FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges; Face Extradition to U.S
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It will be interesting to see if the World Cup will be moved now; it never made sense to have it in Qatar in the first place (no infrastructure, incredibly hot during the summer, hundreds of migrant workers dying and injured because of the insane conditions they're working under to prepare the stadiums. It's really, really messed up.
I've never seen /r/soccer so happy about anything - this news has 99%+ upvotes.
> There's no way Blatter gets through this unscathed
As someone pointed out on Twitter, "oh look, the only people left to vote on Friday are Blatter-friendly".
Can't believe Blatter and his cronies would be so stupid, but perhaps some of the weaker and greedier executives were, so Blatter is happy to serve them up?
Well, the "end" is hard to assess. What has happened so far is a series of investigations begun and dropped over various sex-related crimes until the current set for "aggravated pimping" for which he was tried this past February with the verdict to be read in June.
The bribery charges aren't about payments to FIFA, they are about payments (for instance) that constitute fraud against FIFA (and various other subordinate soccer organizations, among others) as an organization. [0] In some cases, these are frauds that were being investigated when the relevant officials resigned from FIFA (ending the FIFA investigations, but not retroactively negating the fraud.)
While organizations current executives may have power over the organization, they aren't legally indistinguishable from the organization.
> Can't believe Blatter and his cronies would be so stupid
Its not uncommon for powerful people with a tendency to corruption to be, or become after years of smaller transgressions not seeming to have consequences, arrogant enough to commit major transgressions that authorities are willing and able to prosecute.
[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2088...
I truly hope that Blatter is ousted, the Qatar decision is reversed and given to a nation that with a less-appalling human rights record and some actual interest in football. I can't name a single Qatari club or player and know nothing of their league (other than Gabriel Batistuta played there for a year at the end of his career), and I'd consider myself to be someone who knowns a fair bit about football.
Not "some of those built in Portugal in 2004" but actually most of them are currently being used way below capacity. And some of them are actually causing financial problems for the local governments, as the stadiums generate little to no revenue and the maintenance costs are huge.
But everyone involved in getting them built, apart from the guys laying down the bricks, profited hugely from this absurd and pharaonic decision, and the taxpayers didn't really complain properly (and still don't).
These are not profit making events to host, or at least they ought not to be. The benefits are varied and certainly not trivially reducible to profit/loss on the event itself.
http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/ghosts-of-olympics-past?...
http://www.businessinsider.com/sochi-olympics-ghost-city-201...
http://distractify.com/culture/sports/haunting-images-of-aba...
Not really. While there might be some cases where some of the infrastructure is something where the operating/maintenance costs would be justified but which didn't get built because of the up-front capital costs, and where hosting a special event which happened to need the same infrastructure might provide an excuse (or an otherwise-unavailable source of funding) for the capital costs, that's rather exceptional. Normally, the most of the infrastructure needed for the event consists of things for which the operations/maintenance costs would not be justified once the event is over.
- Sea to Sky Highway went from being a ridiculously dangerous road between Vancouver and Whistler to being a pretty good road (still twisty, but there's only so much that can be done about that), and sorely needed these improvements for many, many years without budget for it.
- Canada Line also received a whole bunch of federal money to get built, probably bringing it ahead of schedule by many years. An airport transit line was badly needed in Vancouver, especially with $40 cab rides to downtown.
- BC Place's renovations got a major budget boost from the Olympics, allowing it to be turned into a great venue. The pressurized roof was a huge annoyance (air locks, yay! /s) and collapsed on several occasions, so the new retractable roof probably wouldn't have happened without the Olympic money.
- Cypress Mountain finally got off their ass and built a proper lodge with proper facilities to support the Olympics.
Vancouver also reused a lot of existing stadiums and infrastructure, opting to upgrade rather than build from scratch. It was honestly an example of a really, really well executed Olympics with a lasting legacy. There have been complainers the entire time, but honestly, it made Vancouver a better city. Closing of Granville for theentirety of the games also allowed the city to experiment with closing off city blocks for events, and that now has become a yearly tradition (along with Robson St). On a more sentimental note, it brought the country together in a unified passion which I had not seen before and have not seen since. It was truly a spectacular experience. I like rewatching the closing comments on CTV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX_dndXEGHI) as well as Stephen Brunt's video essay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz8tzP3oeDg) every so often to remember that.
