The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (International Federation of Association Football or FIFA) is the overseer of soccer around the world. Two years ago, FIFA was found to have been committing illegal deeds and because of these illegal acts, it has caused them to go through a series of reforms. In this paper, I will be discussing how these reforms will be good for FIFA and the soccer world. To do this, I will need to explain to you how the FIFA’s government worked in the past compared to how it is working now.  It is also important to compare FIFA to a working style of government that is involved in the same sorts of activities as FIFA. In this case, I will be comparing FIFA to FIBA which is the international basketball federation of the world. The new style of government has a lot of critics and most people argue that it will not work, but with the this newly reformed government it has become a lot more like FIBA’s government which has had no problems of corruption in its 70 years as an organization. Thanks to these reforms, FIFA will get its credibility back and be an organization known for good and bringing people together rather than being known for its corrupt activity in the past.

FIFA is the major governing body of soccer and its job is to create rules, regulations, oversee all of soccer, and develop football at the youth level all over the world. Before the reformations, FIFA’s governing body was set up in a three-branch system consisting of the FIFA congress, the executive committee, and the general secretariat. The FIFA congress is the largest branch, consisting of 209 member associations in six confederations. These confederations are located in major soccer regions of the world, such as Europe and Asia. The congress’s job is to approve annual reports, makes decisions regarding the the acceptance of new national associations, and it holds elections for members of the executive committee. The executive committee consist of the president, eight vice presidents, and fifteen other members. They are elected every four years after the world cup. The president is the only member elected by congress even though it is congress whole holds the elections. The other members are voted in by the member associations and confederations that are a part of FIFA. Their job is to be the main decision making body, whether it be about new rules for soccer or figuring out punishments for rule those who break the rules. The general secretariat is the administrative branch and it is made up of 400 members. They are responsible for FIFA’s finances, international relations, the organization of the FIFA world cup, and the organization of other FIFA competitions. FIFA is also composed of several other bodies, all of which are overseen by either congress or the executive body. The job of the six confederations mentioned earlier, is to oversee soccer in the various continents and regions of the world. FIFA may have had all these different bodies, but it was the executive branch, in particularly the president who made all the decisions regarding anything and everything. FIFA’s governing body was supposed to be set up into a representative democracy, but the way it worked out to be is that the executive branch ended up having all the power because they were the only ones making decisions, so you can see from history how this was never going to work out.

FIFA became corrupt due to many issues involving FIFA’s governing body and its officials. In May of 2015, many of FIFA’s officials were arrested for taking bribes, fraud, and money laundering. These officials did this because they were trying to gain marketing, media, and establish locations for the next world cups all while making a little extra money on the side. There are three main reasons why FIFA governing body became corrupt. The first reason is because there was a lack of accountability. FIFA does not directly answer to any country and some consider FIFA to be a monopoly of the soccer world. If a country were to supervise FIFA, they would ban that country’s team from participating the world cup. This enables FIFA to be free to do as this wish and results in there being a lack of accountability in their government. The second reason is that there was a lack of regulation and enforcement. FIFA is technically supervised by Swiss law, but Switzerland has more to lose than to gain by actually supervising FIFA. In other words, Switzerland prefers not to have their soccer team suspended. economists argue that the regulation is a public goods problem. There are two components to public goods: “the first characteristic is that one country’s regulation of FIFA cannot take away from another country’s enjoyment; the second characteristic states that one country’s enjoyment cannot be blocked even if the country does not contribute to the financing of the public good” (Boudreaux). This causes the problem of free riding which are countries who benefit from FIFA for free, which in return gives these countries no incentives to bring forth allegations of FIFA or to help monitor them. This gives FIFA free roam to do whatever they want. The third reason is that member countries have incentives to engage in rent seeking. “Rent seeking is the practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits” (Boudreaux). This is a problem because it allows the elites of a country to benefit from investing taxpayer dollars into rents to make more money for themselves rather than using the taxes to help the communities or grow the economy. The main illegal activity that occur from this are overpricing and accounting irregularities and an example of this is when it happened in the 2014 world cup in Brazil. Rent seeking feeds into FIFA’s corrupt behaviors because this activity provides FIFA with extra money while communities are unable to get the support they need from the upper class and governance. . Besides just corrupt internal fairs with FIFA, there were other issues, such as determining the FIFA world cup locations and violations of human rights from the building of stadiums at these world cup locations. An example of this is with Qatar being selected to host the 2022 world cup. They clearly do not have the resources to build the stadiums. To get these resources Qatar is using what could be considered as slave labor to build these stadiums and most of these laborers probably will not live to see the world cup, and FIFA is allowing this to happen. Another controversial issue was Africa getting the 2010 world cup selection because people felt that FIFA only selected them because they had taken bribes from Africa and in no way was Africa a financially sound enough country to host the world cup. 

Finally, in May of 2015, the United States brought forth allegation against FIFA which have led to the reforms that were made in 2016. 

