When organised corruption hardens into something resembling an international labour constitution
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
FIFA’s mistakes can no longer be dismissed as a string of unfortunate accidents or the personal failings of a few officials.
What we see instead is a recurring structural pattern that has stretched across decades – faces and names changing, yet the machinery remaining intact.
It is an almost complete monopoly over a global sport, built on the stubborn principle of one national federation, one vote, regardless of a country’s size or population, and protected by the near-total absence of independent, transparent external oversight.
This combination turned FIFA, in the words of the US Department of Justice, into a hotbed of corruption that poisoned two entire generations of officials.
In 1974, Brazilian João Havelange was elected FIFA president. His era is remembered for the sport’s explosive global expansion and its aggressive commercialisation.
While competitions like the Champions League, the Copa Libertadores, the English Premier League, and the Spanish and Italian leagues created fertile ground for brands and betting in a market of hundreds of millions of viewers, Havelange accelerated the process of turning football into pure commodity.
Membership swelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia. The World Cup expanded from 16 teams to 24 for Spain 1982, then to 32 for France 1998.
That same year, German businessman Horst Dassler, son of Adi Dassler, founder of Adidas, convinced Havelange of the need to court major brands for advertising.
Loyalty was purchased generously. Soon Dassler founded the sports marketing company ISL in partnership with Japan’s Dentsu, and the long series of corruption scandals began in earnest.
In 2001, ISL collapsed under roughly $300 million in debt after securing the European and American broadcasting rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.
Swiss criminal police uncovered a systematic pattern of bribes paid to FIFA officials in exchange for lucrative contracts.
Havelange himself was implicated, having received 1.5 million Swiss francs in 1997.
Ricardo Teixeira, then president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (and Havelange’s son-in-law), took 12.74 million francs between 1992 and 1997. Nicolás Leoz, president of the South American confederation, was shown to have accepted money and commissions from 1992 to 2000.
What remains most startling is that FIFA itself negotiated a settlement with Swiss prosecutors, agreeing to return 5.5 million francs so the entire criminal file could be closed.
At the time, commercial bribery between private parties was not even a crime under Swiss law.
The controversy forced Havelange, at 96, to resign his honorary presidency in 2013. He was succeeded by Joseph “Sepp” Blatter who had served as his secretary-general and won the presidency in 1998.
A darker, more intricate chapter opened. Allegations quickly spread that cash envelopes had been distributed to African confederation representatives before Blatter’s first election to secure their votes.
FIFA appeared to have woven tight, opaque networks with Swiss regulators that repeatedly shielded it from scrutiny.
In 2002, 11 members of the executive committee filed criminal complaints against Blatter for mismanagement and misuse of funds.
The Swiss prosecution dropped the case for lack of evidence, and Blatter was re-elected the same year without further accountability.
He continued to dodge every charge for years, eventually claiming a fifth term in 2015. Four days after that victory he resigned.
The hidden reason was a financial scandal: Blatter had paid UEFA president Michel Platini 2 million Swiss francs, claiming it was compensation for consulting work performed between 1999 and 2002.
There was no written contract and no corresponding entry in FIFA’s accounts at the time the payments should have been made.
Yet the most unsettling revelation may be the one published by Forbes under the title “The World Cup of Crime”.
It reported that bets on the 2026 tournament are expected to exceed half a trillion dollars, specifically $593 billion, with regulated markets capturing only 31 per cent while the unregulated, undeclared market takes 69 per cent, or roughly $409 billion.
Hosting the tournament across three countries means three different legal regimes for gambling; the US alone has 31 states that permit sports betting.
In countries with stricter rules, citizens simply migrate online – through Instagram, Facebook, Google apps – to illegal operators ready to satisfy the urge to wager on every match.
Stranger still, FIFA has, for the first time, licensed live broadcast rights to commercial betting brands and legal applications, allowing fans to watch and place bets inside the same platform.
Influencers and content creators have been recruited by bookmakers to pull new victims into the vortex.
This is all why three questions continue to linger, honest and uncomfortable:
Is football truly cursed?
Or did the marriage of advertising and global spectacle simply open a door to international corruption that no one has ever managed to close?
And do the World Cups we watch still reflect honest competitions at the highest level?
By Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