Even London 2012 was a great example – reusing infrastructure, upgrading it, etc is a good way to do it.
Another good idea: One of the recent UEFA cups was hosted by two countries together (actually, several of them were). Which is another good idea, several less developed countries working together to still get the profit off of the games, but sharing the costs.
Now let's talk about the "DEVELOPING COUNTRIES"... what good examples do you have?
In fact, the 'legacy' of the Games was one of its main themes[1]. A ton of money was spent redeveloping Stratford, the area surrounding the Olympic Park, and the site itself has been converted into a park. Lots of the venues were temporary, and the major ones - e.g. aquatics, velodrome - are still being used. Many of the venues were also designed with conversion in mind - the aquatics centre was downsized, the stadium is being taken over by a football club. I think a lot of past problems stem from massively oversized venues that nobody can use afterwards, so hopefully that will be avoided.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_the_2012_Summer_Olymp...
And yet FIFA insists on a bunch of expensive stadiums each time.
Of course, they can easily demand mad money for entry tickets this way.
Probably easier to build new ones than adapt old (cf the demolition and reconstruction of Wembley to fix these and other issues.)
3 of the 10 stadiums built in Portugal for the Euro 2004 have been considered for demolition because they have been largely unused since the tournament and the municipalities have no way to fund their basic maintenance.
In many ways, the World Cup was a tragic waste of resources for South Africa, and even though it showcased the country (for that one month the South African government showed it could rise above mediocrity), the opportunity was soon squandered.
Most of the alleged spin-off infrastructure (Gautrain, new Durban Airport and Gauteng highways), would have happened regardless, and probably at much lower cost, because of price fixing and the general supply-and-demand situation in the construction industry as a result of the World Cup.
Best 8000$ party I ever threw.
So yes, while the actual events were hard to get to, there was more than enough for everyone to do, and it was, as OP put it, a massive party. I'd easily do it again for $8000.
Take for example the proposed Olympic Games 2024 Hamburg and Kiel:
Kiel hosts the largests sailing event worldwide every year, and hosted the Handball world cup before – and, due to having the best european team in Handball, we also have often large matches.
Hamburg has also lots of other sports which are done on worldcup level. Combined, we have the infrastructure done to host more than half of the Olympics RIGHT NOW. You could host more than half of the Olympics right tomorrow, without any additional constructions.
And Kiel has also been co-host of the Olympics two previous times, each of them producing a net-profit and developing a complete new district out of the investments – the facilities built for Olympia 1972 are still in use today.
What are we going to build for Olympia 2024? Nothing new – we’ll update existing infrastructure and stadiums, improve public transport (which would have been done anyway, and is already being built today), and add some new living quarters for the contestants – which could be used as cheap student housing afterwards, as both Hamburg and Kiel are facing a crisis where not enough affordable apartments for students exist.
Reusability quota: 100%. We’d have no losses, only profits, and it’d be cheap, too.
Only two new permanent facilities were built for the games: Olympic Velodrome at California State University, Dominguez Hills and the Olympic Swim Stadium at the University of Southern California. Both of those received heavy corporate sponsorship which covered most of the costs.
Overall, the Los Angeles Olympics made a profit of around $200 million.
I lived in the area at the time (Pasadena, to be precise), and the Olympics were remarkable unobtrusive. Mot people expected traffic to be really terrible during the Games, but enough people apparently took vacations or arranged to work at home or shifted their schedules that my daily freeway commute during the games was actually much faster than it had been before.
As to who reaps the profits, I wouldn't neglect decision makers within governments, as usually the companies that are involved in building and promoting the whole thing have to be "friendly" to get the contract...
Who knows though.
[1] http://www.startribune.com/hartman-2016-ryder-cup-chairman-s...
I hope they get them all. I don't care about the reason behind it... FIFA/Soccer Federations are just to messed up to stay like this unpunished.
GO USA!
The entire region is crazy about football. 5 of the 20 richest clubs in Europe are sponsored by a Gulf company.
http://gulfnews.com/sport/football/more-football/uae-tops-eu...
Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department (26 May 2015)
Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation... nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.
