The Case for the External Reform of FIFA

Nicholas McGeehan is a founding co-director of FairSquare and co-author of the damning report Substitute: The Case for External Reform of FIFA. He joins me today to unpack the long history of systemic dysfunction within FIFA—from its roots in patronage and cronyism to recent scandals surrounding World Cup hosts like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Nick offers a detailed look at FIFA's failures on human rights, governance, and safeguarding in both the men's and women’s game, while also presenting a hopeful vision for a better way forward. This is a must-listen for anyone who loves football but demands accountability.

This episode was recorded in December 2024.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:58] Ben: Welcome, Nick to the Sustaining Sport Podcast.

[00:01:01] Nick: Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:02] Ben: I think let's start with a little bit of background about the organization's FairSquare and what you guys do and how the organization came into being.

[00:01:10] Nick: Sure. So we set up in 2018. And largely it was a collaboration between me and my co-director, James Lynch, and it grew out of the work that we'd done together on, mostly on Kahar 2022 when I was a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

[00:01:28] And James occupied various, quite senior roles at Amnesty International, but we work closely on Cathar 2022. We had a shared view on, on, on how to approach that work and a good working relationship. Around about the same time. We both wanted to, to move out of the big NGOs and the work that allowed us to be a bit more nimble and flexible and pursue, pursue areas of work and lines of research that, that it would be difficult to do within the, within those big organizations.

[00:01:56] And that's really how we started FairSquare. And I guess the work on FIFA isn't necessarily the type of approach we've taken with it isn't necessarily something that we could have done when we were in our previous roles.

[00:02:07] Brilliant. But then you mentioned that you were working on Qatar 22, and obviously we're gonna be talking about your FIFA report today.

[00:02:13] Was all your work, is all of FairSquare's work sport related, or is it, um, is other, other

[00:02:18] topics? No, it's not sport related at all. I guess a lot of it flows from Qatar 2022 though. So the key issue there was migrant worker issues that, and that was the issue that I originally got involved in a long time ago, geez, nearly 20 years ago.

[00:02:31] More than 20 years ago. I was really fascinated by migrant worker abuses in the Gulf. James had been a British diplomat in Qatar for some time, so he was conscious of migrant worker issues there and other issues there. In the course of doing work in Qatar 2022, we're also doing work on civil and political rights in the Gulf, so we did a lot of work on the, the repression of dissidents and activists and the crackdown and free speech there, and that's something that we still work on.

[00:02:58] We're still very interested in political oppression. So we still do a lot of that work. We do a lot of work in Egypt, for example, and the UK's relationship with Egypt and sport is the one that, that emerged as a theme, as a sort of pillar of our work. And really it came out of the, it came out of two things, I guess.

[00:03:15] One, the sort of frustration we felt in doing advocacy with FIFA Q 2022 is a really big opportunity to, to focus attention on this issue and actually make some real progress on it. And at no point did we feel that FIFA was ever serious about that. To a large extent, a lot of the failures we would lay at the door of FIFA for what happened in Qatar.

[00:03:36] But at the same time as we were doing work on that issue, the Gulf States were becoming very interested in European football. And so we've also been very interested in that and state ownership of European football clubs and the implications and consequences of that. So that's another line of work that we started to do quite intensely or more heavily after we set up FairSquare.

[00:03:56] So yeah, those are the three pillars. It's migrant worker issues. It's political repression and it's sport and rights, but coming at sport from a far more critical angle, I would say. We don't see FIFA as an organization that we can go to and say, we would like you guys to be better. We see FIFA as an organization that is fundamentally and systematically dysfunctional as our many sports governing bodies.

[00:04:17] So we come at it from that perspective.

[00:04:20] Ben: Brilliant. And obviously that's why that brings you to this podcast. 'cause I, I must say we love a critical take here. So let's dive into this report. It's exceptionally detailed. I think it's nearly 200 pages. Um, so they can't say you haven't done your homework, and it's titled essentially the Case for an External Reform of fifa.

[00:04:38] So could you run me through basically how you came up with the original concept and what, what was the frustration that you were feeling that led you to put in all this work?

[00:04:48] Nick: I mean, it grew out of, it grew out of spotting a gap in the work that's done on fifa, there is a, there's a vast amount of work, excellent work that's been done criticizing fifa.

[00:05:00] Most of it's journalistic, you know, journalists from across the world have looked at this organization and done fantastic exposes of it. You've got David Cohen. A great book in the uk. You've got the work of Andrew Jennings. There's a whole host. It'd be too long to name all the journalists who've done the work on this stuff.

[00:05:15] And then you had like the US Department of Justice coming in 2015, 2016, and actually prosecuting individuals who were at the top of this organization. But the work that NGOs do, the work that campaigning groups have done in relation to FIFA has always, and has traditionally approached the organization as an advocacy target.

[00:05:36] I will go to FIFA because we want you to do X or Y or Z. We want you to have the human rights policy. We want you to implement that human rights policy in Qatar. We want you to compensate the migrant workers who were abused in the course of the preparation of that tournament. And it became very obvious that that wasn't working, that this organization was not a good actor.

[00:05:56] I mean, that's structurally, I don't mean that the people there are bad. Some of them are very good, but the organization was not structurally set up. To deliver, to, to act responsibly. And so the idea of approaching it as a responsible actor didn't make any sense to us. And I think a lot of the organizations who work on FIFA understand that.

[00:06:14] But yet many are still wedded to, to this approach of FIFA is a business and businesses of human rights responsibilities. So we'll get them to adhere to those responsibilities. We took the alternative approach. This organization is structurally. Fundamentally dysfunctional. And unless it's externally reformed, it's gonna increasingly create the social harms that we saw in Qatar that we saw previously in South Africa and Brazil and Russia.

