Corruption In FIFA

1. Introduction

Corruption in FIFA has a very long history of bribery and money laundering but it was never taken seriously until last year when a large number of FIFA officials were arrested over corruption scandal. When in May 2011 president Sepp Blatter was asked about the crisis in FIFA he sarcastically answered “Crisis? What crisis? We are only in some difficulties.”, four years later in December 2015 FIFA independent ethics committee banned him from all FIFA related activities for 8 years (it was reduced to 6 years in February 2016).

In this paper we will start with a history about football and FIFA which is the international governing body of association football showing how it transformed from being a sport intended to bring health

History

Evidence shows that modern day football was started in Britain. The first international match was played between England and Scotland in 30 November 1872 even though Scotland did not have an association, however football was spread around the world quickly.

FIFA was founded in Paris in May 1904 and it had seven founder members: France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain (represented by Madrid FC), Sweden and Switzerland. Now after a century FIFA has 211 members and football is the number one sport in the world without any doubt.

FIFA was originally founded in order to organize competitions and tournaments such as world cup to further spread the game globally. One positive impact of such competitions was bringing together different nations and cultures from all continents. Currently FIFA consists of six confederations which are responsible for the game inside their respective continent:

• AFC (Asian football Confederation) - 46 members

• CAF (Confederation of African football) – 54 members

• CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) – 35 members

• CONMEBOL (Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol) – 10 members

• OFC (Oceania Football Confederation) – 11

It issues the code of ethics back in 2004 but only after 11 years the ethics committee has taken some sort of serious actions towards the people who were involved in corruption and misbehavior scandals which shows that it was easily violated or ignored in order to gain personal benefits or achieve business objectives. Mr. Blatter was re-elected as president twice in this 11 years despite facing numerous scandals. This should bring enterprise’s attention to the fact that they should be vigilant against a culture that allows executives or employees to bend the rules for their personal benefits through rationalizing the unethical actions. The policies must be enforced consistently in order to achieve this