FIFA's Corruption May Have Finally Gone Too Far

Death, taxes, and FIFA being evil. Those are the three constants of life on Earth. The organisation behind the World Cup that claims to represent the entire sport of football has always been a hilariously self-centred and sleazy group, a barely-veiled front for a bunch of boardroom executives to collect as much money as they want (and hopefully commit a ton of human rights violations in the process.) Following this year’s World Cup, an event that became a parody of itself with its wall-to-wall ads and cozying up to Trump, FIFA has decided that it can, indeed, go lower.

It has a big plan to commercial subsidiary to run its main events, including its World Cups, and external investors will be able to buy stakes in it. FIFA President Gianni Infantino claims it will help to attract top talent to the organisation. Everyone else sees it as a blatant strip-mining of FIFA to sell of its biggest parts to the highest bidder. If approval is granted, Thrive Eternal is expected to lead the proposed investor group. Thrive is Jared Kushner’s venture capital firm. Subtle.

Well, FIFA may have finally gone too far with its corruption, a sentence I never thought I’d type. UEFA, the governing body for European football, is putting its foot down. The 55 members of that group have voted to boycott World Cups if FIFA goes forward with its big sale. “The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product,” it said in a recent statement. “No part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale.” The spirit is there, even if factual accuracy is questionable. But this is still a big deal. This boycott would cover all the major FIFA competitions, including both the men’s and women’s World Cups and all the junior tournaments.

Kevin Lamour, the one-time chief operating officer for FIFA, has also said that the organisation should not go forward with the plans. In a statement released to the Associated Press, he called the sale “the project of one person” and said “the time has now come for football political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions.” The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said that Infantino’s plan could not “realistically achieve the necessary broad consensus and unity required to move forward.” They also said that they’d vote against it. Carlos Cordeiro, one of his senior advisers, resigned with immediate effect in protest at the proposals, saying, “It is a bad deal for Fifa’s member associations, a bad deal for football, and a bad deal for the long-term future of the game.” Even the British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, said that FIFA was making a mistake in selling out.

FIFA has 211 world members. They need a majority to pass this plan. UEFA, the AFC, and Concacaf (The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football), make up 143 members. If the deal ends up going through, it’ll be because a hell of a lot of people got paid off for it.

The calls are growing for Gianni Infantino to step down. He’s the proud face of the commodification of the beautiful game, a practice that obviously predates him but has grown into an obscene blob of gambling ads, red card withdrawals, and Trump BFF time under his rule. Money has strangled sports, and this year’s World Cup felt like pure evidence of that. Now he essentially wants to put the game up for sale, to hand it to Jared Kushner and to let them pick at its corpse while fans and players are, once again, forced to deal with the true costs. Infantino wants FIFA to be an endless parade of sponcon, celebrity spotlights, and profit for the few. Just look at his ridiculous desire to expand the World Cup to 64 teams, a plan that nobody wants, not even the countries that would benefit from it (hi, fellow Scots.)

If FIFA refuses to back down, the first step of the threatened European boycott would come at next month’s Under-20 Women’s World Cup in Poland. I hope UEFA and company stick to their guns. Football fans deserve better than this corruption.