'FIFA Uncovered' reveals the scale of corruption which engulfed football's governing body
Lauren McCann
“FIFA Uncovered” finally dropped on Netflix last week, just eleven days before the start of one of the governing body’s most controversial World Cup tournaments which is about to get underway in Qatar.
This four-part Netflix series certainly lived up to its billing as it laid bare just how deep-rooted and ingrained corruption is and may continue to be in FIFA’S culture. The football governing body is run, as one journalist put it as a '“mafia style organisation”.
The series shows how FIFA has always been susceptible to corruption from its inception as well as portraying the various internal power struggles and global politics at play between executive committee members (a very elite group of football like self-appointed politicians) in the run up to the awarding of the 2018 and more controversially the 2022 World Cup to Russia and Qatar.
It then concludes with the subsequent backlash of those deals, the FBI’s involvement in taking down the main guilty parties in a huge anti-corruption operation, Sepp Blatter’s decision to finally step down after being embroiled in his own scandal, and how new President Gianni Infantino aims to transform the governing body’s fortunes.
It does so through a host of different lenses. From authors who have written extensively on the topic, to former players, bid leaders, advisors to FIFA as well as the main players in the organisation itself including the one and only disgraced former President Sepp Blatter.
FIFA has a history of awarding the World Cup to countries keen to clean up their image.
The first episode takes us through a brief history of FIFA, portraying how the organisation has a history with dodgy dealings in terms of awarding hosting rights to countries seeking sportswashing (using sport as a way to improve a country’s unfavourable reputation).
Examples are clear in the 1938 World Cup being awarded to Germany when Hitler was in power, the 1978 World Cup going to Argentina, who were under a dictatorship and the 1982 World Cup being played in Spain, a country keen to enhance its reputation after Franco’s reign.
Then much of the rest of the episode and the series, as is the case with FIFA’s history, centres around Blatter, and below that members of the FIFA executive committee from across the world, who were mainly in it to get rich, not improve the football in their own country.
It conveys Blatter’s rise from young protegee to dictator of a corrupt organisation. He exploits FIFA, converting it from a nonprofit organisation with the aim of improving football around the globe to a multibillion-dollar business with the World Cup the prized asset which can be bought if the price is right by any country, irrespective of the strength of their bid.
After joining the organisation as second in command to Brazilian Joao Havelange, Blatter got to work swiftly, striking up FIFA’s first commerical deals with Coca-Cola and Adidas, which continue to the present day.
When he uncovered that Havelange had been taking a handsome sum of the money generated from Adidas owner Horst Dassler’s company International Sport and Leisure, which managed FIFA’s broadcast rights, Blatter manages to blackmail the President to get him to step down in 1998.
He will be in charge of the organisation until 2015, making plenty of friends and enemies in that time as well as baring a lot of justified criticism for his handling of World Cup bidding rights.
Three in Blatter’s era are highlighted as being wrongly awarded to the host. The first was the 2010 World Cup held in South Africa. Blatter spoke of his determination to bring a World Cup to Africa in many of his different re-election campaigns, but it was a $10 million bribe from South Africa to Jack Warner, (head of football for FIFA in the Carribean) to secure the numerous votes from the region which got the country over the line.
Warner was given the money to help improve football in the region, but like many of the greedy businessmen involved in FIFA, took it all for himself. Blatter survived the subsequent storm, but a hurricane would follow when he decided that for broadcasting rights purposes, the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts would be announced at the same time.
Russia winning the right to host the World Cup understandably wasn’t covered in as much detail as Qatar, although it was noted that it had been used for sportwashing purposes by Vladimir Putin.
With the 2022 World Cup on the horizon, the second and third episode focus on the Qatar World Cup, and how their bid didn’t match up with other candidates, in terms criteria. Problems included the temperature and infrastructure in a footballing sense as well as in a transportation and hospitality sense, as well as exploring in detail depth the human rights and LGBTQ+ issues.
Yet, what Qatar did have over their rivals, was readily available large sums of cash to buy votes from executive committee members, which is exactly what they did, targeting the African members with sums of up to $1.5 million each.
Qatar also has lucrative natural resources which helped them enter into geopolitical deals which in turn gained them support from the countries they were involved with such as France, Brazil and Thailand.
In the final two episodes we see how the FBI and US Department of Justice swoop in to take down some of the big hitters (I am unable to do justice to the spiderweb of those involved in the way the series does) and this forces FIFA into appointing an ethics committee which in turn finally is able to suspend Blatter after his own bribery scandal with UEFA’s Michael Platini.
Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup despite the bid from the USA being better organised, and showing the country was better organised to host a tournament of this magnitude.
The ‘excess’ which surrounded FIFA, including flashy lifestyles and tax evasion appear to be at an end. Only one man from the disgraced 22-man executive committee from Blatter’s reign remains today.
There is an appetite for change and for those in charge at FIFA to return to their main remit, improving the game worldwide, and briging the World Cup to countries worthy of hosting it.
Tasked with picking up the pieces since 2015 is former UEFA General Secretary Gianni Infantino, who ran in the absence of Platini and has remained ever since.
Although he appears squeaky clean thus far, we are reminded that he did backstab Platini to get into this position and appears to be of a similar ilk to Blatter, in that he was in the right place at the right time and is in the job for personal gain.
At the end Blatter, who was never convicted of any crimes, but was banned by FIFA from all footballing activity until 2028, refuses to take responsibility for the actions of others below him, despite being at the helm and acting as a dictator in this rotten organisation. He appears to insist he has unfinished business in football and will look to return to the sport when his ban expires in 2028.
There was an interesting quote from the end of the documentary, which summed up the mess FIFA continue to find themselves in. It comes from former worker Guido Tognoni. “If you ask if FIFA can ever get away from corruption, you have to ask if the world can ever get away from corruption,” he says. “No, it can’t. As it is structured now: no. Not possible.”
One thing for certain is Infantino has a huge task on his hands to rebuild the reputation of an organisation, who were for so long put in a chokehold by corruption, and may still be lurking in its murky waters.
Lauren McCann is the Scoop’s Sport Editor and an English and Spanish student at Queen’s University Belfast.