FIFA is egregiously corrupt, sycophantic, and supportive of the Zionist genocide in Gaza
Professor Jem Bendell PhD, is an independent researcher and coordinator of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino presenting Donald Trump with the FIFA Peace Prize
I still remember yanking my shoes off a floor made sticky by spilled beer. My eyes were glued to the large screen on the wall, shining through a nicotine haze. Suddenly, that eruption of arms and glasses, roars and hugs. Sol Campbell had just put England ahead against Argentina in the World Cup. Except he hadn’t. While the defender reeled away in celebration, the referee judged Alan Shearer’s elbows had been too high on the goalkeeper. After the game, I sprinted home. I was metabolising not just the pints but the sense of injustice after exiting the tournament in France. Maybe it was retraumatising from 8 years earlier, as Chris Waddle’s penalty sailed over the bar. If I look back on where I was at key World Cup moments, I can see how my life has changed. During the last tournament I watched loads of matches with my Dad. He was bed-bound, with terminal cancer gnawing through his pelvis. Football wasn’t just a distraction. For a few weeks, the matches gave us something to look forward to, and a welcome reprieve from the boredom and sadness of his decline.
But I won’t watch any games live during the upcoming World Cup. Not even the England team. So if they reach the final on American soil, I won’t watch it live. This isn’t a casual protest for me. It is a gut-wrenching decision that goes against forty years of fist-pumping muscle memory. But the reasons for a personal boycott have stacked up so much in the last year, that the idea of watching the games now feels dirty and emasculating.
The first reason is geopolitical. We have been witnessing an unprovoked chain of aggression, enabled by US foreign policy that is actively spreading hunger amongst the poorest people on earth. We have watched the glee of US officials committing war crimes. That glee is only possible because the global community is too timid, too economically entangled, to sanction such officials or the superpower.
Sport is supposed to be an antidote to violence and exploitation. Instead, the organisation that runs the World Cup is now applauding men who choose violence. FIFA literally handed a peace prize to Donald Trump. Let that sink in. A “peace prize” for a man whose administration’s policies have backed war crimes against innocent civilians and boasted of planning worse. By doing so, the Zurich-based giant of world football didn’t just make a joke of itself; it made a mockery of the participating federations, the US political process, the intergovernmental structures built over decades, and the very concept of peace. It suggests that FIFA is utterly unaccountable to the fans who fill the stadiums and the billions who watch at home.
I once lived in Switzerland, near the serene, lakeside headquarters of global sports governance. So I know a little bit about sports federations. And I can tell you: those offices house some of the best-dressed and intellectually mediocre office workers I have ever met. Senior management is reserved almost exclusively for those with the hungriest egos. I’m talking about men (yes, always men) who seek massive pay packets to fund their globe trotting performance of professional status. That’s why they thought nothing of asking $6,000 bucks for a cup final ticket.
If they prioritized the game, would FIFA have scheduled a few knock out matches at an altitude in Mexico City that should involve weeks of acclimatisation for proper athletic performance? If they cared about the quality of the spectacle, would they force teams to travel thousands of miles between matches? And why would they do that if they honestly cared about the environmental footprint of the tournament? Instead, they care about revenue. Worse, they care about cozying up to power, no matter how puerile and brutal.
FIFA and the USA are the spoiled, unaccountable superpowers in their respective realms. One dominates the sport; the other dominates global politics. Both operate with impunity. It seems to me that to let our patriotism become fuel for international instability, which inflates our bills and indebts our governments, would make us more like fools than patriots. Realising that has tarnished the tournament for me. But I don’t want them to take what has been part of my life. So I’ve come up with a way of not supporting their power games: and want to invite you, if a football fan, to consider the same.
Like most people, I could not afford to travel to the US for the games. The fact ticket sales and hotel bookings are way below expectations tells us that many people feel the same. But FIFA and the host nation make the vast majority of their money from the worldwide broadcast audience. Which is you and me. To watch the live broadcasts is to tell FIFA and the current US government that we can turn a blind eye to their practices when it suits us. That doesn’t feel good enough. Instead, if masses of us don’t watch the games live, we can demonstrate how they’re losing social legitimacy. So the first part of my personal boycott is not to watch any games live, and explain why to my friends: “I’m done with having my love of country and passion for football used by selfish twats to fuck up the world.” (I tend to speak differently to how I write). I know I will miss out on a few trips to the pub. But I’ll ask my friends to do other fun things instead, while we celebrate not helping the sick systems destroying what we love.
