Blatter Must Go

This blog is at heart about my love affair with soccer, an affair that is unwavering after five or six years. From very early on I became aware of the corruption that has been in our game and that is in our game at a high level. I was more properly informed about it after reading Andrew Jennings' book, Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals. I wrote a review of the book in late 2006.

Now I have a political background of sorts and things like democracy and accountability are important to me as I am convinced that they are important to civilisation on Earth. So the corruption has always bothered me. At the same time I could see the reality that football people, whilst made up of people who may or may not be politically inclined, are often being football people precisely to escape from realities like politics.

The narrative that got thrown around about the corruption, which was and is pretty much universally acknowledged, was that this was part of the meaning of "football is life." The half-joke that I've heard on many occasions is that society is corrupt, and soccer merely reflects as it reflects everything else.

Well it's not true. There is corruption in society but in decent societies people do at least get busted down when it becomes patently obvious to every single observer.

If you are lost and don't know about current goings on in FIFA, David Hills at the Observer gives a good summary.

In India, apparently (ok, Twitter told me) the lead up to the FIFA congress where Sepp Blatter was (cough) re-elected was compared with the recent Arab uprisings. If so we only got up to the point where the leader, under siege from people screaming "Go!", takes the podium and announces that he is going to reform the system, like he's announced a squillion times before.

We have much less connect, us soccer fans, with our government than the Egyptian people had with Muburak. They could refuse to move and say, "No, we mean it. Go!" We can't.

Before I go on, there are reasons beyond mere morality that corruption - meaning graft and nepotism mostly- is bad. It leads to inefficient decision making. It has been well demonstrated that fighting corruption improves governance and economic growth, and doing so remains a major concern in many parts of the world.

I don't want to sound naive here. Corruption happens wherever there is power and money and we should never forget it - it's a basic insight behind all civic vigilance. But in developed economies people get busted, there are laws in place, accountability standards and penalties that people realistically fear. And in the end, overall, there is lower levels of corruption, which means better decisions are made.

So apart from common decency, the reason corruption in soccer is bad is that it will lead to less development and improvement of football. It's easy to miss because FIFA is very rich, but it's no less true. And we're talking about the world. There's a lot to do.

Damn it I'm rambling, but I just referred to something about Sepp Blatter that I have always liked, and even believed in: his rhetoric about football being used as a force for good in the world. He has hidden his contempt and rottenness behind this rhetoric for a long time. For me the thought of cleaning up FIFA and making it a modern, fully accountable institution of professionals rather than a "family" (Blatter's constant term), induces hope in the truth of the rhetoric. It seems to me that the rhetoric (and maybe Blatter is absolutely sincere in it as such) could not work so well as a screen to being a brazen crook if it did not have some truth in it, or at least be credible enough to be seen to have some truth in it by a very many of people.

Anyway here we are. The President is re-elected. The world media, many politicians and every football fan in the world knows, and is saying openly, that the man has no clothes on. But, as the greatest American poet wrote, "Now's not the time for your tears."

When almost every delegate voted against the English FA's motion that the farcical election be postponed, including Australia's Ben Buckley, and then all mindlessly voted for Blatter, after listening to a series of old tin-pot crooks denounce England's (uncontroversially principled given that there was evidence pending against half the delegates) stance as based on lies and self-interest, and then applauding Blatter's speech, that is when we should weep. For it demonstrates that the rot in FIFA after all these years permeates (almost) every federation. Yes, we must face the bleeding obvious fact that Ben Buckley and Frank Lowy, who each spend a good portion of every public statement congratulating the wonderful work of the other even while the A-League veers toward hell, are of the same culture, at least complicit and at worst up to their ears in it.

There are good reasons why FIFA has always insisted upon a separation of a nation's government and its football federation, and there are cynical reasons as well.

And let's go back to that bid Australia made for the 2022 World Cup. I can only speak for myself but I can also be honest, and provocatively I'm going to use the pluralised first person.