[00:06:38] It's not gonna govern the game properly, and that's gonna have really bad consequences both on the pitch and and off the pitch. And the other thing I think that made us very interested in it was that there's this dissonance in relation to fifa, which is it is in control of the world's by far the world's most popular sport, and yet it is deeply unpopular.

[00:06:56] A lot of people care about it. So we come from a background where we are often campaigning on, on fairly in, in the global scheme of things, niche issues that not a lot of people care about. And that's a really difficult task. As an advocate, it's really difficult to go into a policymaker and say, or to an audience and say, I want you to care about this issue.

[00:07:15] And they look at you and say, well, okay, but there's a lot of other big issues out there. This is kinda, kinda niche and maybe the stuff that we have traditionally advocated on. It's been difficult to, it's been difficult to get people in power, policy makers to take 'em seriously with football. Everybody cares.

[00:07:32] Everybody cares about football, and you have an organization that is well known to be, I mean, what's the most generous way of putting it? It's not well governed, right? That's the most generous characterization you could say. And everybody knows this, and yet we continue to accept the fact that it governs world football because it does.

[00:07:51] And I think we are of the opinion that when an organization is this dysfunctional and when the thing it's in control of, is this important and when it's this unpopular, well that's a really, that's a really heavy mix and that gives you a strong basis to, to push persuasively for, its for its reform.

[00:08:11] Ben: A good point about their lack of popularity, because I would say most people, football is that kind of global currency.

[00:08:18] There's obviously certain sports that are maybe slightly bigger in a certain country. You know, I'm thinking of like American football in the us, that kind of thing. But as the global average is obviously football. So then you have the, this organization that governs the most popular sport in the world, which as you rightly say, are so unpopular.

[00:08:33] And I'd say anyone listening to this, even if they haven't spent that much time reading it, we'll have heard bits and pieces of corruption here. Scandal here. So why don't we go down memory lane a bit here, where, where's a lot of this stuff come from? Because from what I understand, and obviously your report goes into it.

[00:08:50] Almost from the beginning. It had some blind spots or some loopholes that could be exploited and were exploited.

[00:08:56] Nick: Yeah, yeah. The problems were really structural. Right, and the problems was locked into the organization right from the outset. It was set up up, well, it wasn't set up in in Switzerland, it was set up in Amsterdam or Paris.

[00:09:06] You never quite remember. I think it moved to Switzerland in the thirties. It's set up there as a, as an association under the Swiss civil code. And basically, basically what that means is that it's a member association and it can extend its membership status to any national association that wants to join.

[00:09:23] And FIFA governs this and sits at the top of this, and this wasn't. Ever really a problem for a very long time that it was set up because it was a small organization. But increasingly over time, more and more organizations joined, more and more national associations joined, but it wasn't turning out vast amounts of money.

[00:09:41] Now this changed in, in the seventies, and it largely changed with the election of a guy called Joe Hava lunch to the presidency in, is it 1972? Avalanche replaced a, an Englishman who was called Stanley Rouse, who had presided over the organization for quite some time and who had made it a fundamentally European organization, and in some senses, an organization that was, that was rooted in a belief in European supremacy.

[00:10:06] So Avalanche came along as a Brazilian and said he was going to extend more power to organizations outside of Europe. Now, this, on the one hand, was a very laudible game, but the other thing that Alan did was he started to really. Mine, the very obvious commercial potential of the game. And within, within a few years of him coming on board in the presidency, they had Coca-Cola come on board and they were heavily influenced by, by horse Dassler, who was one of the heads of, or the son of the head of Aidas.

[00:10:37] Who saw FIFA as a brilliant vehicle for him to sell lots of sportswear to lots of organizations. He wanted all the people playing at World Cups to be wearing Adida tops. And then he wanted to sell Adidas stuff to lots of people around the world. And he did that very successfully. But as the organization grew, vast amounts of money started to flow in and in broadcasting revenue and in sponsorship money.

[00:10:59] And because it's a Swiss, an association under the Swiss civil code, it can't turn a profit. So you can't just walk off with all the money. It's a not-for-profit organization. And ultimately what started to happen is that in order to ensure that they would remain in power and that they would remain in control of the sort of commercial elements of the game, they.

[00:11:21] The people at the top of the game started redistributing the money to the member associations and the quid pro quo was, we're gonna give you lots of money and you're gonna vote for us when it's time for the presidency to come around. And the man who formalized that was set bladder after 1998 when he introduced what was called the goal program.

[00:11:38] And instead of this ad hoc system whereby there would be a nod and a wink, and suddenly a national association would find itself with a new training pitch or a bunch of photocopiers, or perhaps even just a brown envelope. Platter formalized this and says, we're gonna give you development money every year.

[00:11:53] And that in a sense, formalized and entrenched what has become a patronage system. There's a very simple dynamic at the top. This organization is gonna make lots of money. A lot of the people at the top of the organization are gonna have lots of power, uh, lots of publicity, lots of prestige, lots of status, great big salaries, and the organization is gonna distribute vast amounts of money to the national associations.

[00:12:16] Now for a lot of big associations, that money isn't necessarily significant. So you take the English fa, well, they don't really care about the money they get from FIFA because it's it's chicken feed compared to the rest of the money that they'll generate through the course of their operations. You take an organization like Botswana or Bhutan or any of these smaller associations, the money they get from FIFA entirely sustains, or almost entirely sustains them.

[00:12:39] So FIFA is providing all of the money to these organizations on whom it depends for political support. And that's the mechanism at the heart of fifa. That mechanism has, there was a big, uh, US Department of Justice prosecutions in 2016, which everybody knows about, which again we might wanna talk about in some more detail.

[00:12:58] But the reforms that came in after that just never touched that, that system never touched the link between political power and development money. And that that problem, that dynamic, which was, which was built into the structure right from the start, has continued to essentially to corrupt and degrade the organization to the point where we are today.

