The Not-So-Secret Shame of Sepp Blatter and the FIFA Scandal
Because if there is a bummer at the heart of FIFA gloating and global corruption mockery, it’s Qatar and the trail of money that flows in from points around the globe. Under its kafala system, migrant workers are lured to the country with promises of opportunities to raise a lot of money quickly for the folks back home, then watch as their employers withhold both wages and their passports, denying them the financial and legal means of escape. Labor inspections are sporadic and of dubious authenticity, and workers’ conditions are lethal. Workers live in metal shacks in the desert, die from heat exhaustion and heart failure and are routinely exposed to open sewage. Their working conditions double as crime scenes.
These realities were brought into stark relief again recently, when Qatari “employers” refused to let Nepalese workers on World Cup construction sites return home in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that have killed over 8,000 people in their homeland. But we knew all this before the Nepalese earthquakes. Amnesty International has condemned the kafala system for years. The International Trade Union Confederation describes Qatar as a slave state. And these observations aren’t the exclusive province of human and worker-rights organizations. The Guardian reported on this in 2013. You can find some discussion of Qatar as a modern Metropolis built on sand and bones on almost any halfway serious sports website. SB Nation – home of “Breaking Madden” and “Hatin’ Ass Spurrier” – sent my friend David Roth there in 2013. And as Roth has pointed out, the only part of this story that goes underrepresented in the discourse is the bizarre expense the nation devotes not to redressing its human rights nightmare but to papering over it with imaging, talking points, guided tours and Potemkin villages – every facet of the neoliberal brand correction to create a safe space for investment.
FIFA isn’t even secretive about its interests in places like Qatar. Here’s FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke in 2013, on Russian authoritarianism:
“I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup. When you have a very strong head of state who can decide, as maybe Putin can do in 2018…that is easier for us organizers than a country such as Germany…where you have to negotiate at different levels.”
This blasé approval of a strongman’s efficiency doesn’t even rate a spit take, considering it’s the same realpolitik line trudged out by every Western power trying to secure its economic interests since the dawn of post-colonialism. As my friend Dan O’Sullivan put it, “There was a joke in the mid-nineties among CIA functionaries about how to brief Bill Clinton on the prospect of regime change in Iraq. ‘Mr. President, we cannot definitively predict the identity of Saddam’s successor, but we know his first name: General.'” This is the story of the U.S. in Central America for over a century, the story of post-Suez Crisis Egypt, pre-gassings Syria, and Kissinger in Chile.
When a bloodbath is this profitably routinized on this kind of scale, chances are, someone in the West is paying for its output, and the story of FIFA in Qatar is no different. You don’t rig games and lives like this without a mark and, buddy, we are all in. Granted, the rest of the world gets its cut – which explains the lockstep devotion of Africa to FIFA’s every idea – but we’re the home of the big conglomerates, big marketing and big payroll. UEFA officials and American commentators can huff about boycotts and moral disgust, but FIFA would have cleared out at least a few smoke-filled rooms years ago if they thought the West would stop dropping by the establishment every four years.
The West’s underwriting of FIFA stems from the same impulse as the Steelers fan pointing fingers at Ray Lewis while shielding Ben Roethlisberger (and vice versa) or the Carolina Panthers fan rediscovering the penal code now that Greg Hardy signed with the Cowboys. It’s the same impulse as Anheuser-Busch and fellow advertisers threatening to pull money over Adrian Peterson, the biggest superstar on a go-nowhere Vikings team, while staying silent about the 49ers or Patriots. Sin, venial or mortal, is only worth consideration after we know we can’t win the big game or turn a profit off it. At the drop of a hat, UEFA and North America could organize a North Atlantic Cup, but neither wants to win one. There is no status involved. Nations will pervert themselves as readily and bizarrely as the average fan when potential glory is this storied and this truly global.
There is no joy here, shameful or not, no pure and easy scorn. FIFA greases itself because it knows everyone wants the machine to run, and a global operation spanning the first and third worlds is going to need monstrous levels of baksheesh and blind eyes turned to strongmen. It would take seeing every body on the news for enough fans and consumers to really care about what the machine chews up, and even though we’ll never see them, there’s still a good chance the images wouldn’t even register. The no-brainer about FIFA corruption and the mass death in Qatar is the same no-brainer about everything else in sports: as soon as the competition is big enough and our chances near enough, we throw ours away.