...the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and its lobbyists met with the State Department officials who oversee enforcement of human rights policies. Clinton’s State Department the next year approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The increase included authorizations of almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment” after the State Department did not authorize the export of any of such items to Algeria in the prior year.
...Goldman Sachs paid Bill Clinton $200,000 to speak to “approximately 250 high level clients and investors” in New York, according to State Department records obtained by Judicial Watch. Two months later, the State Department approved a $675 million foreign military sale involving Hawker Beechcraft -- a company that was then part-owned by Goldman Sachs. As part of the deal, Hawker Beechcraft would provide support to the government of Iraq to maintain a fleet of aircraft used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Goldman Sachs has also contributed at least $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to donation records.
Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international affairs, told IBTimes that the intertwining financial relationships between the Clintons, defense contractors and foreign governments seeking weapons approvals is “a vivid example of a very big problem -- the degree to which conflicts of interest have become endemic.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons...
Your second point about "false flag" makes no sense whatsoever.
EDIT: This is why HackerNews is going to the dogs. This perfectly reasonable comment has been downvoted numerous times.
To the extent that the FIFA discussion is inappropriate for HN, the correct response is to flag the article, not post things off-topic to the article in the thread.
Whether the FIFA-related article is appropriate to HN is completely irrelevant, in any case, to discussion of whether the attack on Clinton is itself on-topic to the thread discussing the FIFA article.
"Clinton Foundation took at least $1,250,000 from Qatar and its World Cup committee implicated in FIFA bribery scandal
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3099839/Clinton-Foun... Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3099839/Clinton-Foun...
"Clinton Foundation took at least $1,250,000 from Qatar and its World Cup committee implicated in FIFA bribery scandal"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3099839/Clinton-Foun...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3099839/Clinton-Foun...
It's within 200 now, though the many follow-up stories have diffused the voting somewhat.
Xavi, 35, would also work with Qatar’s Aspire Academy, become an ambassador for the 2022 World Cup to be held in the Gulf state, which is one of Barcelona’s main sponsors, and aim to start his coaching qualifications, his agent, Ivan Corretja, told Reuters.
Corretja declined to comment on reports that Xavi will earn €10m (£7.2m) a season."
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/may/20/xavi-hernand...
Thousands even, and the sad thing is the number of slavery condition migrant workers have been very high in Qatar and the Emirates since the start of this golden age.
Let's hope some things improve for those who suffer the most. And fuck FIFA.
The fact that all games of WC will be played in one city is the problem. All the fans in contact for a prolonged span...It won't end well.
They may have money to throw at the problem, but Nepalese migrants building the infrastructure to host the 2022 World Cup died at a rate of almost one per day. Look at the full report, it's astounding:
* Evidence of forced labour on a huge World Cup infrastructure project.
* Some Nepalese men have alleged that they have not been paid for months and have had their salaries retained to stop them running away.
* Some workers on other sites say employers routinely confiscate passports and refuse to issue ID cards, in effect reducing them to the status of illegal aliens.
* Some labourers say they have been denied access to free drinking water in the desert heat.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars...
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/16/sports/world-cup-98-fans-s...
The lack of humanity they displayed was an eye opener for me and helped me come to the realization that Soccer/Football has become the proxy for war in Europe. While that is, all things considered, an excellent development (I'll take hooliganism over world wars), it's also scary that people seem to have a deep-seeded, tribal need to fight and, when we do, we seem to lose all compassion for the opposition. Events like the World Cup seem to play on this need rather than trying to quash it.
Violence and the Euro 2004, in Portuguese.
Qatar would build them on less time and less money, I suppose.
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/11/405955547/b...
Besides the issues with building stadiums in states without a football tradition, Brazil is facing the problem that people just don't go to the stadium much. For example, the national league, which finished its third round last week, has had only 3 games with more than 20000 spectators so far.
That was already a big problem before the World Cup, and only became bigger after it since the cost of maintaining the stadiums is much higher now, and so are ticket prices.
That's quite low - only the bottom two Premiership teams averaged less than that for 2014-15. But presumably it'll pick up over the season?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_home_attendances_in_non... implies there's at least 3 clubs averaging >20k a season recently.
Do you have any sources for the claim? As far as I know, football is quite popular in middle east. Football clubs in that area have consistently been strong contenders in the AFC champions league. This means they have a healthy and competitive domestic league. Claiming they don't have soccer-related infrastructure is pretty ridiculous.