[00:13:17] Ben: Fascinating. And I think that's interesting that you can almost see this sort of incremental change throughout the decades and perhaps even aligns with some global trends. We saw some deregulation starting in the seventies and escalating in the eighties, which would've helped the, um, the, the process.

[00:13:32] And I think a lot of people will know EP, bladder. When it comes to a name synonymous with a lot of the issues that FIFA have had. And I think, yeah, let's dive into that 20 15, 20 16 situation in more detail. 'cause from my understanding, it was basically that they finally got on the radar of the US Justice Department, which one of the few organizations in the world that could have had any kind of influence on them.

[00:13:54] It ultimately led to the stepping down of step bladder. They put in some kind of reform, but I think as you were probably about to touch on more, the reforms weren't fundamental. And from what I'm reading from the last year or so, they have now been walking back some of those reforms that they did implement.

[00:14:09] So could you go into more detail on that?

[00:14:11] Nick: Yeah, so I, I think they put a nail in their coffin back in 2010 when. Qatar won the right to host 2022 and Russia won the right to host 2018 Men's World Cups. And I think FIFA senior leadership knew that was a problem. Blair did not support the Qatar World Cup, and I think he was well aware after that vote that there was a big problem for them.

[00:14:33] Now, one of the, one of the countries that lost out was the United States, and not long after this decision. As you say, this issue came on the radar of the United States. I think it was the Treasury Department. First of all. There's a really good book by a guy called Ken Benzinger called Red Card, which if anyone's interested in how this all evolved and how it started, it's really well worth the read.

[00:14:54] But the United States basically realized that they could trace a whole series of corrupt payments involving senior football officials, including payments related to the Qatar World Cup. And that ultimately led to them taking a case against, and it wasn't a case against fifa, which is really interesting.

[00:15:11] The US Department of Justice. FIFA was the victim in that case. The argument proposed by the US Department of Justice is that FIFA as an organization had been the victim of an organized criminal conspiracy by members of its senior leadership, and that led to a series of arrests in 2015 in the Bartel in Zurich.

[00:15:31] It didn't affect bladder personally, but affected many of the senior leaders of within FIFA and within some of its confederations. Now, this prompted a massive problem for fifa. FIFA can deal with stories about human rights abuses, but the thing that FIFA and particularly sponsors can't handle are allegations of corruption.

[00:15:50] And when the US authorities get involved, that's just about the most serious thing that can happen to to an organization like fifa. So what ultimately happened there is that bladder was forced to resign. 2015 Reform Committee was instituted interesting. One of the members of that was that the UFA delegate was a guy called Janni Infantino.

[00:16:11] And this reform committee wrote a report explaining how FIFA was going to reform itself and how it's gonna bring itself back under principles of good governance. It's a relatively detailed document. It talks about increased representation for women. It talks about reducing the number of subcommittees that were avenues for graft and corruption.

[00:16:34] It talked about limiting presidential term limits a whole, a whole suite of relatively solid good governance principles. These were then enacted in February, 2016 at the same general conference in which Infantino was elected the president of fifa. And this new fifa, FIFA 2.0 set off proclaiming that it was going to be new things were gonna be different this time.

[00:16:58] Infantino was gonna be a different type of president. Now if you'd been paying close attention to how Infantino won his presidency, he'd been very skeptical of claims of reform. One of the things that Infantino said he would do is he said he would increase the amount of money that was going to the associations.

[00:17:13] So what he was really saying is he was going to, he was going to not necessarily turbocharge the patronage system, but he was very, he was unequivocal. He was gonna keep it going, I'm gonna give you more money now. At the same time, they were saying things like, yeah, but it's gonna be done more transparently.

[00:17:27] But ultimately what we've seen over the last eight years is a slow unraveling of the reform process Very quickly after he came in, new independent heads of committees that were supposed to. Impose good governance principles either resigned or were effectively sacked. Most prominent in those was a Portuguese academic and lawyer called Miguel Maduro, uh, who was the new head of the, of the governance committee and independent head of the governance committee, who very quickly ran into problems within Infantino over Infantino efforts to have a senior member of the Russian government sitting on the FIFA Council.

[00:18:07] Maduro told Infantino, well, we can't have this. This is political interference and it obviously goes against the rules. Now the problem for him was that Russia was about to host the 2018 World Cup. Vladimir Putin wanted Vitali Muko, the politician in question to be part of the FIFA Council. And Infantino was not prepared to challenge Putin because FIFA's revenue is entirely dependent on World Cups.

[00:18:34] FIFA needed a successful World Cup in 2018 to make sure that infant Tino's presidency was a success. So when faced with the decision of, do I adhere to these new principles of good governance and get rid of Vital Muko, or do I continue to cozy up to Vladimir Putin? 'cause he's gonna make sure that my work cup's a success?

[00:18:53] And Fantino chose Putin and Miguel Maduro was effectively sacked and the reason all these things were happening. As I explained earlier is because the reforms that came in didn't touch the patron system. They didn't touch the fact that there's a, there's a, there's a clear and irresolvable tension in a system whereby you're providing funds to a group of associations upon whom you rely for political support.

[00:19:19] I guess you might say that the culmination. The nail in the coffin of the reform process was probably this month's decision to, to give the 2034 World Cup to to Saudi Arabia. There's a certain neat symmetry. The thing that kicked off the reform process that swept Infantino into power was arguably the decision to give the World Cup to Qatar in 2010.

[00:19:39] And here we are in 2024. Infantino has just handed the 2034 workup to, to another Gulf state and more dangerous Gulf State, a Gulf state whose actions will lead to even more human rights abuses and will probably admire or in mesh fifa in in future scandal, I would bet.

