"Football has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting." George Orwell
I have been working on a project about sports governance for the past year. It has been a tremendously interesting piece of work, forcing me to apply experience with governance in developing countries to questions of governance in sports sectors and organizations.
As I have moved along, I find many overlaps between my work in both areas...and the most recent FIFA scandal reflects this as well. As in many developing countries, the biggest challenge for sporting sectors (and football in particular) centers on the pressure of improving governance in the midst of modernization, professionalization, globalization, and a flood of money.
The governance structures in world football are simply outdated, and creaking. They are feudal in many respects and country-clubbish in others. These simply don't match a sector that has grown financially by multiple times over the last twenty years, and that is global and complex. As in many countries, the perpetuation of old-style personalistic governance regimes under conditions of change will inevitably lead to corruption and abuse. Especially when rents are easy to come by, as they have been in global football in the past twenty five years.
On the topic of say rents, I think football's governance issues are very much like those we see in resource rich countries, where the easy-to-come-by revenues need special type of management and protection. We often do not see governance that provides such structure in resource rich countries, and we are absolutely not seeing it in world football right now, where Orwell's words are ringing true (and world football looks more like war without shooting).
Hopefully things will change.
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