This week, the soccer world was shaken to its foundations by the arrest of top officials of FIFA on U.S. corruption charges. This was the Obama administration’s doing — at long last, Obama has made a foreign policy decision that is both popular and sound.
FIFA is the governing body of international soccer, best known for putting on the world’s largest sporting event every four years – the prestigious World Cup. The charges allege what many have long suspected – that FIFA officials invite bribery bidding-wars in order to determine where games are held, who gets to televise them and nearly any other imaginable decision FIFA makes.
The pretext for U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s prosecutorial intervention in international soccer is the use of the American financial system and occasional travel by its perpetrators. This is admittedly a flimsy connection, even if it suffices in legal terms. It must also be uncomfortable for at least some Americans to watch their government persist in its bad habit of fixing the rest of the world’s problems.
Yet it is a relief to know that this action will do some good without any bloodshed. What’s more, Europe’s response so far has been one of gratitude rather than the usual disdain. Very few ostensibly intelligent people are buying into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s contention that this is some sort of American diplomatic power play.
“International soccer has lived in a corrupt ecosystem for the last two decades,” declared the editorial page of Madrid’s El País in a scathing missive calling on FIFA’s president to step aside.
“Thank goodness, is my reaction,” writes John Gapper of the London-basedFinancial Times. “The tradition of U.S. law enforcers and courts reaching overseas to get their men and women often irritates. Yet in FIFA’s case, and in its broader crackdowns on corruption, the U.S. is correct.”
It is especially important to consider FIFA’s corruption in light of its probable consequences. There is no mention in the indictments of the selection of Russia or Qatar, the respective hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. But Qatar’s climate — arguably too hot for soccer even in wintertime — is so completely inappropriate for the sport that it is hard to believe it was chosen by honest means when other, more appropriate sites — including South Africa 2010 — were allegedly chosen on the basis of bribery.
Far more important than the weather is the human sacrifices that have been going on in Qatar in the name of building the stadiums and other facilities for the tournament. The Guardian reported in December that Nepalese, Sri Lankan and Indian workers — who labor under slave conditions and have their passports confiscated — had been dying at a rate of one every two days. Just this month, Qatar’s government arrested and detained a BBC news crew attempting to report on the condition of the migrant workers.
Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution specifically empowers Congress to “punish…offenses against the law of nations.” With most European governments unwilling to dirty their hands, who better than the world’s old standby and a people far less invested in the world of international soccer? Somebody’s got to do it.