FIFA has made many reforms after the FIFA Corruption Crisis in hopes of regaining their credibility and maintaining their role as the leader of soccer. From an article written by FIFA, the changes they made include: “clear separation between political and management functions, which the FIFA council (replacing the FIFA Executive committee) is responsible for setting the organizations overall strategic direction, while the general secretariat oversees the operational commercial actions required to effectively execute that strategy; term limits for the FIFA president, FIFA council members and members of the audit and compliance committee, and of the judicial bodies (max. of 12 years); election of council members supervised by FIFA and in accordance with FIFA’s own electoral regulations, all subject to comprehensive eligibility and integrity checks conducted by an independent FIFA Review Committee; greater recognition of women in football with a minimum of one female representative elected as a council member per confederation, promotion of women as an explicit statutory objective of FIFA to create a more diverse decision-making environment and culture; disclosure of individual compensation on an annual basis of the FIFA president, all FIFA council members, the secretary general and relevant chairpersons of independent standing and judicial committees; enhanced control of money flows; universal good governance principles for confederations and member associations; FIFA’s commitment to human rights to be enshrined in the FIFA statutes; and new football stakeholder committee to ensure greater transparency and inclusion through broader stakeholder representation (including players, clubs, and leagues).”  These reforms should make FIFA’s governing body stronger all while improving the game of soccer. This will allow more transparency and accountability in FIFA, and it will also increase the diversity throughout FIFA. FIFA claims that these reforms “will bring back trust to the FIFA organization and provide a strong foundation for soccer to thrive on”.

The reforms FIFA made to its governmental body looks more like FIBA’s governmental body. This is important because FIBA is just like FIFA in the fact that they are both leading organizations in two major world sports. Also, FIBA has never had any problems with its government or had any sort of corruption in the organizations lifetimes, so by FIFA becoming more like FIBA could prove that their reforms will be beneficial to both FIFA’s credibility and to the sport of soccer. FIFA has become a representative democracy which is the style of government that FIBA uses. This will ensure that nobody gets too much power and all the different parts of the governmental body will be able to work together to make correct decisions, come up with rules, or make changes to better the sport and improve the FIFA. Both have regional confederations that watch over their regions and provide the main body with feedback to make changes that can would be voted on to improve the game or to decide on punishments for those who are breaking the rules. Each region is broken up by major location, such as the Asian (in Asia) region or the European region (in Europe). Both organizations utilize a four-year election cycle to ensure nobody gets too powerful and so that there are always opportunities for new people to get into office and spread their ideas to further better the organization and better the future of the sport. 

Even though people can clearly see FIFA is turning itself around, many people argue that the reforms will not work because they believe that FIFA is still only looking out for itself and because they also believe that FIFA is going to struggle enforcing these reforms. In an article written by Ciaran O Raghallaigh, he states, “I don’t expect a football governing body to have a bicameral decision-making process.” This means that he does not believe that it is possible for FIFA’s three-branch governmental system is able to effectively make decisions. It might be harder for FIFA to make governmental decisions, but when they come to a decision, it will at least the correct one because they will have put in more time and effort into analyzing the problems and then figuring out a solution. The three-party government will also enable FIFA to have a system of checks and balances and allow for there to be more accountability and  there will no longer be decisions that could hurt the sport or cause one party to get to powerful which could possibly lead to corruption just like the last time. Another thing that people are critiquing is how FIFA is going to be more transparent with the smaller confederations and member associations when there are so many of them. This is a huge task and FIFA will have to make sure they do background checks on individuals from time to time to make sure they are doing their jobs and not participating in illicit activities. The way that FIFA will do this is by setting up a section of the government where their main job is to look over these confederations and member associations to make sure the individuals in charge are not committing illegal acts.

Bonita Mersiades, the author of the article FIFA Reforms: Easy Pickings, Compromises and Missed Opportunities, argues that “FIFA is only looking out for itself because the reforms they made were easy changes, such as adding more women to the council to have more diversity or by adding an overseeing committee, not part of FIFA, to oversee all of FIFA’s finances”. What FIFA is really trying to do by adding more female members to its organizations, besides just adding more diversity to it, is to expand the role of women in soccer while helping to create more equality between men and women. The oversee committee is supposed to be an independent organization that looks into FIFA’s finances to make sure they are not engaging in corrupt activities, which is much needed after the FIFA corruption crisis. “While the word ‘independent’ is used readily as an adjective in relation to the Audit and Compliance, Finance, Development and Governance committees, the definition of independence is one that is not consistent with normal community standards,” as Roger Pielke points out. “It is possible to earn up to US $125,000 per year from FIFA and related entities, yet still be considered ‘independent’” (Mersiades). This issue of independence causes critics of FIFA’s reforms to be skeptical because if FIFA is paying these “independent” organizations, then what is there to stop these organizations from lying about FIFA’s books so that FIFA can make more money through illegal means, causing FIFA to be a corrupt organization again. This is why FIFA is now disclosing how much money individuals in their organization makes, so that anyone will be able to see if these people are making more money than they should be. This gives individuals the chance to speak up to acknowledge that these individuals are engaged in illegal activities so they can be kicked out of FIFA and punished accordingly. Lastly, Mersiades argues that the reforms are weak, especially related to the requirement of confederations and member associations to change, and the new development committee because they are required to have “at least three independent individuals, but there is no indication of what the total membership is or where they will be drawn from” (Mersiades). It will not be hard for the member associations to change because they are a part of FIFA. As FIFA makes its changes, so do the member associations. This is part of FIFA’s goal in becoming a united front which they call “One FIFA.” These independent individuals will be coming from the country in which the member associations are from and there will not just be three independent individuals. Half of the association will consist of independent individuals to ensure no corruption and further the develop the game at the youth level.

FIFA is a whole new organization without corruption, looking to better the sport of soccer and be a good presence at the top of the sports world. After all the corruption that has been in FIFA, it is amazing how they have been able to turn their organization around so that it is more focused on the soccer community rather than looking out for itself.  Even though there has been much criticism, understandably, most of the world still believes in FIFA and the amount of good it can do. Not only that, the world also seems to be rooting for it, in hopes that the major soccer body will be able to rid soccer’s image of being a tainted sport, but instead become an agent that brings the world together and continues to develop the youth of the world in the greatest way it can, with the greatest sport in the world. With great power comes great responsibility and FIFA now knows that; the future of soccer is looking brighter than it ever has been