[00:19:57] Ben: Yeah, super interesting. And I find, I always find the, one of the funniest comparisons between set bladder and infantino is with the argument being that they're essentially a, a reproduction of the, uh, infantino is a reproduction of bladder, just with a few different, um, slightly different appearance is that they're from the same Canton in Switzerland.

[00:20:14] I always find that ironic that you sort of say to an organization that is global, right? We're gonna have big reform here, but we're gonna pick someone who. Intent purposes have a very similar track record to the predecessor who has under scrutiny. And then as you lay, once they knew what kind of.

[00:20:30] Business model could be so profitable and to be so good for their own ends, of course, they were gonna try and default back to the mean, and you could almost argue that putting in such light reforms was a, a media exercise. Just to slightly allay people's suspicions, because as you say, 10, 12, 14 years later, we're in identical situations, if not even in a worse one.

[00:20:49] I wonder if you could go into a bit more detail about. How they, how they sort of deal with the member countries. 'cause you raise two cases in the report under the title of weaponizing political interference, particularly the cases of Angola and tida and Tobago. What do those conversations look like?

[00:21:04] Because I think you, you laid out the sort of gist of it, but are there specific examples where it gets a bit more complicated? Like where they maybe deal with a specific regime or deal with a particular political entity that has not got a democratic support?

[00:21:19] Nick: Sure. Yeah. No, that was, to be honest, this was one of the most interesting aspects of the report I found.

[00:21:26] 'cause we knew that the development money is like the carrot for member associations. Yeah. So they're going about $10 million over three years. Right. FIFA doesn't really ask them for any, any proof as to how they spent it. Yeah. It's $10 million. It's almost no questions asked right now. That should keep, it should keep a lot of people happy.

[00:21:47] But there are all of good people working in football. I mean, this is one of the things I found that was really encouraging in the course of the research, how many people work in football because they genuinely believe in the sort of transformative potential of this sport. Like they, they like, it's something that people are really committed to.

[00:22:03] I'm sure it's one of the reasons you're doing this podcast. Right? And it's certainly one of the reasons I'm doing the work. Like I actually think it's true that sport can have this, it can be a tool for social justice, let's say. And so, so the money doesn't keep everyone happy, right? There are a lot of people who want their associations to be run properly and run well, but the problem for those organizations is that if they go up against.

[00:22:24] Infantino or they go up against anyone who's an ally of infantino. FIFA has a really powerful stick at its disposal, and that stick is the prohibition on political interference and the ability of FIFA to impose work called normalization committees, which is when FIFA sends in essentially an independent or not an independent, a FIFA run body to take over the affairs of any association who doesn't think is acting properly.

[00:22:54] The most interesting case that I've come across was in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, when a challenger to an ally of Infantino essentially was successful in, in, in taking over control, a part of a coalition of, of actors who, who managed to win control over the Trinidad and Tobago football Association.

[00:23:12] Now, what they uncovered was gross financial management on the part.

[00:23:17] Ben: Hello, it's Ben in editor mode here. We lost the audio for a few seconds. What Nick was about to say was the challenger Keith. Look. Loy had discovered gross financial mismanagement on behalf of Infantino Ally and the incumbent president David John Williams.

[00:23:35] Once John Williams was defeated in the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association presidential election in November, 2019, Luke Lawy gained access to the association's accounts among the various transgressions discovered. There was a notable instance where 2.3 million US dollars in local currency was unaccounted for.

[00:23:56] It had been allocated for a 2.8 million US dollar project recently inaugurated by Infantino, called the home of football. In response to Laloy, FIFA appointed a normalization committee to take over the running of the association. Nick continues from here.

[00:24:13] Nick: He quickly imposed a normalization committee, said they were going to, they were gonna come in and take over control of the organization.

[00:24:20] And when this organization went to the Trinidadian High Court to protest against this. The Trinidadian High Court supported them. They said, they said it is basically, it's this fascinating judgment actually. You get the sense of reading the judgment that this high court judge in Trinidad was just utterly appalled that that FIFA could essentially tell this organization that they couldn't run their own affairs independently, and that if they were to go to a high court, that would be a violation of the, of the prohibition and political interference.

[00:24:52] VO saying, you can't go to your own court. To protest against your exclusion from this association That's illegal. Under our rules, as soon as they did this, FIFA basically excluded them from competition, and so the capacity of the Trinidadian Football Association to participate in competition was gone just because they'd basically.

[00:25:14] Gone to the court to protest against the fact that they'd been, they'd been excluded from running the association, and so that's what they do all the time. Eventually, it was overturned by the appeal court who basically said, no, we have no business in interfering in this issue on what happens to our own football association.

[00:25:33] Because this organization, FIFA has it in its statutes. The political interference is not okay. So in short, it's a, it's a sort of complex issue, and it's a difficult one to explain neatly and uh, like this. But essentially, FIFA can overturn the decisions of courts. It can overturn the decisions of governments because it has it within its power, the ability to exclude these teams from competition.

[00:25:55] And everybody wants to be involved in FIFA competition, and politicians in particular don't want to be seen as the people who have been responsible for having their teams excluded. So it has this unique power, this unique leverage over over courts and governments. In fact, now it is probably not gonna try and pull a stunt like that with any of the larger governments.

[00:26:15] You, you can't really imagine a situation where they do this to, to the French, right? Or let's take the example of the independent football regulator in England and Wales, right? Now, technically speaking, FIFA could come in and say, political interference, you're out. And they would do that, right? Because the English FA are too powerful and the British government are too powerful.

[00:26:33] But they have that power at their disposal and they can use it against the smaller associations who can't be bought off by development money.

