Tag Archives: sports

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Dan Hough

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available.In this episode, host Liz Dávid-Barrett interviews Professor Dan Hough of the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption about his new book, Foul Play: Tackling Football’s Integrity Problem. Professor Hough discusses how he applies analytical frameworks from the corruption and governance fields to analyze the integrity challenges facing football, both on and off the pitch. The discussion also covers how debates over integrity in football connects to broader debates about how to encourage integrity in other areas.
You can find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:
KickBack was originally founded as a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). It is now hosted and managed by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends!

Moneyball: The Financial Entanglement Threatening the Integrity of Spanish Football

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The Spanish Professional Football League (La Liga) is the most popular and profitable sports league in Spain. (In the 2022-2023 season, La Liga had a record-setting revenue of 1.99 billion euros and more than 11 million spectators.) But the league has been beset by a string of corruption allegations. In an especially prominent recent case, one of La Liga’s most well-known teams, FC Barcelona, confirmed that between 2001 and 2018, the club had paid a total of 7.3 million euros to a consulting company owned by Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, who during that time was the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), the national governing body of all football-related activities, including La Liga. Though FC Barcelona acknowledged the payments, the club insisted that the payments were solely for lawful consulting services unrelated to refereeing decisions. FC Barcelona further noted that such consulting arrangements are standard practice among La Liga clubs. (Indeed, a former police commissioner accused Real Madrid CF of paying Negreira as well.)

While the allegations against FC Barcelona are still under investigation, many outside observers would likely conclude that, even if there was no direct quid pro quo, this is a textbook case of a serious conflict of interest. The problem, though, is that it does not appear that there are any rules—under Spanish law, the RFEF Disciplinary Code, or the league’s own regulations—against such conflicts: Continue reading →

Shifting Goalposts: How FIFA Has Failed In Its Transparency Reforms

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FIFA, the body that oversees world football (soccer), has a long history of corruption well-documented on this blog, particularly during the tenure of former president Sepp Blatter (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). A series of groundbreaking indictments of numerous FIFA officials for wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering by United States prosecutors, starting from 2015, led to multiple convictions, and revealed the widespread bribery involved in the awarding of 2010 World Cup hosting rights to South Africa. This scandal led to Blatter’s resignation in June 2015. (Blatter was later fined millions of dollars and banned from any involvement in FIFA activities for more than ten years by the organization’s Ethics Committee.) There have also been frequent allegations that Russian and Qatari officials allegedly bribed some FIFA executives and voters to win hosting rights to the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups, though United States Attorneys probing FIFA have not elected to bring charges in relation to those allegations.

After Blatter’s resignation, FIFA pledged to clean up its act. In early 2016, Gianni Infantino was elected FIFA President. Infantino had campaigned on promises to crack down on corruption in the organization, and he pledged greater transparency in his first post-victory remarks. Shortly after assuming office, Infantino took steps to hire a chief compliance officer, publicly disclose the compensation of executive management, and bring FIFA’s accounting and auditing in line with industry best practices. But how has Infantino fared in increasing transparency when it comes to picking the host of the World Cup? 

Not very well. True, FIFA and Infantino widely touted the rigor of the process used to pick the United States, Canada, and Mexico as joint hosts for the 2026 Cup: an extensive consultation process introduced new standards for bidders, bids were subject to a years-long review window, new “technical requirements” for sustainable event management and environmental protection were created, and voting rights were expanded to FIFA’s entire 211-member body in place of being vested solely in FIFA’s executive committee. But the rather bizarre series of events this past October—culminating in FIFA picking the hosts of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups in a span of less than a month, with the winning bidder uncontested in both cases—demonstrates that the organization’s leadership has engineered rather ingenious methods of subverting nearly all of these reforms. Continue reading →

From the World Cup to the Olympics: Why Are International Sporting Events So Corrupt?

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The recently-concluded FIFA World Cup in Qatar has served as yet another reminder of the corruption that seems to accompany the awarding of hosting rights for major international sporting events. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in 2010 representatives of Qatar bribed three South American FIFA officials to win the run-off vote against the United States to host the 2022 World Cup. And this came after two members of the FIFA selection committee had already been barred from voting after they had been caught agreeing to sell their votes. This was not an isolated incident. The DOJ also alleged that Russia bribed FIFA officials to host the 2018 World Cup, and indeed more than half of those FIFA officials involved in the 2018 and 2022 host country votes—including FIFA’s then-president Sepp Blatter—have been accused of improper behavior. Nor has this sort of behavior been limited to FIFA. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has had numerous similar scandals. The IOC has launched an investigation into nine members who were bribed to vote for granting Brazil the hosting rights for the 2016 Olympic Games; Sérgio Cabral, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro, admitted to paying $2 million to the former president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) to buy votes to select Rio as the 2016 Olympic host city, and the head of Brazil’s Olympic committee, Carols Nuzman, was sentenced to over 30 years in prison as a result. And when Russia secured the 2014 Winter Olympics bid, it did so with the assistance of the then-vice president of the Olympic Council of Asia, Gafur Rakhimov, an organized crime leader and heroin kingpin.

