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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I'm impressed and somewhat surprised that the U.S. would be the entity to enforce this given the relative lack of presence FIFA has in the U.S.

Maybe it's because the U.S. lost the world cup (as in hosting privileges)?

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According to the Swiss Federal Office of Justice, the bribery has occurred in the US and paid through US banks :

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...

This makes a ton of sense now with the increased scrutiny of US financial institutions as of late.

Make no mistake: this is entirely about the lost 2022 bid.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/10871114...

TL;DR: Don't piss off Bill Clinton.

There a lot of problems with financial institutions that would be detected by "increased scrutiny " before something like this...

> I'm impressed and somewhat surprised that the U.S. would be the entity to enforce this given the relative lack of presence FIFA has in the U.S.

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."

Indeed. Perhaps the US were the only country that could do this? Great that they did !

It requires a combination of a big enough investigation/court system to work with the Swiss and a political class who won't care if there's a risk of soccer being disrupted in the country, so the US would be one of the few nations that might fit the description.

The article on CNN mentions that the US has the largest FIFA television audience and that because of their banking, tax, and regulations, they have a long arm essentially.

I understand where the capabilities come from, my curiosity here is more in the motivation. The U.S. has a lot of capabilities that they don't exercise, what put FIFA into the crosshairs on this one? (beyond the allegations of wrongdoing)

I expect it is simply that the evidence indicated substantial financial corruption, and bribery with loss of tax revenue. Taxman is what really gets governments pissed off.

I have no doubt there are similar patterns of corruption in other sports, but the financial impact is probably not as big.

I'm disgusted that the Swiss let this thing go on for so long and still give FIFA non-profit status.

Not just FIFA, the IOC aren't exactly squeaky clean either

Certainly, but the Olympics is something of a 20th century anachronism, celebrating a bunch of sports that few people have any genuine interest in. It is slowly becoming little more than a sports-themed fireworks roadshow.

FIFA controls the most popular and most profitable sport in the world. Period.

Well the FIFA is not a league of amateur in this field. They know that they must accept their gifts in other countries and follow the law at it's strictest in Switzerland so that they risk next to nothing.

What would the Swiss do without the shady business brought by corrupt foreigners? The extremely high standard of living is directly related to money laundering and "asset protection" schemes.

They would do fine. The idea that Switzerland is only successful because of banking privacy is a common myth. The entire financial sector including things like pensions, insurance and corporate banking is only somewhere between 6-10% of the Swiss GDP, depending on how you precisely account for the risk premium. The construction industry alone is about 6% of the GDP. Switzerland does a lot of things beyond finance.

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.

This is why (from the NYT)

"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.

Thank you, I didn't catch the significance there. Whoever owns those teams (I somehow doubt it's the country itself) is pretty important.

Getting my football nerd hat on …

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)

Clubs from Mexico participate in the Copa Libertadores. Mexico is in CONCACAF (as is the USA). That could be the connection.

The connection is that CONCACAF has their headquarters in Miami, FL

It's that plus the commercial aspects. We (Australia) almost investigated FIFA for the same reasons (the 18/22 World Cup Bids), but we don't have the financial leverage to do anything about it.

I'd instead suspect that the corruption involves entities with an impact on the US. Either they gained or lost out of it and thus provoked the US to take action.

It's a bit ironic that it takes what is almost a non-soccer country to fix soccer. But US corporations (Coca-Cola, McDonalds etc.) are major sponsors of FIFA so the US has a legitimate interest in prosecuting FIFA officials.

I think only a non-football country could fix football. They've not been sufficiently bought.

Football (soccer) is relatively minor sport in the U.S. but it is still a major country in this sport as well: during the FIFA ranking history, it averages on position 19. That is very good, and higher than the ranking of several past World Cup or continental competition winners.

In addition (as mentioned above), FIFA sanctions don't mean all that much to the US, so the US has a lot less to lose by prosecuting this, both financially and in the court of public opinion.

> I'm impressed and somewhat surprised that the U.S. would be the entity to enforce this given the relative lack of presence FIFA has in the U.S.

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.

The basis for this surely is business of people in USA. Meaning that the business is in USA even if the people currently were in Switzerland. Recently, there has been more public attention on tax evasion, and football (as I call it; soccer for Americans) is big business.

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.)

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