[00:26:40] Ben: Unbelievable. And it does always raise the interesting thought around a sort of supernational organization, but who are they accountable to? 'cause as you say, like if they, if they can basically just hold the political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago for ransom until a high court is a, is appealed, then who, who could come in and give them a slap on the wrist and say, don't do that.

[00:27:01] I, I acknowledge your point around some of the bigger nations and obviously we know the US. Can push back if it really needs to. But at the same time, you know, the, the, I I always just imagine if you leave a bunch of children in a classroom without any kind of supervision, eventually something's gonna go wrong.

[00:27:17] Eventually someone's gonna knock something over. And it's kind of how I imagine FIFA going about their business because there is no, there is no top dog other than themselves. Let's move on to how, as you said, their big cash cow, their big thing every four years is the Men's World Cup in particular. And since you've published the report, but now we're talking after the, they've voted in Saudi Arabia for 2034.

[00:27:39] Talk to me a little bit about how that process came into being, because from what I understand, they had to do a few jigs of their own regulation to allow it to happen, to come so quickly back to a, an Asian country.

[00:27:52] Nick: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, the stories around the links to Saudi Arabia have been there for a while.

[00:27:57] Infantino is clearly very impressed by Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and has been for some time. Saudi Arabia's moves in the world of sport have been extensively documented, and clearly they had their sights on a World Cup. The problem that FIFA had was, well, how are we gonna give this World Cup to them?

[00:28:15] Because we've got all these new bidding guidelines and it tricky for Saudi Arabia to. To go up against another country, which has a load of stadiums and doesn't have a horrendous human rights record. It's really difficult for us to give it to them. So what they basically did was they engineered a process where by Saudi Arabia was the only bidder for 2034.

[00:28:36] Now, they did this by ensuring that, so the Saudi 2030 tournament is going to be hosted in, how many confederations is it? I think it's three right? It's Spain and Morocco, and yet some of the games will also be held in, is it Paraguay? I can't recall, but

[00:28:54] Ben: Paraguay, Argentina, and one more I think as well.

[00:28:57] Nick: Uruguay. Yeah. And Uruguay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that's three confederations taken out from one tournament. Now under the pro, the principle of confederation rotation. No Confederation can host subsequent to, can host consecutive tournaments. And so what they did was after they announced that the South American teams would also be part of 2030, they said there was a two week deadline.

[00:29:22] They set a two, they set a two week deadline for countries to bid for 2034. But this meant that only two confederations were eligible, one of which was Asia, and one of which was Oceana. Saudi Arabia very quickly secured all the support of the Asian football confederation, all of whom said they fully supported the Saudi Arabian bid, which was ready to go, had already been prepared, which meant that any bid potential bidding countries in Oceania had two weeks to get something together.

[00:29:51] Now, the Australians had said that they were interested at, indicated that they may be interested in 2034. But there is just no way that you can, you can turn around the bed in two weeks. And so they ended up pulling out and so that left Saudi Arabia as the sole bidder and so, so they couldn't be, there could be, there was no competition.

[00:30:09] Right. It was just them and, and whatever they did was likely to be accepted. They still had the issue of, of the human rights dimension of their report, but the Saudis very quickly got around that with active support from fifa. First of all, they commissioned a, an independent human rights assessment by the law firm, Clifford Chance, which was spectacular in many of its submissions, and the cherry picking of what human rights issues they said would fall under the scope of that.

[00:30:39] They basically selected the ones they wanted to and ignored the ones that they didn't. And so the report from the supposedly independent assessment was that the Saudi said, a clean bill of health, not content. With that, I think a week before the announcement, uh, FIFA announced that its own assessment of the Saudi bid gave it the highest ever score for any World Cup bid.

[00:31:04] They gave it 4.25, and so in doing so, I mean it was already guaranteed. It gives the clear sense of that FIFA is shamelessly and unabashedly throwing its full support behind a, a Saudi bid and will do whatever it needs to do, irrespective of the evidence to the contrary, to, to present Saudi Arabia as being the perfect host in many ways for one of his tournaments.

[00:31:30] Ben: Yes. There's obvious, obvious conflicts of interest before we even get into what you've just described around obviously their, their lead. Sponsor is now Saudi Aramco, which is not just a big company. It is a state run massive enterprise, which Mohammad bin Salman essentially. Is the, is the operator of as well, not directly, but it's under his jurisdiction.

[00:31:52] So you can just see the sort of very, very clear and obvious conflicts of interest throughout. And this is why I think the essence of your report is so powerful because you know, you don't even have to get into the weeds to see that some of the conflicts of interest, but then when you do get into the weeds, you can just see these mechanisms playing out.

[00:32:07] And I'm almost just thinking now in real time, why. A country like Paraguay would agree to it because they're basically precluding themselves from hosting a tournament in full for a number of years because they will have obviously now counted briefly as a host. But then I think it just goes back to your point around political interference or, or the power that FIFA hold is that if they want Paraguay to host one game and say, you are not gonna host another one for 12 years, they can apply that kind of pressure.

[00:32:32] Which, yeah, again, once again, a conflict. Just in the interest of time though, I wanna keep things moving on. I'd say the one of the meatiest parts of the report, and probably goes more to your previous expertise, is around the abuses that you've seen, that we've seen at the World Cup. You go back all the way back to 2010.

[00:32:49] I wonder if you could just pull out some highlights from those that you found that you knew about, maybe in the research or maybe some that you found surprising. I obviously found it very interesting being South African, reading about the one in 2010. There's so many

[00:33:01] Nick: that it was hard to, it was hard to pick them out.

[00:33:03] And it's funny, when you do this work, you get accustomed to writing about stuff like forced evictions and you get accustomed to documenting horrible stuff that that happens to people. And yet you never feel to be shocked and surprised and stunned and horrified by some of the stuff you end up uncovering.

