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Football’s crisis-stricken world governing body FIFA needs political intervention to ensure long-term reform, according to Nick McGeehan, director of the sports and human rights pressure group Fair Square. McGeehan told the* Byline Times Podcast* that FIFA is “part political party, part mafia organisation,” and that its underlying structure will ensure that corruption thrives, even if current President Gianni Infantino is removed.
Infantino is under pressure after floating plans – now withdrawn – to create a private equity-backed spin-off company to manage the World Cup. The proposal was condemned by UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who said “Football does not belong to investors. It belongs to the people who fill the stands and who stand on the touchline week in, week out, rain or shine.” European football’s governing body UEFA has even threatened a boycott of the men’s and women’s World Cups; and there have also been calls for change from Concacaf – representing soccer in North America, Central America and the Caribbean – as well as from the Asian Football Confederation.
But McGeehan cautions: “Whoever is proposed as a new leader may be slightly better than Infantino in the short term, but they’ll be the product of the same rotten system. We need politicians from the outside to intervene to say ‘you had your autonomy, you had the right to govern yourself for a very long time. You’ve totally ballsed that up, and now we’re going to come in and impose some basic regulations so that this doesn’t happen again.’”
McGeehan identifies a system of patronage at the heart of FIFA which, in his view, encourages corruption. The billions of dollars raised by the World Cup trickle down to national federations, but where and how it flows beyond that is all too often opaque. Fair Square’s attempts to see audited accounts have twice been rebuffed and McGeehan says, “The central problem is the dynamic between the member associations and the presidency, which ensures that money goes out and loyalty comes back. Unless you sever that link, then we don’t have any foundation for proper reform.” That loyalty also means that, even now, Infantino would probably secure a majority if FIFA members forced a vote of confidence on his presidency.
These problems were all too evident during the reign of his predecessor Sepp Blatter. Although Blatter himself has never been convicted, nine senior football officials were successfully prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for a range of offences, including wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering.
Infantino was supposed to be the “new broom sweeping clean” when he was elected in 2016, but his courting of autocratic governments with poor human rights records has raised serious questions about his appetite for change. When Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup, for instance, an estimated 400-500 migrant workers died on construction projects, whilst Saudi Arabia, known for its brutal suppression of internal dissent, has been awarded the 2034 tournament.
The FIFA President has also cosied up to Donald Trump, awarding him a ‘Peace Prize’ in 2025, and renting an office in Trump Tower in New York in the run-up to the most recent World Cup, which apparently stood empty for many months. The key investor in Infantino’s aborted private equity scheme was Joshua Kushner, son of the Trump-appointed US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, and the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. US Congressman Jamie Raskin, the Head of the House Judiciary Committee saw the proposed World Cup sell-off as the culmination of a “kick-back hat trick” to the Trump family. McGeehan takes heart from Raskin’s involvement, saying that “the way that [FIFA] are behaving is starting to attract political scrutiny from people who care about rules.”
He also points out that two EU parliamentary committees have summoned FIFA: “We’re beginning to see the type of political interest and scrutiny that could lead to the regulation that we need. We’re not going to get it from inside FIFA. This scandal, while it’s really depressing to see, could also yield the type of political intervention that might actually return the game to the people who care about it.”
You can watch and listen to Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Nick McGeehan here
