Most modern team sports were codified in Victorian Britain, partly in the hope of distracting schoolboys from masturbation. But the British saw little point in playing against foreigners, and many major international sporting bodies were created by the French. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association was founded in Paris in 1904 by seven continental European countries. FIFA controlled the rules of soccer and oversaw national federations. Yet it was always a weak regulator, with little say over professional clubs. Its power derived from its one prestigious property: the quadrennial men’s World Cup, first played in Uruguay in 1930. [...]
Beginning in the 1980s, Havelange expanded the tournament, creating more places for Asian and African teams. And so the rights to broadcast and sponsor the World Cup became ever more valuable. But Havelange’s tiny FIFA staff lacked the skills to market them. (In 1974, the organization’s Zurich headquarters had twelve employees.) Horst Dassler, whose father had founded the soccer shoe manufacturer Adidas, a much larger operation than FIFA, bought many rights directly from Havelange. Dassler paid him kickbacks, and the Brazilian flew suitcases of cash first-class between Rio and Zurich. [...]
That election set the template for Blatter’s rule. World Cups kept generating more money: FIFA’s revenues rose from $308 million in the four-year cycle through 1998 to $5.7 billion in the four years through 2014. This was largely because in an interconnected world, people from China to the US were now watching soccer. Blatter nevertheless took credit for “developing” the game—FIFA’s supposed mission. He passed on chunks of the loot to national and continental soccer barons, in payments that were typically couched in the language of “development.” A FIFA grant, often handed over by Blatter’s staff on the eve of a FIFA presidential election, was supposedly meant to fund facilities in the official’s country. Indeed, some national federations, especially in Africa, couldn’t even afford a phone line. But these payments were not monitored, and if the official slipped the money into his jacket pocket, nobody would complain. [...]
The FBI and others uncovered corruption in World Cup bids far into the past. It now seems that Germany paid bribes to host in 2006, as did South Africa in 2010. Warner, Blazer, and a co-conspirator got a $10 million payment from South Africa, disguised as support for the Caribbean’s “African diaspora.” Warner also insisted that an ailing eighty-five-year-old Nelson Mandela fly to Trinidad to beg for his vote.
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