[0] " Local organizers are planning to build 9 new stadiums and expand 3 existing stadiums for this event." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar#Football
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_2022_FIFA_World_Cup_bid#P...
Of course, almost every major soccer league in the world runs during the winter with a summer break, so moving the month-long World Cup to would have thrown a wrench into the scheduling of every league and match in the top leagues. It would be an absolute nightmare.
I have high hopes that the World Cup will be moved (it's been moved with as little as three years notice before), but if not it will be chaos.
None of the major professional leagues are happy about this. If the world cup remains in Qatar it's going to be a fiasco.
http://www.businessinsider.com/qatar-world-cup-disaster-2015...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_United...
It creates an incentive for the prison industry to lobby for more prisons, tougher anti-crime laws, tougher border crossing penalties, longer sentences. The profits incentivize a total lack of addressing recidivism.
1 out of 4 prisoners in the world occupy a US prison (we account for what? 4-5% of the world's population?). Violent crimes have been trending down over 20 years, but prisoner population as a percentage is at an all time high due to tougher drug convictions.
Also, then there's huge factory farms, which are known to use migrants of questionable citizenship as laborers, and report them to the police when they complain.
The points you bring up about prisoners is interesting. I've always found the moral idea of a for-profit prison as reprehensible.
Every few years since, IIRC, at least the mid- to late-1980s there seems to be a new exposé about various forms of slavery in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (particularly Saipan), though that may have been at least somewhat mitigated in the last few years by Congress' federalization of CNMI labor and immigration policy in 2008.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/nobodies
Since then, they've helped the government rescue over 1,000 people from slavery in the southeast U.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_State...
More detailed account of prison labor in Nevada regarding casinos and construction. http://vltp.net/casinos-prison-labor-strange-bedfellows/
The slave market: http://www.unicor.gov/
You can even get slave labor to operate your call center: http://www.unicor.gov/services/contact_helpdesk/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/americas/03iht-slave...
The term mostly used nowadays to describe the selling of people is "human-trafficking" even though human trafficking is a little bit broader category. Its common for organized crime to deal in human trafficking.
The only way Blatter will step down is if a major football country association or group of associations (e.g. Germany, Spain, Holland) threaten to leave FIFA if he doesn't.
To really hit the tournament, you would need the support from several historical and relevant members in each Association. As an example: USA, Mexico in Concacaf; Argentina and Brasil in Conmebol; Italy, Germany, France and England, Spain (mainly for their leagues) in UEFA.
Let's say Germany 'secedes' from FIFA. I know for a fact that if Holland (I'm Dutch, but same thing goes for England) were to win the next World Cup in the absence of Germany, it wouldn't be taken seriously. I'd say most Dutch football fans would rather not win it at all in the absence of Germany. If they didn't qualify, well that's a whole different story, then they obviously weren't good enough to start with.
We can get FIFA, but we cannot get Roman Polanski?
Some combination of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (where a company can be prosecuted in the US for bribing officials abroad) mixed with RICO. The RICO part might not even be necessary, but it would allow them to go after anyone in the organization if they felt like it. I'm betting Blatter is sweating bullets right now.
As I understand it, the FCPA covers U.S. companies and their foreign affiliates and companies/organizations that trade securities in the U.S. If any employee or agent of such an organization bribes a foreign official, the DOJ or the SEC can go after them. "Foreign official" is defined really broadly as well. It includes foreign government employees, but also employees of international agencies and employees of government-managed industries (like doctors working for a state university hospital.) Also, the payment has to be illegal and not just "grease" money to speed up an ordinary task.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but the DOJ might be able to draw a line from various U.S. individuals to various FIFA board members or from US Soccer to FIFA itself depending on how broad the definitions are. If they get that second one, everybody on FIFA's board is screwed.
RICO is cited in the indictment, along with wire fraud and money laundering statutes; FCPA is not.
Here:
(1) Several of the charged principals are US persons (individuals or corporations),
(2) All of the other principals are charged with conspiracy with the charged US persons,
(3) Several of the charged acts took place in the US or by means of US institutions,
(4) Several of the charged persons, and the various properties allegedly illegally acquired through the illegal acts and against which criminal forfeiture is sought, are within the US.