[00:33:18] I mean, the one that stood out to me was one in, in Cape Town, actually. I didn't do the South Africa research. I didn't go on the ground. It was one of our researchers who went and did that. So I was just reading his notes and collating that. But it was a story of, I think it was several hundred residents, and I'm gonna forget the name.

[00:33:34] I'm sorry, Ben. But they were relocated to make way for a training pitch, and they were taken out of their, their, their, their residence evicted and moved. To this other, which was far from the schools that their kids went to. Which was very badly drained. They had loads of flooding and lots of, uh, insects coming.

[00:33:57] As a result of that, it turned out we found some, some video footage of a South African film crew who went there. This is 10 years later. I mean, this is very recent footage who, who went to the camp and said that there were asbestos in, in very close proximity to it. We're talking like hundreds of families here who.

[00:34:16] Having been evicted in I think 29 or 2010, we're still in, I think it was 2023, we're still looking for alternative accommodation and who still hadn't been relocated despite the fact that this accommodation had initially been moved to, was supposed to have been supposed to have been temporary. And this all happened because somebody wanted a training pitch for the teams who were going to be based in Cape Town.

[00:34:41] They ended up not even building the training pitch because it turned out it was on the other side of the city from the hotels that were chosen. Now that is just a fraction of the stuff that happened to people because of World Cups. The notion that you would not destroy, pretty much destroy the lives of 300 families and pitch them into this horrendous schoor next to asbestos ridden buildings.

[00:35:10] 'cause you want to build a training pitch for a bunch of football teams. In what world is that acceptable And okay, again, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the stuff that, that we documented, I think in the South African context. It really was. It was these evictions, it was the destruction of the livelihoods of street traders.

[00:35:30] Uh, free FIFA wanted to cleanse the area around these fancy new stadiums. To make sure that everything looked good for the international audience. Completely ignoring the fact that a large section of the South Africa's population has a living through, through street trading and has done for some time, but that wasn't consistent with the sort of look that FIFA wanted.

[00:35:50] Brazil again, widespread evictions, a massive increase in the militarization of the police in Brazil, which was all done using the World Cup as the cover. In Russia, again, vast cronyism, appalling abuses in relation to stadium construction. The use of North Korean laborers who were living in shipping containers next to stadiums.

[00:36:13] Vast amounts of money handed out to Putin's cronies in the construction sector. And then of course, Qatar 2022, which was again, happened after the reform process, and I think was the host of, by far and away the most egregious. Human rights abuses ever linked to FIFA's operations. The total number of people who died because of negligence there, which FIFA could have done something to arrest or to improve.

[00:36:41] I don't think we'll ever know that. But it's pretty obvious that hundreds, if not thousands of relatively young men never went home. And the cost of that will be felt forever by their kids and by their families. And just recently, in fact. Few days before the tournament was awarded to Saudi Arabia, TIFA effectively closed the door on on the idea that those workers would ever be compensated.

[00:37:05] They had commissioned a report about the idea of compensation and remedy for what happened in Qatar 2022. The report recommended that they remedy the families. The subcommittee in human rights at FIFA also recommended that be done. FIFA then turned around and said it was gonna do something entirely different with the Legacy Fund.

[00:37:24] They're gonna engage in some program with the World Health Organization, thereby depriving all the people affected in Qatar of what would probably be a fairly minimal amount of compensation, but which would be important nonetheless. So yeah, it was, it was all stuff that I knew about as I started to write it, but putting it together was pretty, pretty horrifying.

[00:37:47] Ben: Yeah, I, I think just the kinds of things you're discussing there really speak to the depth of the problem and I guess is a proof of concept for the entire report around. It's not just that they need some kind of tweaks here, it's that the whole thing is kind of rotten. I, I'm so glad you included South Africa in it, because I was, I.

[00:38:04] Here for that and it was a, a special time and there is that magic to the World Cup or to football that none of us can really deny. And it was a special time in my life, but I remember like it was also probably the dawn of acknowledging some of the stupidity or I would even say obviously, um, I. Malice behavior that exists in this profit seeking enterprise.

[00:38:23] At the start of, it was definitely that. Um, they didn't have a, a local beer provider. The beers in the stadium was Budweiser and South Africa is one of the biggest beer drinking companies in the world. And we had SA breweries, which could easily provide the beer for a tournament like that. And now they're importing beer.

[00:38:41] You're like, that's a bit stupid, but you can kind of stomach it. And then there was the instances of building stadiums in. It were nearly bigger than the towns that they were in. I mean, the one I'm thinking of is in Bomb, which is a 43,000 seater and a 50,000 person town, uh, which is just, it speaks to madness.

[00:38:58] But then I think it leads to the ones you're talking about where it's like, right, no, you're gonna ruin people's families and not do anything about it. Right. No. You're gonna literally know that X number of labors have died. As you say, we don't even maybe know the full number. I'm not do anything about it.

[00:39:14] And that last point really just kind of breaks my heart that there are these internal decisions where it's like, right, we've done something wrong here. We can fix it here, or we could fix it here. And just when it finally gets to that actual do something change, fix something, they seem to always be able to just say, no, we're moving on.

[00:39:31] Nick: Exactly. And do you know, and do you know, the other thing that's really interesting about it is sometimes you talk to people and they say, Hey, wasn't fifa like, you talk to people in South Africa and they'll say, wasn't fifa, it was our government's corrupt. And you say you find the same in Brazil. Don't lay the door at FIFA is, don't lay the blame FIFA's door, it's our government.

[00:39:47] Our government did this and, and that's true up to a point, but that's what FIFA does, right? FIFA comes in and it says, it basically says, here's the contract. Do what you like. Just give us our money. Right. Make sure you give us our money 'cause we need that money. 'cause the only money that FIFA generates throughout the four year cycle comes from the World Cup.

