FIFA and the United States: The Russian Connection
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- Published on Tuesday, 09 June 2015 22:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1126 .... June 10, 2015
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FIFA and the United States:
The Russian Connection
George Wright
On May 27th the United States Department of Justice issued a 47-count indictment against nine International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) officials and five executives of FIFA-affiliated sports management firms. The charges the United States pressed included racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering amounting to $150-million over a 24-year period. That morning, the Swiss Government also arrested seven of the indicted defendants at a Zurich hotel, while holding them for possible extradition to the United States. The United States and Switzerland also announced that criminal investigations into FIFA's 2010 decisions to award the World Cup to Russia for 2018 and to Qatar for 2022 would continue. Is there a basis for the United States’ allegations... of corruption against FIFA officials and affiliated sports executives? Why is the United States involved in issuing indictments against FIFA officials and affiliated sports executives? How will the United States targeting FIFA corruption play out?
International sporting federations (IFs), such as FIFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the International Associations of Athletics Federations (IAAF), by definition, are inflicted with corruption. This fact has been well documented over the past several decades by the international media and sports historians and reformers. However, FIFA related corruption should not be a surprise since IFs operate in the United States-dominated neoliberal world-capitalist political-economy, where systemic corruption is quite common among the world's political, financial, and economic power-brokers. Starting in the 1980s, the IFs were increasingly susceptible to corruption, because having previously operated on ‘shoe-string’ budgets, they were re-structured into mega-rich bodies owing to: 1) the influx of massive amounts of revenue from global television conglomerates and corporate sponsorships; and, 2) the agency of ambitious and well-connected federation leadership (for example, FIFA's Joao Havelange [1974-1998] and Sepp Blatter [1998-2015], the IOC's Juan Antonio Samaranch [1981-2000]; and the IAAF's Primo Nebiolo [1981-1999]).