(5) Also, the main charges are not paying bribes, but receiving/profiting from the bribes (constituting fraud against various organizations, money laundering to conceal the proceeds, etc.)
DOJ has a lot to do with bribery by US persons (natural persons and corporations), and criminal conspiracies involving such bribery (even if not all the principals are US persons), and criminal conspiracies making heavy use of US financial institutions.
Nor in Russia, especially considering they are at war with their neighbors, under sanctions, and how the anti-gay laws will treat gay fans and players.
We have unofficial reports of Putin gifting officials with bribes. If this investigation continues, we'll see a lot more than just Qatari corruption here.
Of course, don't let the facts get in the way of all the Qatar/Russia bashing.
It does not mean Qatar/Russia campaigns were corruption free. They do not have the evidence for it, or have not yet found a localization (US) vector that could aid in prosecution. My personal opinion is there was corruption (as normal) for both Russia and Qatar, but especially Qatar. The Jeremy Schapp ESPN documentary gives you a peek into things, including the bribing of local African football association officials.
I think the fact that the charges indicate a massive pattern of corruption by FIFA and subordinate organization executives in a wide variety of decisions is quite relevant to the FIFA-bashing over the decisions regarding the way that the Qatar and Russia decisions, given the factual conditions surrounding hosting the cup in those countries, seem inexplicable on any basis other than corruption at FIFA.
Even if the charges don't include charges specific to corruption around those decisions.
"U.S. investigators got help from Chuck Blazer, the longtime general secretary of the confederation, the New York Daily News reported in November. Blazer wore a hidden recording device in a keychain to meetings with soccer officials at the London Olympics and elsewhere, the paper said. The IRS had leverage over Blazer: He hadn’t paid taxes on millions of income for more than a decade, according to the paper.
...
The choice of Qatar for the 2022 tournament angered many nations, and the U.S. in particular. The U.S. was beaten in a final vote run-off with the emirate after rival offers from Australia, South Korea and Japan had been eliminated in previous rounds. Former President Bill Clinton led a U.S. group that traveled to Zurich to make a final pitch to voters."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/u-s-starts...
http://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2015/may/27/fifa-of...
The report also mentions Blazer is gravely ill with colon cancer. Does anyone know how the prospect of one of the star witnesses being unable to testify would impact the prosecution's raid/trial timeline?
Maybe it's because the U.S. lost the world cup (as in hosting privileges)?
I have no doubt there are similar patterns of corruption in other sports, but the financial impact is probably not as big.
The US can't keep their nose out of business of people in foreign countries. If the US has any interest in anything, they'll make it so. Just look at Megaupload for an example.
Then again, it's nice that finally someone is taking action against the corrupt hellhole called FIFA.
I do not believe the Swiss police would have acted for this on a U.S. request without some substantial evidence of actual wrongdoing that happened in the U.S. and is punishable by law both in the U.S. and Switzerland.
I am happy that the U.S. is finally putting some pressure on FIFA and its corruption (and inefficiency).
(As an anecdote, I got really pissed off by the FIFA procedures when trying to let an exchange student, a young kid, to play just for fun. They really try to squeeze the money off of ordinary people, just for a 16-year-old to be licensed to play. The end result: he couldn't play.)
"Indictment cites bribes, kickbacks related to * WC qualifications in Concacaf; * Gold Cup and Concacaf Champions League * Copa América * Copa Libertadores."
The USA or American owned teams participated in all of those competitions.
The WC qualifiers, Copa América and Gold Cup are international competitions, the USA Men's National Team (as they're called) participates in the WCQ and Gold Cup, although why the Copa América is included is odd, that's a South American competition.
The Copa Libertadores and CONCACAF Champions League are both club competitions, again the Libertadores is odd, that's South American, but 4 clubs from the United States participated in the Champions League (in 2014-15 that was Portland Timbers, Sporting Kansas, New York Red Bulls and DC United)
The bribery suspects [...] are alleged to have been involved in schemes to make payments to the soccer functionaries [...] totaling more than USD 100 million. In return, it is believed that they received media, marketing, and sponsorship rights in connection with soccer tournaments in Latin America. According to the US request, these crimes were agreed and prepared in the US, and payments were carried out via US banks.
https://www.bj.admin.ch/bj/en/home/aktuell/news/2015/2015-27...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/10871114...
