For all those years that the rest of the world has laughed good-naturedly at the United States about the Beautiful Game, the last two weeks have provided good payback for Americans. Yes, we Europeans may know that the teams wear shirts not uniforms, studs not cleats, play extra time not overtime, run around on a pitch not a field, and most importantly of all, are playing “football” not “soccer”–but then Americans understand that the game can’t be run by clowns such as Sepp Blatter and seem prepared to use their legal system to root out the corruption and grafting that is rife within FIFA, the sport’s governing authority. So I guess we’re even.
Now, after the Justice Department and prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York announced a sweeping indictment against 14 soccer officials and marketing executives we smile affectionately at any “soccer” moments, such as the one revealed in the relevant court transcripts. “I don’t know how you pronounce it,” the presiding judge, Raymond Dearie, asked innocently, “Fifa…”.
Clearly there are many reasons behind the FBI indictments, including that the new U.S. Attorney-General, Loretta E. Lynch, was able to use an investigation she had previously led as chief prosecutor in Brooklyn to notch a career-defining, global frontpage success story barely a month into her new job. (Contestants on “Jeopardy” recently showed they had no idea who Lynch is, despite her making history as the first African-American woman ever to hold the post, so obviously she needs to up her profile). Nevertheless, the indictments also tell us something about the way in which the United States exerts its power on the global stage, and how that power is experienced by the rest of the world, particularly by many countries outside the West. Three elements stand out.
First, the FIFA indictments followed a well-worn Anglo-American path. The initial leg work on corruption in the governing body was carried out by a British journalist, Andrew Jennings (profiled here). For more than fifteen years he obsessively investigated Blatter and FIFA, producing a book, FOUL! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals, and a damning BBC documentary, “Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s Fifa Organized Crime Family.” Eventually the FBI’s organized crime squad came calling. “I said, ‘Right let’s just level the playing field a bit’,” Jennings told the Washington Post, “And I gave them the documents that really got this going.” This sharing of research may not be at the wartime significance of Britain giving the U.S. the cavity magnetron or sending the report showing that fast fission in uranium could produce an atomic bomb, but the principle is essentially the same. When Britain has a good idea, it often needs American clout and resources to turn research into action.
Second, the nature of the bust on FIFA tells us something important about how the United States sees the world. It is axiomatic that the U.S. takes a harder stance on financial crime than most nations. Those convicted in the U.S. of “white collar” crimes such as insider trading or manipulating the market often find themselves serving long sentences alongside inmates who are murderers and violent offenders. Moreover, the reach of the American justice system is long, as many FIFA officials tucked up in their Zurich hotel beds recently found to their cost.
Again, football may not be on a par with questions of war and peace, but the instincts behind the move against FIFA is consistent with the principles that have underpinned much of American foreign policy for the past century. Whether it’s President Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, or Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and the United Nations and the World Bank, the United States has consistently attempted to institutionalize the rules of the international game. This global governance is usually dressed up behind high minded rhetoric about freedom, but the reality is often as much about protecting America’s right to trade freely as the right of others to speak freely. The U.S. has consistently and ruthlessly sought to bust open all markets, much as it did to the British empire after both the first and the second world wars.
FIFA may be relatively small beer in the global financial scheme of things, but the impact of football as a brand gives this governing body a value far above its price. Let the word go forth, and all that—the United States will come after you for corruption committed when using the U.S. dollar or U.S. institutions. Coming from the holder of the world’s reserve currency this is a powerful reinforcement of a longstanding message: that the United States will not tolerate those who seek to thwart American companies competing in markets where bribes and sweeteners can be the norm.
Third, and easy to forget, not everyone is happy at America exerting its hegemonic authority over the world’s favorite sport. In the 1990s, a BBC soccer news/satire show called Fantasy Football League used to run a feature called “Old Football was Rubbish.” They had a point. Until the mid–1970s, the sport was run by well-meaning amateurs such as Sir Stanley Rous, who were quite happy to keep the game for the traditional footballing powers in Europe and South America. At the 1966 World Cup, hosted by England, the Asian and African champions had to play off for a single spot at the finals. When Rous was replaced in 1974 by João Havelange, the new president set about modernizing FIFA exploiting the hopelessly underutilized commercial potential of the game by developing what has become the model for contemporary sports sponsorship and TV rights. Havelange’s egalitarianism saw FIFA dividing its new wealth among the many, doubling the size of the World Cup Finals to make it a truly global competition, and sharing the profits even with countries that had no chance of progressing through the early stages of the competition. No wonder these “new” football countries were grateful.
The globalization of the game was continued by Havelange’s protege and successor, Sepp Blatter, who gave the World Cup Finals to the United States, South Africa and, infamously, Qatar. FIFA officials are alleged to have taken bungs to ease them along the path to giving the World Cup to Qatar, but no-one could say that giving the finals to a country in the Middle East was not consistent with a clear strategy to make the game truly global. That momentum helps explain why, just two days after FIFA executives were arrested in Zurich, Blatter was comfortably reelected as president of the organization. In the end he fell on his own sword, but his Praetorian Guard mostly stayed loyal to the end.
So not everyone is glad to see the U.S. Cavalry riding over the hill to save the beautiful game. For many it smacks of economic imperialism—the world’s leading power clearing the way for its own commercial and trading interests. But those national football associations guilty of corrupt practices are now hoist by their own petard. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,” George Orwell famously reminds us, “It is war minus the shooting.’’