Fifa won’t fix itself – scrap it now and set up a World FA, led by Uefa and South America
Football’s world governing body Fifa is beyond reform; a better idea is to abolish it and replace it with a new organisation, argues ethics expert Thomas Beschorner.
The games are over, but the aftertaste remains. As wonderful as the matches on the pitch were, Fifa, as organiser of this summer’s World Cup, has once again showed its ugly side. Multiple ethical violations during the tournament were proof enough, but they’re not even the tip of the iceberg.
Below the surface, further developments continue to call into question the integrity of the organisation. Fifa’s Swiss president Gianni Infantino faces accusations of abuse of office in connection with a campaign for his re-election.
And now Fifa, a private association under Swiss law, wants to further commercialise football by selling shares in a company that would manage the World Cup to a group of investors.
As football fans know, the end of one game always means the start of preparations for the next. Therefore, instead of continuing to be outraged by Fifa’s schemes and Infantino’s manoeuvres, we should ask more fundamental questions about how ethical standards and integrity could be established in the organisation of world football.
The yellow card option: Reform
A first approach could be to initiate fundamental reforms within Fifa, with the aim of guaranteeing a maximum of integrity. But this hardly seems realistic, given that the organisation’s problems are not isolated but structural.
In Fifa, we have a body where power is highly concentrated. Its governance structures offer little space for the types of checks and balances needed to bring strategic considerations into appropriate alignment with moral ones.
For years, ethics commissions at Fifa have been more ceremonial or symbolic than actually effective in shaping the association. In some cases, critical voices from the commission which were unwelcome to Fifa were simply dismissed.
The current row over the commercial spin-off makes that structural weakness even harder to ignore. The reaction from major stakeholders shows how little trust Fifa’s governance still commands.
The red card option: Abolish
And so, if we drop the idea of Fifa’s capacity to reform as a realistic scenario, a second option would be to abolish it altogether and replace it with a new body.
Practically, this would be possible. Fifa is neither more nor less than an association of national football associations, any one of which can terminate its membership without further ado and join another association.
Hypothetical scenarios can often act as a spur for thinking about real options. What if, for example, powerful European national associations, or all associations in Uefa along with others, such as Argentina, Brazil and Japan, were to pull out of Fifa and try to establish a new world football association?
What was until a week ago a hypothetical thought experiment is now clearly moving into the realm of practical political pressure, with Uefa, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation standing in solidarity against the proposal.
Another footballing saying is to take “one game at a time” – wins rarely come easy. The same applies here. Such an undertaking would be no small matter, and would require coordinated steps by a range of actors, but the visibility of opposition alone shows how serious the current backlash has become.
Common cause
It is not just the associations. It is the Council of Europe and its Secretary General, former Swiss minister Alain Berset. It is the Swiss Football Association examining whether it wants to back Infantino’s candidacy for re-election. It is the resignation of senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro in protest.
All of these people and organisations, as well as various others, are currently not shy about heavily criticising Fifa. As Uefa put it: “None of us owns football. It is not for Fifa to sell it.”
It seems time to take action against Fifa in order to save a sport in which fairness and decency, both on and off the pitch, are of great importance. Otherwise, in four years’ time, we will simply be caught up in outrage again.
is Professor of Business Ethics at the University of St Gallen, one of Europe’s leading business schools