[00:40:06] So if there's any threat to that money, any jeopardy to that money, the entire model falls apart. Right? So there's no way that they're gonna go into these countries and say, you can have the World Cup, but you're gonna have to do this and this, and it's gonna have to be human rights compliant. And you can't give all this money to all your construction firms.

[00:40:21] They, they are not going to do that because all of the leverage that they have. They used to make sure that the money they get from the tournament is maximized. They'd rely on these countries to provide that. And so the quid pro quo from them is they turn a blind eye as to how the tournament is delivered.

[00:40:38] So there's a really strong link between the stuff that you see happening, which, which does reflect often the worst instincts of bad politicians in countries. But that has to be directly linked to this governance and this business model.

[00:40:51] Ben: Yes. And that just links to the idea why they're so attracted by authoritarian governments, because the, the arch enemy of corruption and cronyism is democracy.

[00:41:00] So although they can put it off in a democracy, yeah, you definitely can always find someone to do a deal with. The, the more authoritarian, the easier, because there's just one person, two people you have to

[00:41:11] Nick: convince. Exactly. You don't have to worry about going and asking for tax exemptions because that's agreed.

[00:41:16] Of course you'll get tax exemptions, like have whatever exemptions you want. Yeah, they're far, it's far easier for them to deal with authoritarians and particularly rich authoritarians like the Saudis.

[00:41:25] Ben: So we've talked a lot about the men's game and obviously that is still the big cash cow of fifa. There is a bit in the report about how they fail the women's game.

[00:41:33] Could you just quickly go into what's go, what's going on there? Because I think this is definitely, uh, at least in the journalistic sense, under reported on.

[00:41:41] Nick: I agree and I'm glad we included that. Again, I wasn't the lead researcher in that section of the report and there are people far you can talk to that far better than I can.

[00:41:49] But yeah, that was another one that was pretty shocking in terms of just how badly they're failing the women's game. And we, we focused on representation, we focused on funding, and we focused on, on safeguarding a preventing abuse within the game. Representation. Women are still really underrepresented governance structures.

[00:42:08] I think there are two or three women on the 36 member FIFA Council, which is utterly unacceptable. There are no women who are heads of confederations whenever, and Fantino has brought women on like Fatma Samoa, who is General Secretary. That seems to have been done as a way of screaming, look, there's a woman here, but it doesn't reflect.

[00:42:31] The prevailing underrepresentation of women in senior governance positions, and that's a huge problem because if you don't have women there, then you don't have women advocating for the types of funding structures that the women's game needs. There's a huge problem in funding, right? FIFA redistributed $2.2 billion to its member associations between 2016 and

[00:42:57] FIFA wanted. Dictate how that money should be spent, and it could dictate a lot of that money should be spent on the women's game. Only 6% of that money was spent on the women's game. I think about 48% was spent on administration and infrastructure IE salaries and fancy headquarters or training pitches.

[00:43:17] Now, again, no one's arguing against training pitches, right? That those things are important and no one's saying that you shouldn't have a decent headquarters, but we don't really know where that money's going. And it's clear that not enough. It's going to the women's game. You've got women's teams turning up at World Cup tournaments.

[00:43:32] Who aren't paying their players. These are affecting not just the, the smaller teams from developing nations, but like the Argentinian women's team has huge resourcing issues at the same time as when it's men's team has messy and it's just won the World Cup. How is that possible? Why is FIFA not taking a lead on that?

[00:43:48] And then the one that, again, was pretty shocking was the safeguarding failures. Now it is not FIFA's fault that sport is very fertile ground for abusers. It's been seen in multiple sports. It is a risk that will always be there because it speaks to the power dynamic of sport where you have ambitious, hungry athletes, often young, often vulnerable under the sway of very powerful individuals who hold their fate to some extent in their hands.

[00:44:22] Now, that is a very dangerous dynamic. And what you need in order to mitigate that risk are very strong safeguarding procedures and mechanisms. Now, some parts of the world have those and still still experience problems. A lot of parts of the world don't have those. FIFA is in a unique position to, to lead on this issue.

[00:44:43] In fact, in 2020, after a really horrific series of abuse scandals in first Afghanistan and second Haiti. FIFA pledge that it would take a lead on the issue and that it would institute a global safe sporting entity. They subsequently led a really impressive consultation process, which involved just survivors and interviews with hundreds of experts and then did nothing with it.

[00:45:12] They've done absolutely nothing with it. It's gone absolutely nowhere. They've just basically seemingly dropped it and according to one people, one person rather. Who was, who is heavily involved both in women's sport and the efforts to get safeguarding procedures in place? Apparently it's just been deprioritized, and in her view it was deprioritized because ultimately it would pose a challenge to very senior figures within football and therefore.

[00:45:43] Wasn't going to be, it wasn't gonna be pursued by fifa. It certainly wasn't gonna be prioritized. And again, that's just her opinion. And we didn't have a whole lot of people expressing the same thing. But you do wonder why not if you've got 4 billion in reserves, if you know that there have been multiple sex abuse scandals all around the world.

[00:46:04] Why would you not put a little bit of money into taking a lead on this issue? What possible political reason would you have for not doing that given the reputational enhancement that you could get from doing it? But yeah, nothing from fifa. And interestingly, they wrote to us, actually, they never, FIFA never replied to, to, to anything that you sent to them usually.

[00:46:23] But they did reply to our report and they said that our, one of the things they complained about, they said that our, our assessment of their failures in the women's game was entirely unfair. Um, but they did not say, for example, that they had any concrete plans to take forward the SafeSport entity, which would to some extent mitigate the risks that we've seen all around the world.

[00:46:43] So yeah, the women's game is, uh, and we're gonna, we're gonna do a bigger, deeper report on this, hopefully, but I think it is a critical aspect of work on fifa given how intrinsically progressive, a lot of the figures within the women's game are. Perhaps it's a place where we can apply some good pressure on them.