We were excited all right. We were into it! And even though we're a long way away from the World, are in a difficult time zone, and are a fair to middling soccer country, we thought we had a chance. Why did we think we had a chance? Because we had Frank Lowy, multi-billionaire, up front for us. Did we have confidence in Frank because of the vast experience and people skills that he undoubtedly has? No. If the position was about technical ability to do the task, or charisma, or both, there would be many better. Was it because he was rich? Partly, but we know all the countries have money, and we also knew he wouldn't be using his money. I'll tell you why we believed in Frank Lowy, and it's the same reason he can't breathe a word about any of it now.

We believed in Frank Lowy because we had no doubt whatsoever that the process was a corrupt one of bribes and favour swapping and that Lowy could play that game. We thought we had a chance at getting a World Cup because we thought we had a player who could be as corrupt as the best of them.

And we were wrong. We were wrong morally, mostly, but it was very poor judgement as well. We should not have bid for it knowing that it was a corrupt game. We should have saved our 46 million dollars.

That's my mea culpa as a fan of the game. I was an enthusiastic Like-er of the Support Australia's World Cup bid's Facebook page, and I shouldn't have been there. I was wrong, because I did know that FIFA in general, and specifically the World Cup decision, was utterly corrupt, and that graft and favour was the only way we could win.

Mind you, even in retrospect it remains unbelievable that Qatar would get it.*

Anyway, what in hell is a concerned fan to do? We have no vote in any practical way, obviously.

The voice demanding change is very loud. High profile media are well and truly on to it (this Economist article is a good example). There is a lot of noise on the networks. '@changeFIFA' is good, on Twitter ('Change FIFA on Facebook - this will link you with many good sources). There are politicians speaking out in England and Europe, Maradona has called FIFA corrupt dinosaurs, the Swiss Parliament is trying to figure out how to impose some law upon their FIFA inhabitants. It's actually a kind of marvel that Blatter and FIFA can stay among the thickets of the law while the whole planet clamours 'Foul!'

For the fans there is not much we can do, and that is enormously frustrating. There are some small things we can do though, which will be powerful if numbers come forth, and might indeed be decisive. Much easier than camping out on the streets of Cairo.

Several of FIFA's sponsors have already made disapproving noises about FIFA and there is a move ('@FIFA_Boycott' on Twitter, 'Demand Change: Boycott FIFA's Sponsors' on Facebook) to boycott FIFA's major sponsors. My own take (tweet, bumper sticker, whatever) on this idea is to rather than the cry "Boycott McDonalds, Adidas and Coke"...

Don't even mention the four letter 'C' word. Drink Pepsi until Blatter is out.

The burgers are better at Hungry Jacks until Blatter is out.

Take control with Nike until Blatter is out.

I just think that would hurt more.

But furthermore, whilst we cannot boycott games (sorry, the personal cost is too great), we can boycott merchandise. Going to an official game, in full knowledge that our game's government is utterly illegitimate, is in part a sombre thing to do after all. So from now on I am wearing only black to games until Blatter is out. It is a small statement, but I'm making it.

* Not that that's the point, and although I think Australia would do a great job, by a fair judgement of the selection criteria, the USA should have gotten the 2022 World Cup. My money is on them getting it still, though I can't foresee why. It's just so far away, there are so many random factors and difficulties, and the current actors will be dead or nearly so. It will be in the USA. Only time will tell if I am right or wrong there.

Can the World Cup Save the World?

Anyone who frequents this blog will be accustomed to the ravings of a lunatic so I must emphasise to begin with that I didn't make the above question up. Part of FIFA's explicit agenda is to save the World.

In terms of the history of institutions, FIFA is a doozie. It's mind-bogglingly big, federating more nations than any multinational and indeed more than the United Nations. It turns over multi-billions of dollars, allegedly as a non-profit organisation, from its headquarters in Switzerland, where it pays bugger-all tax. FIFA is utterly corrupt and, given its lack of accountability, quite possibly so from top to bottom. Its obstinate rejection of any video technology to aid in referee decisions only reinforces this impression. Its corporate, non-national structure means it does not answer to any constituency, even indirectly.

The political power of FIFA should not be underestimated, and if any international political scientist is not accounting for it they're missing a biggie. One of the first steps a new state will make (with the Balkanisation of Eastern Europe for example) is apply for membership of FIFA. This application has actually been prioritised over an application to join the United Nations in cases.