The second part of my boycott will be to avoid buying anything from the companies that are “FIFA Partners.” Those are Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai-Kia, Visa, Aramco, Lenovo, and Qatar Airways. Not using Visa is more difficult than avoiding the others, but there is an obvious alternative in Mastercard. Some people have dubbed this practice ‘unvertising’, where people look at the billboards at the games to see which brands to avoid in future. For me, I’ll avoid those companies and their sub brands for the rest of the year.
I’ve heard the arguments against doing anything like this. For instance, Russia and Qatar aren’t great for human rights and democracy, but I still watched the live matches in their World Cups, and didn’t think of boycotting their sponsors. But the situation has moved beyond bad practices and poor leadership, to one where the host country actually facilitates the worst crimes against humanity and the sports organisation awards them a fake peace prize. In the Oval Office that day, the FIFA president was effectively spitting in the face of humanity. What some sports bureaucrats now do is more shameful than diving for a penalty and more dangerous than a studs-up tackle. Yet there’s no world referee to send them off. If we cannot effectively influence the superpowers of politics and sport with our voices, at least we can sanction them with our silence: by turning away from their broadcasts and their lead sponsors.
Those of us who regard the world order, ecosystems, and belief systems to be fragmenting within what’s now called a ‘metacrisis,’ aren’t waiting to reform the global power elite. Instead, we do what we can to defend human dignity and ditch any acquiescence to the psychos in suits. As part of that, we should also ask the institutions that might have countervailing power, to try harder.
Which brings us back to the Swiss. Last year, the small Alpine country strengthened governance expectations for its sports organisations through a new Federal Act and Ordinance. They included requirements on transparency, conflict-of-interest, ethics, and whistleblowing. The new expectations apply to national sporting bodies rather than international sports organisations. But that gap doesn’t make sense. FIFA is a globe-spanning commercial and political force – an unruly colossus of world sport – whose decisions affect billions of people and move vast sums of money across borders. By inventing a peace prize for a war starter, FIFA declared it wants to act more like an international political body. So politicians must not be quiet. Swiss lawmakers should issue regulatory interpretations and guidance, so that any international sports federations headquartered in Switzerland can be expected to meet equivalent governance and reporting standards.
Such a reform would not require stripping FIFA of its autonomy or rewriting Swiss association law. It would simply end the exemption from minimum governance expectations in the sports sector. How is it fairplay to expect these standards from a small Swiss sports association down the road from FIFA, but not from the football behemoth? Exactly: it is not.
Andrea Florence put it well, when she wrote that “a world of sport rooted in human dignity and transparency is the only one worth having.” She is director of the Sports and Rights Alliance (SRA), based in Geneva. When I was living there, I saw how pressure can have impacts within Switzerland’s direct democracy. So if the international sports federations become a national embarrassment, we might see some progress. As football fans, let us share our hopes with their Federal Office of Sport, along with independent groups like the SRA and the Sport Integrity Global Alliance. If you can, take a moment to share this commentary with them on social media, especially if you join the two-part boycott of live games and topline sponsors. To help, I list some relevant organisations and their social media accounts, below.
For me, it is going to hurt to miss out on the live drama. Even now, I vividly recall watching the wonder goals of David Platt in 1990 and Michael Owen in 1998. So I’ll still be aware of the kick offs, and urging the England players to win. I will also think of my Dad and how we enjoyed the last tournament, our last together. But some things are more important than a game. Refusing to play along with the pretence that the behaviour of heartless men in charge of powerful institutions can be ignored, for fun, is the least we can do.
Come on England! Clear out FIFA!
Several Swiss-based NGOs actively monitor and push international sports federations on issues like corruption, poor governance, and human rights violations:
Sport & Rights Alliance (SRA): A Geneva-headquartered global coalition that integrates human rights and fights corruption in world sports, often lobbying Swiss authorities to enforce due diligence. Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sportandrightsalliance/ https://x.com/Sport_Rights
Centre for Sport and Human Rights (CSHR): A Geneva-based independent non-profit that promotes human rights in sports and enables accountability for federations and event organizers.Socials: https://www.linkedin.com/company/centre-for-sport-and-human-rights/
Sport Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA): A Geneva-based global coalition that promotes governance and integrity standards and tries to hold sports institutions accountable. Socials: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sigalliance/
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