{"id":90,"date":"2015-06-03T00:03:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-02T23:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scscsussex.wordpress.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2021-10-05T09:19:56","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T08:19:56","slug":"fifa-where-to-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/centre-for-the-study-of-corruption\/2015\/06\/03\/fifa-where-to-now\/","title":{"rendered":"FIFA; where to now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sepp Blatter is soon to be the former president of FIFA, the governing body of world football, but questions are already being asked as to both who will succeed him and what he\/she will do to restore FIFA\u2019s battered reputation.\u00a0 SCSC Director Dan Hough muses on where FIFA goes from here<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It has been a revolutionary week for FIFA.\u00a0 Many people – including me (see here<\/a>) – thought that Sepp Blatter would eventually have to step aside, but very few thought it would be just four days after he had been re-elected President for another five year term.\u00a0 The speed of change has been genuinely breath-taking. As evidence of alleged wrong-doing within FIFA has grown (see here<\/a> for the 47-count, 164 page indictment against 9 FIFA officials and 5 corporate executives) Blatter has gone from proclaiming that he was \u201cthe president of everybody\u201d (see here<\/a>) to \u201cI have been reflecting deeply about my presidency\u201d and \u201cwe need deep-rooted structural change\u201d (see here<\/a>). \u00a0The New York Times is now even claiming that Blatter himself is under investigation (see here<\/a>).\u00a0 In the space of five days these are the types of summersault that any Olympic gymnast would be proud of.<\/p>\n

FIFA will now indeed have to change.\u00a0 That much is clear.\u00a0 It is clear because the next President simply has no other option.\u00a0 But the new President faces a massive challenge in managing this process.\u00a0 Indeed, he or she could well make or break the organisation.\u00a0 Some things will be relatively easy to do; FIFA could, for example, reveal how much executives (including the president) actually earn.\u00a0 In the future the organisation could hardly be less transparent about where money flows to and from than it is now.\u00a0 Blatter himself even raised the prospect of having term limits for the President \u2013 slightly odd given that four days previously he had been elected for the fifth time (his tenure began in 1998).\u00a0 Putting things like this right should be a relatively straightforward for the new person in charge.<\/p>\n

Quite who the next President will be remains unclear.\u00a0 The 2015 election was more a coronation than a genuine contest, and the incumbent had a huge advantage over his one and only challenger, Prince Ali bin Al-Hussein<\/a> from Jordan.\u00a0 Al-Hussein is likely to be a strong candidate to succeed Blatter and although he\u2019s been a FIFA vice-president since 2011 he has made a name for himself as an independent thinker (most notably when he criticised Qatar for the treatment of construction workers building some of the facilities for the 2022 World Cup).\u00a0 At least four other candidates could be in the running; Michel Platini, the current head of European Football (UEFA), Luis Figo (who pulled out of last week\u2019s election in the week before the congress claiming that it was \u201ca plebiscite for the delivery of absolute power to one man<\/a>\u201d) and Lydia Nsekera, the first woman ever to be elected to the FIFA executive committee (see here<\/a> for a more extensive list of possible candidates).\u00a0 Others may also throw their hats in to the ring.<\/p>\n

However, the identity of the next President is only one part of the story.\u00a0 The bigger question is whether he\/she will have the vision, the diplomatic skills, the leadership qualities and the drive and dynamism to really get to the bottom of FIFA\u2019s problems.\u00a0 It is worth remembering that FIFA already has what looks like a pretty good set of ethics committees that should have been able to root out alleged wrong-doing.\u00a0 The shambles surrounding the non-publication of Michael Garcia\u2019s report (see here<\/a>) in to the last round of World Cup bidding illustrated that what looks good on paper often doesn\u2019t work in practice.<\/p>\n

FIFA needs root and branch reform.\u00a0 Thought needs to go in to how the executive committee is elected as well as to how FIFA awards prestigious tournaments such as the World Cup.\u00a0 Good governance involves having the courage to allow independent oversight and to be prepared to be open and transparent about decisions that are made.\u00a0 FIFA really needs to let the forensic accountants in, be open about mistakes and misdemeanours (and some of those could well end up being criminal misdemeanours, of course) that have happened in the past, and create new governance structures that disperse power away from the President.\u00a0 Finding an institutional structure that does justice to all of this will not be easy; there are still lots of interested parties within FIFA and they will want to make sure that they don\u2019t lose out in these power games.<\/p>\n

As things stand, the jury is still well and truly out on whether the World Cup bids \u2013 one of the main bones of contention and currently the subject of Swiss legal investigations \u2013 for 2018 and 2022 will need to be reopened.\u00a0 Very few people within FIFA want to do any such thing, but the key issue will be whether the Swiss investigators find any evidence that due process in awarding these events was not upheld.\u00a0 If they do, then, well, all bets are off and we can expect sparks to fly.\u00a0 It may realistically be too late to re-run the 2018 competition, but it certainly isn\u2019t too late to open things up for 2022.\u00a0 As things stand, it is still very unlikely that that will happen, but given the events of the last seven days anything appears to be possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0 Sepp Blatter is soon to be the former president of FIFA, the governing body of world football, but questions are already being asked as to both who will succeed him and what he\/she will do to restore FIFA\u2019s battered…<\/span><\/p>\n

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