The main thing long-time President Sepp Blatter insists upon is that the government does not interfere with the national soccer. From time to time national federations are suspended from FIFA, when they will flurry to adjust to Blatter's demands. It's quite a lot like insisting upon the seperation of church and state, and I invite readers to think about how powerful that makes this bloke Sepp Blatter. Bloody powerful.

I am a big supporter of Australia's World Cup bid, but we should not be naive. Australia would not be running it. South Africa had to agree to forego a lot of sovereignty to FIFA, whose perks included tax free status and an unlimited and unimpeded license to move money in and out of the country in any form.

Now as I suggested in the beginning, FIFA has an explicitly progressive agenda. A few years ago it insisted that all national federations raise the minimum percentage of their funding for women's soccer from 10% to 20%. 220 odd countries, just like that. It doesn't even sound much to a Western mind (the USA had a constitutional decision that government sports funding must be 50% for women - and it shows in their women's sport), but note that this requirement is insisted upon from Kenya to Iran, from The Solomon Islands to Ecuador. It's very proactive stuff, and the governments move to comply.

I can feel a digression coming on when it comes to FIFA's major campaigns against racism in soccer. Australians who have been exposed to not much more than popular press might even find them ironic, because soccer is still often associated with hooliganism and racism. A football game can not produce racism of course, it just provides a jolly opportunity for racism to come to the surface in an ugly way, and we've seen it often enough.

FIFA and the European football federations tackled racism head on with advertising, stadium redesigns, modern crowd management and heavy policing, including with lifetime bans, utilising continental blacklists of hooligans, and the rest. They've had enormous success in combating the racism and the hooliganism, but from what I've read the cycle has gotten going as strong as ever in Eastern Europe and the potential remains everywhere.

The problem is, as many governments have discovered over the past century, soccer is too big and too popular to ban. So the only solution is to confront the problem directly. The effect, in my view, is that racism in society is actually tackled.



In Australia we failed to utilise football as an opportunity to tackle racism in our society. Ethnic rivalries between clubs is the standard scapegoat of all the problems of the old Australian National Soccer League, even though the Crawford Report mostly pointed to corruption and an archaic voting system as the problems. The solution was to lock all of these old clubs, with their decades of tradition and community connection, out of the A-League. It was a monumental mistake in my opinion, but I've digressed too far...

The 1Goal Campaign

The flagship progressive feature of World Cup 2010, apart from the fact that it is in Africa, is the 1Goal campaign. For my own part I am almost shocked at how perfect the goal of this is, which is to eliminate illiteracy, insisting that every child on the planet be schooled. This is an achievable goal and a basic milestone in the stabilisation and development of World Civilisation. I would argue that it is about the single greatest World priority actually, quite independently of my obvious neurotic passion for soccer, and have done so. Clearly it goes with the whole Africa thing, as that's where most of the work will need to be.

As I write 8,154,180 people have signed up to 1Goal. I am one, and I heartilly recommend you add your name. Just go to the site and do what you're told.

So how does 1Goal propose to address this problem? Well explicitly it doesn't want our money, and as far as I can see it is pure lobby, a global petition to, "the governments of the World." Fair enough, but I do question how wholehearted FIFA is, given there is no link to 1Goal from the FIFA World Cup front page.

The thing is I see a real potential for this campaign, and do in general believe that what I call 'the globalising middle classes' do have a real political role to play now, but it doesn't seem to me that the campaign is really being pushed, beyond its stylish, star-studded launch and then automated internet collection.

What I would love to see, and what could actually make an impact, is the campaign featured, maybe for 90 seconds, before the World Cup Final in front of a billion people. This billion people would include, for the overwhelming part, all the leaders, corporate and political, all the journalists, judges, generals and pop icons. In short, every player is watching, aware that a billion others are watching. That is the moment of maximum opportunity, but I doubt that it will be taken.

But sign up I reckon. It would be great to get to 10,000,000 anyway. I think it is a unique lobby, without borders, without particular cultural biases, or even a common language. Despite my cynicism about the 1Goal campaign, I think the goal itself is actually achievable, so I think it's worth humouring FIFA en masse, to see what might be pushed.