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Crony Capitalism Kicks Off the World Cup

International soccer's organizing body brings corruption to every level of sport.

Crony capitalism looks a little different when the corruption in question is pervading a stateless conglomerate. But government cooperation, internal politics, and the casual passing of millions of dollars are looking all-too-familiar as one of the world’s largest bureaucracies takes center stage with the 2014 World Cup kicking off in São Paulo, Brazil today.

The organization in question is Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, the international governing body of soccer. FIFA’s job, when it was founded in Paris in 1904, was to set rules and organize matches among a few nations interested in a game popularized by English public schoolboys just a few decades earlier. It now has more member countries than the United Nations, and over a billion dollars in its bank accounts, with several billion more on the way.

FIFA has never been altogether innocuous (soccer’s export and popularity would have been impossible without British imperialism), but its recent turn to the blatantly corporatist has brought unprecedented scrutiny upon the organization, such as the New York Times‘s recent two-part investigation into the organization’s entanglement with match-rigging syndicates.

What finally cracked soccer fans? The next three World Cups: Brazil 2014, Russia 2018, and Qatar 2022.

As for the first, the World Cup has wreaked absolute havoc on the Brazilian landscape. Over 250,000 Brazilians have been displaced and their neighborhoods (usually poor communities known as favelas) destroyed by the preparations for the World Cup. “Since the television cameras can’t remove them from view, FIFA and the IOC demands cause the Brazilian government to send in the bulldozers to do the work,” David Caruso postulates, summarizing journalist Dave Zirin’s recent book Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. “FIFA and the IOC give the Brazilian government an excuse to do what they have long wanted to do: please the wealthy class.” The displacements, compounded by millions of wasteful government spending on stadia in remote Amazon towns, facilities likely never to be used again, have caused mass demonstrations that will continue throughout the tournament. As Zirin himself reported, “a friend in São Paulo told me, ‘FIFA is about as popular in Brazil as FEMA was after Hurricane Katrina.'” Most protests are directed at President Dilma Rousseff’s government, which has funneled at least $3.5 billion of taxpayer money into the event, even as its job-production power is limited by regulations on vendors (official FIFA partners only) and quotas (600 vendors to a stadium).

Russia 2018 and, especially, Qatar 2022 have attracted similar international outcry based on a combination of bribery and abusive working conditions. Files obtained by the Sunday Times just this month revealed that at least $5 million in bribes were handed out by Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari football administrator known to make frequent trips to Russia. Bin Hammam was a member of FIFA’s executive committee in 2010 when Russia and Qatar were awarded their respective World Cups. He has since been banned for life from FIFA for other corruption charges related to his FIFA presidential election campaign, but FIFA has thus refused to revisit the results of its vote. Qatar’s blistering summer temperatures have been pointed to as evidence of the inappropriateness of its win, but the real problem is with the horrific working conditions in the nation. FIFA president Sepp Blatter has argued that knee-jerk anti-Qatar reactions hint at racism, an argument that has surfaced time after time as Qatari oil barons buy up soccer network after jersey sponsorship. But even he thinks awarding Qatar this tournament was a mistake.

The fundamental problem is that FIFA is self-regulating, which is to say that it doesn’t self-regulate. The only things to keep it in check are vaguely uncomfortable sponsors and only nominally responsible participating governments. (Fans for their part have no other organization to turn to. FIFA has a monopoly on international soccer.) Even FIFA’s upcoming Congress, in which each country has an equal vote, is unlikely to make waves. With few checks and balances in sight, FIFA is under no obligation to be transparent about either its policies or its finances.

FIFA has done the impossible: they have made Brazilians hate soccer. But as Brazilians’ anti-government protests over the past few years have shown, this is about much more than soccer. That’s why this World Cup, and the inevitable spilling over of these anti-cronyism tensions, are crucial to watch, even for those uninterested in soccer. FIFA is running an experiment to find out just how many platitudes people will put up with from the crony capitalists running a global entertainment industry.

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