[00:46:59] Ben: Yes. And obviously the embodiment of. Issues that you're discussing obviously happened in the final of the last Women's World Cup with Ruby kissing Jennifer Herso, and it's, it's a funny thing 'cause as you kind of phrase, it's like that's not necessarily FIFA's fault. But it is another example of another high ranking football official, uh, or person in, within football abusing their position of power.

[00:47:22] And yeah, it just seems to, it, it seems to be this weird balance between like, how do you isolate the culture of competitiveness? I. And hard work and intensity from all the other things that just don't need to be there. And I think as you discussed, it would almost seem like not an easy win because I do think these problems are hard to solve, but if it could be solved, like a big win for fifa, like that would just be an obvious positive thing that they could solve.

[00:47:47] Whereas I always think that sometimes there things are under like environmental sustainability, I don't think they can really solve because their business model's so grand, but surely even with a profit within a profitable business model, they can solve some of these, these issues. Exactly.

[00:47:59] Nick: Yeah. I mean this, I mean, like you say, it's really difficult.

[00:48:02] Safeguarding is tough, and all you can do is put in place mechanisms to mitigate risk. You can't eliminate risk, but the types of money you're talking about are not vast. And yeah, the Ruby Alice thing is really interesting because again, I think what it speaks to is like, it's the culture within football.

[00:48:18] How did a man like that get to that position? That's the issue. Now, ultimately in that case, they took some action, but only because of the outcry. Only because everyone was utterly appalled that he would commit this assault in full view of all the cameras and seemingly unaware that what he was doing wasn't assault.

[00:48:38] Yeah. He's a sort of embodiment of this sort of toxic male culture that that prevails in football administration.

[00:48:46] Ben: Yes. So after all of that said, let's try and end with some kind of. Positive note. And I think you kind of offer that because the final chapter in the report is a positive vision for fifa.

[00:48:57] What are the, what are the key takeaways from that positive vision, and what are the things that you hope FIFA would do take from your, from your hard

[00:49:04] Nick: work? Well, the thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to accept that football should be this badly governed. External regulation is possible.

[00:49:15] The most obvious example is the, or the most obvious avenue is the European Union. The European Union could act to regulate sport in the same way it has acted to regulate big tech, Facebook and Google and all those organizations. Those are not headquartered in Europe. They're headquartered in the United States, and yet the European Union is able to basically impose regulation, impose standards that they have to follow, otherwise they cannot access the European market.

[00:49:39] And the same could be true of sport. So we did a short policy brief actually before we outlined, before we released the main report actually explaining how the EU could act, what it could do, and the legal basis for that. So it's very clear that exists. What needs to happen is we need to convince policy makers that sport is too important to be ungoverned, essentially, and that they need to bring their regulatory skills, capacity to bear on sport.

[00:50:04] And FIFA's the best example or the example of an organization most in need of that regulation. I. The benefits would be, I mean, the benefits, you don't want to get all overly optimistic about things because that can, uh, yeah, that never ends too well. But can you, for example, can you imagine a situation where a World Cup bidding process actually involve contribution to the countries involved, actually involve going to a developing country and saying, give us a plan, give us a sustainable plan as to how you're going.

[00:50:39] To run this tournament, how it's going to benefit your population, not your construction companies, but the sections of your community and your society that are most in need of development. And what we are gonna do is we're gonna look at these plans, we're gonna bring in our own. Geographers and we're gonna bring our in our own sociologists, and we're gonna bring in our own public health experts.

[00:50:59] We're gonna give you some advice on this. Then we're gonna take some of the broadcasting and sponsoring revenue that we've got from this. We're actually gonna give it to you. We're gonna keep it all for ourselves. We're gonna give it to you. Why is that not possible? Why can we not have sport run like that?

[00:51:13] Um. That to me is just one example. The women's game could be developed in a way that is not just profit oriented. Again, it is devoted to and aimed at ensuring maximum participation of women and girls, competitive integrity in European football. Why do we not have a system whereby. We're redistributing money to clubs that need it most, rather than allowing this elite band of clubs to, to hoard all the wealth for themselves.

[00:51:42] Of course, that speaks to U effort. U effort is in many senses, almost as problematic as fifa. In fact, some people you speak to would say it's more problematic. All of these things are possible. Ticket pricing, the list goes on and on. Fan ownership of football clubs like you have in Germany. That should be mandatory in my opinion, and well governed football would make it mandatory so.

[00:52:01] If policy makers and football fans can get their act together and, and policy makers are usually football fans, so there's a lot of crossover. Then I think we could make advances in the world of football that that is far more difficult to make generally, right, like sport relies on. Redistribution and equality and fairness in a way that, in a way that unfortunately it's, it can be harder to make the case in other domains, whereas in sport, I think the case can be made quite clearly in the fact that we are allowing sport to come under the influence of authoritarianism could ultimately and irreparably damage the sport.

[00:52:41] So that's, I guess where, where some optimism comes from.

[00:52:44] Ben: Yes. I always think it's so sad that sport, because sport is so good, it is so exploitable and like you, you have so much leeway, so much slack to dig into because people's love of it is so strong that it just takes so much to break people's resolve on that.

[00:52:59] But at the same time, I think that's where the motivation. Maybe for your work, for my podcast and so many others comes from is that we want to protect this core that is inherently good because all of the stuff that happens, it seems to be happening on the outside, is getting increasingly bad. And yeah, as you say, it doesn't have to be this way.

[00:53:16] But on that note, Nick, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your hard work to you and to your colleagues at FairSquare. And yeah, I encourage anyone who hasn't read the report in full to give it a read 'cause it's, it's fantastic.

[00:53:26] Nick: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.