PROSPEROUS CHEATERS
FIFA fraud the tip of the iceberg of corruption that runs rampant throughout sports,
It might seem odd that the high drama over the past week in the hierarchy of the game North Americans call soccer and the rest of world calls football would be authored by the U.S.
Then again, the U.S. has little emotional investment in the beautiful game. It would be a different matter if U.S. gumshoes took on the cheesy ethics of the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball, which blithely operate in abeyance of the world’s toughest antitrust laws.
The U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the FBI don’t regard the Zurichbased Fédération Internationale de Football Association as a sports entity. It is, for them, an organized crime syndicate. And they’ve spent several years carefully planning to sweep out its Augean stables.
In the ultimate confrontation between FIFA, the world’s most powerful sports organization, and the world’s lone superpower, it was no contest.
On May 27, the U.S. indicted 14 members of the inner circle of Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, 79, president of FIFA for 17 years until he was forced to resign June 2. Four other highranking FIFA officials and Blatter cronies, having already entered guilty pleas, are convicted felons.
The U.S. is a member-nation of a FIFA regional confederation. But FIFA operates at a geographic remove from the U.S. That and the remote home bases of Blatter’s indicted high-level cronies — who hail from 11 countries, including Argentina, Venezuela, the Cayman Islands, Brazil and the British Virgin Islands — no doubt emboldened the alleged crooks in the racketeering, bribery, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice and other crimes with which the U.S. has charged them.
It now appears certain, from the mountain of evidence the U.S. has dug up, that the 2010 South African World Cup was bought with bribes paid by the South African government and South Africa’s bid committee.
Same goes for the World Cup inexplicably awarded to Qatar (2022), where the mercury during the month-long competition hovers around 50 degrees C. (Those games have been rescheduled for the winter, a first, disrupting the schedules of the players’ home leagues.)
Few doubt that Russia was awarded the world’s biggest sporting event, for 2018, in an above-board manner. Even Blatter’s 2011 reelection appears to have been bought with bribes.
Which shows how little progress has been made since the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics were bought with bribes during a bidding process that began in the 1990s.
Admittedly, the recent bill of indictment against FIFA is incredible. But its enormity obscures the menacing decline in ethics across the $181-billion global sports industry.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch accuses FIFA of a perpetrating a 24-year-long fraud on football’s 3.2 billion fans that “spans at least two generations.”
As it happens, that era has been marked by a fantastic injection of money into organized sports, notably broadcast revenues and merchandise sales, and the often unseemly trading in those rights.
A newer, additional curse is the advent of cross-border Internet betting. That has spurred an epidemic of match-fixing, in mainstream sports as well as weightlifting, cycling, handball, volleyball, horse racing, even snooker. Rampant match-fixing allegations have bedevilled India’s Board of Control of Cricket.
“With so much public involvement, political influence and money at stake, corruption remains a constant and real risk to the world of sport,” Transparency International, the leading anti-corruption agency, notes in its 2014 report Corruption and Sport: Building Integrity to Prevent Abuses.
The athletes, fortunately, keep striving for higher levels of excellence.
But it’s the miscreant athletes, owners and officials who make a mockery of athletes as role models and raise doubt about the uncertain outcome of games.
You know the rogue’s gallery, sufficiently overpopulated that it no longer looks like a collection of isolated cases: Tonya Harding; Alan Eagleson; convicted felon Harold Ballard; substance users like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and Lance Armstrong; and perpetrators of anti-social behaviour Tiger Woods, Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson.
Racist remarks by Donald Sterling earned him a lifetime NBA ban and required him to sell his Los Angeles Clippers. The New Orleans Saints paid “bounties” to players to inflict wounds on opposing players.
Undeterred by being caught taping opponents’ locker-room strategizing (Spygate), the New England Patriots more recently put underinflated pigskins on the field, resulting in a raft of NFL-ordered player and coaching suspensions.
In recent years, the Cleveland Browns, Atlanta Falcons, Minnesota Vikings and Carolina Panthers have run afoul of their league’s code of conduct.
So far, the fans have been loyal, which rules out boycotts as a tool for bringing about needed reform. And the sponsors have, for the most part, also looked the other way. Which enrages billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin conglomerate is a lead sponsor of the London Marathon.
Disgusted with the pallid “statements of concern” about the epic football scandal by FIFA sponsors Adidas, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and the like, Branson has said, “Sponsorship money has played a major role in enabling and sustaining this corrupt system for decades. I couldn’t think of a greater risk to any brand than being described as complicit in what really looks like organized crime.”
Corruption in sport is exacting a high cost to society.
Biting off more than it could chew, Salt Lake City had to be bailed out by Washington, to the tune of $1.6 billion, more than twice the U.S. subsidy to the 1996 Atlanta Summer games. (No, Mitt Romney didn’t save the Salt Lake games. Uncle Sam did.)
South Africa has little more than federal-treasury impoverishment to show for its 2010 World Cup. Brazil has recovered only one-tenth of its expenditure on the 2014 World Cup. Many of its venues have not been used since — though their parking lots are proving useful for transit-bus and other municipal-vehicle storage.
Tragically, the 2022 Qatar World Cup preparations have already claimed the lives of an estimated 1,000 migrant construction workers. The death toll will reach about 4,000 by 2022, according to international labour authorities.
Blatter, as it happens, was host for the first “World Summit on Ethics in Sports,” held at the FIFA headquarters raided the other day by Swiss authorities. The purpose of the confab was to “help define the role of sports in solving society’s problems.” It would highlight “what business and politics can learn from sports.”
Al Capone was a nervy fellow. But even he lacked the chutzpah to promote himself and his confederates as moral avatars. dolive@thestar.ca