World Cup: FIFA riddled with corruption
Workers Power Global, London: 9 June 2002

It's a shadowy, unaccountable transnational organisation, dispensing bribes to the Third World and riddled with corruption. No, not the IMF, but FIFA - the international football federation that is running the World Cup.

Just days before the World Cup, FIFA held its annual meeting and re-elected the man charged with corruption by his own subordinates. But that does not worry Sepp Blatter. He won on the back of votes from some of the poorest countries in world football. The fact that his main innovation has been a programme that dispenses millions of dollars to the football officials of these countries surely has nothing to do with it.

Once Blatter was reinstalled, his critics resigned and dropped the corruption charges. With the world's attention now focused on the game not the dodgy deals surrounding it, will that be the end of the matter?

Don't count on it. Because FIFA is sitting on a pyramid of financial disaster that could bring the whole game crumbling down once the World Cup Finals have ended.

The corruption allegations raised by Blatter's right hand man, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, go back years - but it was the collapse of FIFA's marketing partner, Swiss-based ISM, that triggered the crisis. FIFA's official losses are put in millions of dollars. Zen-Ruffinen says it could be billions. We will only know the truth if Blatter's ability to go on covering up the state of FIFA's finances fails.

But the sheer scale of the money being talked about tells us something about the way international capitalism is leeching off football.

There are two big sources of profit from football: advertising sponsorship and broadcasting rights. Since the advertising on players' shirts and boots would not mean much if they weren't on TV, it's no surprise that the lion's share is generated by TV rights.

Or was generated. As well as the collapse of ISM, which was in charge of marketing the World Cup, we've seen the bankruptcy of Kirch Media - the German firm that owns the TV rights to both this and the 2006 tournament.

The football's still being televised, because Kirch is being allowed to run itself while bankrupt - a nifty capitalist trick. But after the event it is likely that the whole structure of international football, TV rights and sponsorship will come apart.

Football Associations in the developed world - especially UEFA - are even talking about setting up an alternative to FIFA.

If all this capitalist chicanery were something you had to put up with in order for the sport to grow and improve, and had no impact on the game itself, you might decide you could live with it.

But what it all means for football was shown in the last World Cup Final, when Brazilian boy-wonder Ronaldo felt unwell - he had a seizure - before the big game. His name was left off the team sheet but he reportedly begged the manager to be allowed to play.

Nike had a $200m sponsorship deal with Brazil and Ronaldo himself was getting $1m a year. A Brazilian Congressional Committee hearing two years ago did not manage to shed any light on the sequence of decisions that led Ronaldo to go on the pitch. His performance was dismal. Was it because Nike pressured the coach, pressured the player or because they pressured themselves? We may never know but the incident is widely seen as an example of how the commercialisation of sport can kill real competition.

Another example is what is happening to the English Football League in light of the ITV Digital collapse. Up to 30 out of 72 clubs could go bankrupt. The TV money made them as dependent as junkies on the commercial handouts. They've spent most of the money up front on players' wages. These in turn end up in the pockets of sports car dealers and lapdancing club owners. Because capitalism couldn't make a profit out of making us pay to watch football on TV, football itself has to pay the price.

The current World Cup will no doubt be full of drama and excitement. But with people like Blatter in charge, fans will be keeping fingers crossed that it's only sporting drama - not financial collapse or Ronaldo-style personal tragedy.

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