This looks like it's slowly improving though.
FIFA is a bunch of corrupt crooks, and while some individuals have been shown the door when the amount of corruption became too large, the institution itself has done nothing to prevent corruption.
[1]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei...
While I also don’t love that idea there is a BIG difference between making more money for the organization FIFA and profiting from it vs direct corruption. Ie taking bribes from Qatar
FIFA the org doesn't need more money, any extra they get will get pocketed with intra-org admin, where the jobs are also doled out as favours.
You might not like it, but it's an entirely separate thing.
(Just like it's silly to call everyone you disagree with politically either a fascist or a communist. They are other bad things, too!)
That was reported here with "Everyone will profit from this (decision)" Infantino quote in some headlines. It's like FIFA is run by the Ferengi... /s
You can't deny that there are serious advantages of a World cup every two years (currently even the best players with long careers can't hope to play more than 4 World Cups - even 17 year old debutants like Bellingham and Pedri, so their chances of winning one are slim; there are many good teams that deserve to win, so giving more options can result in more winners, etc.), and it isn't unprecedented, the AFC and Copa America are already on such a schedule.
With all that load, players rarely have the time to recover from games, that plus the ever rising speed and run distance leads to more injuries, which again the players can't naturally recover from. It's a rat race to the bottom, and the players get ground down only so that advertisers can get more exposure for ads and random dictatorships can whitewash their crimes.
And it's not just the players that can't keep up any more, the fans can't either. Traveling is expensive and annoying, particularly for games during the week (attending a "Montagsspiel" means two days worth of vacation), international travel for the cups means plane tickets and hotel stays and that eats up money really quick.
Furthermore, more competitions and more matches means more opportunities for more players to play a part.
> And it's not just the players that can't keep up any more, the fans can't either. Traveling is expensive and annoying, particularly for games during the week (attending a "Montagsspiel" means two days worth of vacation), international travel for the cups means plane tickets and hotel stays and that eats up money really quick.
Not every fan needs to see every game in a stadium. More games, more chances for more fans to visit. With a World Cup every two years, demand will probably be slightly lower/spread out, meaning more fans overall can go see the games. Not to mention that a World Cup every two years means much more host countries, which can be huge, for local fans and the sport locally. There'd be more shared hosts, hopefully close together. I'd love to see more neighbouring countries host, and i bet many countries and many fans in those countries would love to as well, especially for countries where qualifying to be a part of the thing isn't always an option.
In reality, coaches are under pressure to always put up an A-level selection. For the FC Bayern, that means Manuel Neuer between the goalposts no matter if the opponent is FC Chelsea or Greuther Fürth (the current bottom of the Bundesliga). The only scenarios outside of regulars being injured where coaches are fine to experiment with B/C level players are friendlies, training matches and irrelevant games (UEFA CL group phase, when the result of the last game does not matter).
> Not to mention that a World Cup every two years means much more host countries, which can be huge, for local fans and the sport locally.
Unfortunately, a World Cup requires large, expensive stadiums - billions of dollars, usually borne by the tax payers. In countries like the US or most of Europe, it is economically feasible to either use existing stadiums or build new ones (like Germany did) that get used for decades afterwards. In countries without a large (!) football fan community, these will all either rot or cause massive financial losses for their upkeep - like what happened in Brazil and South Africa [1] or Russia [2]. Qatar will likely be even worse, they already plan on one of the stadiums being torn down directly after the World Cup [3].
Not to mention the supporting infrastructure (public transport, hotels, press venues, roads) - if the stadiums aren't used to capacity, that's a lot of waste there too.
> I'd love to see more neighbouring countries host
That only spreads the expense, but the waste will be the same. A World Cup (and for that matter, also Olympic Games) only make sense in countries that can use the infrastructure at the designed scale for decades.
[1]: https://www.musikexpress.de/millionen-projekte-was-aus-den-w...
[2]: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/sport/fussball-wm/hohe-kosten-ka...
[3]: https://www.stern.de/sport/fussball/wm-2022-in-katar--neugeb...
Especially given the current de-globalization and nationalist sentiments in politics and the importance of football for politics as "panem et circenses", I expect anti-trust and even confiscation-scale action against oil sheik and Russian mob owners, should they attempt such a radical transformation of how football is played.
At least there would be less corruption in the match played in Singapore..
That might be greedy, but it's not a sign of corruption in itself.
There's plenty of real corruption in FIFA to choose from.
Every world cup assignment of the last decades was loaded with corruption charges - including, to my shame as German, the 2006 World Cup.
More World Cups, more opportunities for grift and corruption. Not to mention that there aren't many stable democracies left willing to host World Cups, there's a reason why Qatar and Russia ended up hosting 2018/2022.
Nah, stable places are totally willing to host, if it was offered to them. They are just not willing to bid as high as Qatar and Russia were. (Where bidding is informal, basically how much bribery you were willing to do.)
> Every world cup assignment of the last decades was loaded with corruption charges - including, to my shame as German, the 2006 World Cup.
I can believe that. But the amount of money in bribes is still relatively trivial compared to the total amount they make from the World Cup.
(In general, what's so infuriating about bribes and corruption is how low the stakes are. If someone is willing to sell out their country for a few billion Euros, I wouldn't be mad. But have a look at eg the paltry sums that changed hands in the CDU-Spendenaffäre. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU-Spendenaff%C3%A4re They are talking about mere millions.
Compare also https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in... )