TL;DR: Don't piss off Bill Clinton.
FIFA controls the most popular and most profitable sport in the world. Period.
Also, though Switzerland has a big financial sector it's not massively larger than other countries. If you use the "output method" then 10% of the Swiss GDP is finance. The next biggest is Ireland with 7%. So that's a 3% difference, yet I don't see anyone claiming that Ireland would be hosed without finance.
If you actually spend any time in Switzerland you'll rapidly figure out why it does well - things are just remarkably well run there, and Swiss people are rather industrious and skilled. Their government stays out of expensive foreign wars and other boondoggles. Unemployment is extremely low. The regions compete on tax rates, which keeps them low, and that in turn attracts wealthy people (who are then taxed on their global wealth, not just assets in Switzerland). It's very democratic.
The cudgel FIFA uses to prevent anyone looking too closely at how it does business is to threaten any member country with suspension from international competition if there is "political interference in football."
And the US may be the one country where FIFA doesn't have enough pull to graft their way around the problem.
There was a great documentary a few years ago about the US links...
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21652222-...
>America’s actions could force other countries to investigate FIFA more bravely. Indeed, that may already be happening. In what appears to be a separate case, Swiss officers raided FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, seized electronic records and said they had opened criminal proceedings against “persons unknown on suspicion of criminal mismanagement and of money laundering in connection with the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 football World Cups”. According to reports, 10 FIFA members who participated in the vote for those competitions are to be questioned by police.
http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/32891267
The guy was pretty unpopular when he appeared at the Asian Cup Final - booed by just about everyone in the stadium.
It, like these arrests, are a wonderful thing to the majority of the football world. Unpopular doesn't go far enough to describe the disdain that the football "community" feels about Blatter and FIFA in general.
He needs to go and so does the non-profit status of FIFA.
I hope he will get caught if he's involved and that his face will disappear forever from the football world. That sport is amazing, but in the last (almost) 20 years, it has been ruled by a man with a dubious integrity.
Pardon my ignorance, but why would this make you actually freak out? Are you related? I'm not trying to be obtuse, it just doesn't make sense to me.
For FIFA, the US is the single largest source of television audience and therefore advertising revenue.
For the US, on the other hand, soccer is just one of many sports. In fact, the US is one of very few countries where soccer is not the sport.
Americans are nowhere near as desperate for soccer as FIFA is desperate for American money.
Are you for real? This statement is so ridiculous that I don't even know where to start. You do realize football is by a huge margin, the most popular sports on this planet, right?
http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cup/story/1950567/world-cup...
The US had 43.8 million people watching the final (in English and Spanish). Germany (who was in the final) had 34.65 million people watching. Even if Argentina had ever single person in their country watching, they'd only have 42.6 million people watching (wiki estimate). Granted Brazil almost definitely has higher viewership, but the US is definitely one of the largest.
For example, the 2006 world cup attracted 4 billion viewers from China, and their team was not even playing.[1]
[1] http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/fifafacts/ffprojects/ip-401_...
Something suspicious about that...
If 1 person watches 6 matches they count as 6 "viewers" for those statistics. It makes sense if you're trying to track retainment for an event that's broken up into several instances.
By comparison, FIFA's worldwide revenue from broadcasting rights for the 2014 World Cup was around $2.4 billion [2].
American soccer fans might only constitute a small fraction of soccer fans worldwide, but they watch more ads and have deeper pockets than most of the rest. A billion poor fans don't make FIFA any money.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2014/06/09/american-w...
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/380788/revenue-of-the-201...
It's clear the TV broadcasting price has jumped rapidly over the years. You can't compare the current revenue with a future deal. 100 million over two world cups is still a tiny portion compared to 2.4 billion in one world cup.
And note that the quote says "SOURCE of advertising revenue", not "viewership".
It's not so hard to believe, given that a lot of the multi-nationals that advertise aggressively in FIFA are American-held... Americans don't have to like football to believe that advertising during the world cup could be profitable...
It's a fair assumption that the administration in the US cares. They put significant work into the 2022 World Cup bid and were beaten in the final round by Qatar. It is highly unlikely that this is unrelated to that.
