4 June 2015
A Beautiful Game
by J R Thomas
Money, that is, not football. Football may be beautiful too, but it is big business now. The cash flows are immense, not just from ticket sales, though seats are becoming pretty breathtakingly expensive for Premier league or national games. Sales of branded goods (what used to be called souvenirs) also grow ever more expensive and sophisticated; not team posters now, but replica kits and footballs which change every season. The bigger money is from the television rights, in the West mostly controlled by Sky Television, so that most top matches are premium pay to view; and from sponsorship, the vast sums paid by commercial companies for advertising and branding rights connected (some directly, some obscurely) to the game. All that adds up to lots of money.
And the greatest money tree is Fifa, the international Swiss-based organisation which controls the World Cup, an enormous four-yearly jamboree. Until Tuesday this week, at the very top of that money tree sat Sepp Blatter, the Swiss national who for eighteen years has ruled Fifa in a style that would be admired by any aspiring dictator. Mr Blatter was an unlikely man to head up an athletic grouping, a 79 year old professional bureaucrat with a tendency to verbosity, but with an iron grip on his soccer quasi-quango.
Practically every country in the world has a national football team and they are all members of Fifa. Most hope to field their teams in the World Cup and many to host it at some point. It seems an odd ambition, given the cost and chaos caused by this type of event, but, like the Olympics, the collateral benefits can be enormous: huge revenue from the fans, the players and the officials who stay and spend; massive free advertising exposure for future tourism; lots of sponsorship and assistance for new facilities; and, most of all, prestige.
The next World Cup is in Russia in 2018, a wonderful opportunity for Mr Putin to schmooze and entertain world leaders, and to showcase the new, powerful, resurgent Russia.
The one after that is in Qatar in 2022. Qatar has taken this very seriously indeed. This Gulf state has become a very rich one, with enormous reserves of cheaply extracted natural gas and oil. That wealth has been thoughtfully deployed. Qatar has become one of the greatest business investors in the West, in particular in real estate. But the Al Thani royal family has greater ambitions – to be seen as a new, highly civilised, moderate Islamic state, an example to its neighbours. It is building magnificent facilities in health care, medical research, technology and communications. The Al Thani’s are also becoming great connoisseurs of the arts, building fine modern architectural landmarks and buying a selection of western art which will soon be one of the finest (and most expensive) collections in the world. The 2022 World Cup is a key further strand in this presentation of modern Qatar to the world, though perhaps a surprising one given that the country has no football tradition to speak of and hardly any sports facilities. It is having to build all the World Cup facilities from scratch, and given the amount of construction required is already building at a great pace.
Qatar’s known eagerness to win has caused great controversy since the Fifa secret ballot awarded the tournament to them. Allegations that brown envelopes had played a role in the voting arose immediately, and it is that that has led to the far-reaching investigation by the FBI and the resignations over the last couple of years of several Fifa senior delegates, who are at various stages of being charged with corrupt activities.
Nobody, though, has yet been convicted of any serious offence. You might not think this, from reading various remarks made by (mostly Western) pundits such as Greg Dyke, former TV executive, who heads the England Football Association, and indeed by the Duke of Cambridge, who was heavily involved with England’s bid to host the World Cup in 2018 or 2022. The Prince may learn useful lessons in this about royal discretion. England won no support at all from the Fifa board for its bid, and the UK and USA’s enthusiasm for the corruption hunt currently going on looks to a lot of third world football groupies like sour grapes.
Dyke and the European football association, UEFA, have threatened to pull the European participants out of the 2018 Cup unless Fifa is reformed. That may look like a principled and high-minded approach to matters on their side of the megaphone diplomacy which is going on (it might have looked even more so had England not offered again to host the Cup, or Cup substitute), but to the second and third world countries which make up a majority of Fifa board members it looks a bit like late colonialism on the football field. To Russia and even more so, Qatar, both sensitive to slights and heavily committed to building massive new facilities, it looks downright insulting.
Mr Blatter lasted 18 years in his job because he had considerable diplomatic skills and had carefully built a strong following among the non-European members of Fifa. An unlikely champion of third world rights, maybe, but one cherished by the constituency of such nations. If it emerges that some of this may be based on what some might call unauthorised cash movements, that is not regarded with such horror in some parts of the world as in the West. The role of the USA as world policeman and moral councillor may be worthy, but it is not always appreciated.
It is quite possible that with Mr Blatter’s exit there will be somewhat of a backlash among the Fifa delegates and that the next president will also not be a friend of western politics or football. It might behove western politicians, football leaders, journalists, and even princes, to consider the wider modern world and more subtle diplomatic approaches to achieving their objectives, even on the fields of beauty.
