for average pay and have seen their name continually dragged through the mud by those above them.
And while Blatter has endlessly trumpeted Fifa’s revenue increases over the past two decades, there is a strong argument they should be higher still. A Fifa not mired in scandal or distracted by personal power struggles and enrichment could have increased its commercial take by even more in an era when the sport’s global appeal has rocketed and technological advances have made its media rights massively attractive.
Instead, TV rights have been sold without a tender to correct earlier mistakes (see Fox/Telemundo and their deal for 2026) or because it suited the president (see marketing firm ISL being chosen over IMG) and the roster of possible sponsors has contracted as Fifa’s name has blackened.
5 World Cup bidding and hosting
With the 1998, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding processes all under investigation in some way, it is clear that the method by which Fifa selects the host of its cash cow has long been unfit for purpose. It was clear from the start that the dual 2018/22 bidding race – ostensibly for commercial reasons but also because it suited Blatter’s politics – was an invitation to corruption and collusion.
The International Olympic Committee remains far from the whiter-than-white ideal it has been painted by some in recent weeks and has its own challenges, but when it comes to bidding, its model should provide a way forward. Bidders are forbidden from meeting their electorate and instead expert inspection teams collate serious and weighty reports that then lead to a shortlisting stage.
In a sane world, that is where Qatar would have been culled and perhaps told to go away and come back with a reconsidered bid spreading the World Cup across the Gulf. Meanwhile, voting should be extended to all 209 member associations and the bidding period drastically shortened. Continental rotation too should be reintroduced.
Going further, the entire basis on which Fifa stages the tournament needs to be recalibrated. The governing body’s demands for tax-free status, the sense in which it lands in a country and hoovers up all the benefits while leaving behind a string of white elephants, the heavy branding and stultifying corporate layer that hangs over every World Cup – all must go.
Something that should spread joy has become a harbinger of discord and protest. The tournament must leave behind something more than unfinished roads and unused stadiums.
In turn, that process has played a part in tipping the balance towards those countries prepared to invest heavily for nation-building purposes.
Bizarrely, a Brazil World Cup that was the focus of so much protest from the host population ultimately offered something of a way forward. Terrified of the possible backlash, sponsors were wary of being too overt in their association with the tournament and fans flooded in from across South America to make the tournament their own in host cities.
Fifa’s staff have become expert in the logistics of putting on a World Cup – now they must find a method to stage it in a way that benefits the host country as well as continuing to make profits that can be redistributed around the world. Both should be possible.