Fine by me, honestly. FIFA is pretty damn corrupt, and if this is what it takes, then so be it.
The state cares if the people who are officers of your club defraud your club of funds by directing funds from the club to third parties who provide kickbacks, contrary to their contract with your club, as part of the way that states generally are concerned with criminal frauds.
And they'll especially care about that if that fraud also appears likely to have disadvantaged an effort in which the state had interest that was dependent on decisions by your club.
> Is it illegal to bribe someone making some private decision?
It generally is illegal for a person making a decision as an agent of another private person to take a bribe and as a result to act in their own interest and contrary to the best interest of the person whose agent they are nominally acting as -- and note that, for legal purposes, a corporate entity like FIFA (or any of its subordinate clubs) is a distinct "person" from any of its officers.
as well as this: http://www.fifa.com/sustainability/news/y=2010/m=9/news=fifa... http://sportanddev.org/en/connect/userprofile.cfm?894/FIFA-J...
"Lower one's body briefly by bending one knee to the ground, typically in worship or as a sign of respect."
So, to kneel.
I'm all for dismantling and/or restructuring FIFA, but the timing is rather opportune.
Yes, really the whole thing makes perfect sense when viewed from an "Old Order" vs "New Order" perspective.
My point is that Russia is forced to face actual consequences for its actions, whereas the Americans, and the rest have been given a free pass for doing basically the same thing.
The more meaningful point to be taken from this event is that US government can and will use its influence over public and private institutions (banks, sporting organizations, other governments) to pressure Russia (and possibly other BRIC nations) into abandoning their economic and strategic interests.
This is dangerous because there is no chance in hell of Russia abandoning those interests over a soccer tournament (no matter how unfair/undeserved those interests seem to an average Redditor trolling /r/worldnews from their mom's basement in Illinois).
I feel that there are significant powers in Washington who sense that NATO and US's days of being able to violate international law on a whim and without repercussions are numbered and the only way to extend that immunity is by raising the Iron Curtain once more.
The effort governments (among others) put into propaganda demonstrate that this is not true.
It mentioned adding slavery to Russian laws for building the stadiums ( the FIFA law - http://www.ituc-csi.org/new-fifa-laws-strip-world-cup ) , Fifa - who only wanted to use someone's "name" for "cleaning up FIFA from the inside" ( she quitted her fictional job at Fifa), the return of someone who has been trialed for bribery - he laughed with it in an interview, bribery from Qatar and Russia for holding FIFA, people/women who have been threathened for accusing the FIFA of "actions against human rights", ... The list is long :)
Blatter, the president of the FIFA, likes to brag. He said: "i'm the only person who can travel without official notification, who gets received by the president of that country."
This is how spineless these European countries are. United Kingdom you know who I'm talking about. And it looks like Switzerland has also joined the list. Some of you European countries are so despicably shameful.
$150 million over 20 years for sports rights in Latin America seems to indicate pretty slim margins. I wonder what the deal was with bribes and kickbacks over the selection of the host country for the 2010 World Cup (i.e. South Africa)?
The defendants who have copped pleas are convicted of the made-up 'crimes' of e.g. "wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and the structuring of financial transactions". http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/nine-fifa-officials-and-five-c...
No doubt terrible things go on among the members and their representatives at FIFA (as they do at the UN). Perhaps someone could explain how to organise an international federation that prevents corruption in its member (i.e. owner) organisations.
As to "fraud", I actually referred to "wire fraud conspiracy", which is, more or less, once having had some sort of agreement (tacit or otherwise) to do something with a dishonest intention where a telephone was involved in some way or other. Note that you don't actually have to have followed through on that intention for the "crime" to have been committed.
These defendants plead guilty, so the convictions are no doubt correct. And no doubt many millions of bribes were paid. But I think a degree of skepticism about prosecutorial conduct is appropriate no matter what the supposed target of the prosecution.
But I would guess that already ancient Chinese criminal gangs did something similar, to make the proceeds of illegal activities appear legal.
(And part of the modern trend of criminalizing the living of one's life in a way not maximally transparent to the government.)
http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/bodies/02/36/77...
Answering my own question, having now skimmed the indictment, it seems to be the usual suspect taking money paid by the South African federation to the CFU for its support in the bid process - something which seems to be entirely legitimate - for himself (which isn't).