Why is the process of selecting host cities and countries for major international sporting events so constantly captured by bribery and corruption? There are several inter-related reasons for this ongoing problem:

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Beijing Olympics Marks the End of the Era of Corrupt Authoritarian Megasports—But What Comes Next?

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Today’s guest post is from Andy Spalding, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law and the Chair of the Olympics Compliance Task Force.

The present Beijing Winter Olympics are widely seen as yet another chapter in what has become all-too-familiar story of governance disasters in megasport events like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup: 2008, China; 2010, South Africa; 2014, Brazil; and Russia; 2016, Brazil . . . again; 2018, Russia . . . again. And now, China . . . again. But for the last decade, pressure has been building for change in how the organizers of these megasport events approach anticorruption and human rights policy. And at last, change has come—even if it’s not yet obvious to casual observers only looking at the current games.

The period between roughly 2014 and 2018 became a tipping point in megasport anti-corruption and human rights policy. Russia consecutively hosted the Sochi Winter Olympics and FIFA Men’s World Cup with dizzying human rights and corruption problems. Meanwhile, the only two bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics were China and Kazakhstan. Something had to change. Continue reading →

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Dan Hough

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Professor Dan Hough, Head of the Department of Politics at the University of Sussex, who previously served as the Director of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. After starting out discussing how Professor Hough got interested in studying corruption, the bulk of out interview focuses on Professor Hough’s most recent research project focused on integrity and corruption in sports–including not only cheating on the field and in the organization of major sporting events, but more broadly why better understanding threats to integrity in sports can help the anticorruption community better understand important aspects of the fight against corruption in other contexts. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

New Podcast, Featuring Michael Hershman

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After a brief summer hiatus, I’m happy to announce that a new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, my collaborators Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke interview Michael Hershman. Mr. Hershman, one of the co-founders of Transparency International (TI), has had a long and distinguished career on issues related to transparency and anticorruption, including work with the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and, more recently, the Independent Governance Committee for FIFA. In the interview, Nils and Christopher talk with Mr. Hershman about his background, the founding of TI, the relationship between corruption and populism, and issues related to corruption and sports, among other topics.

You can find this episode here. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

FIFA Can and Should Do More To Crack Down on Corruption in International Soccer

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Just over one year ago, in June 2019, Ahmad Ahmad, the president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and a Vice President of FIFA (international soccer’s governing body), who had long been dogged by reports of corruption, was detained by French police at a luxury hotel in Paris. Eight months later, in February 2020, the accounting firm PwC released an audit of CAF’s finances, documenting scores of financial irregularities by Ahmad and his colleagues, including an alleged kickback scheme involving a company run by a friend of Ahmad that did business with CAF.

CAF is just the latest in a long line of international soccer organizations beset by corruption scandals. Corruption in international soccer, long the subject of rumor and speculation, first made mainstream headlines back in 2015, when the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a series of indictments against officials in FIFA and the regional soccer federations for North and South American (CONCACAF and CONMEBOL, respectively). Those indictments—and the resulting public outcry—forced FIFA, CONCACAF, and CONMEBOL to adopt a series of structural anticorruption measures, such as publicizing financial statements and creating independent audit committees.

Unfortunately, those reforms are not enough. The alleged corruption by Ahmad and his CAF colleagues is not anomalous, but rather symptomatic of two important factors that will continue to contribute to corruption in international soccer, notwithstanding the reforms implemented by FIFA and a few other federations in the aftermath of the 2015 indictments.

Continue reading →

Corruption in Tennis, Part 2: Independent Review Panel’s Recommendations Are a Step in the Right Direction, But Prioritization Is Essential

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As I explained in my last post, the game of tennis—because of its one-on-one format and unusual scoring system—is especially vulnerable to match fixing. This risk has become ever more significant with the explosion in the global sports betting market, particularly online betting. Professional tennis’s Governing Bodies (which include the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), the Grand Slam Board, and the International Tennis Federation (ITF)), have demonstrated their concern about this sort of corruption for over a decade, publishing reviews on integrity in tennis in 2005 and 2008, establishing the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) to govern anticorruption matters in 2009, and adopting a mandatory anticorruption educational program for players and officials (the Tennis Integrity Protection Programme (TIPP)) in 2011. Yet, despite these efforts, match fixing and spot fixing continue to be a major problem. In January 2016, Buzzfeed and BBC published a bombshell report alleging not only that match fixing in tennis was pervasive, but also that the TIU and the Governing Bodies had suppressed evidence on the extent of the problem. The Governing Bodies quickly released a statement “absolutely reject[ing]” the suggestion that they had suppressed evidence of match-fixing, but they nonetheless immediately commissioned an Independent Review Panel to evaluate integrity in tennis.

Almost three years later, in December 2018, the Panel published its conclusions and recommendations in a 113-page Report, which the Governing Bodies endorsed. While the Panel found no evidence suggesting that the TIU or the Governing Bodies had covered up any wrongdoing, the Panel did conclude that the sport’s current anticorruption efforts are “inadequate to deal with the nature and extent of the problem,” and recommended changes to the sport’s governance policies and institutions.

The Report’s greatest strength—its no-stone-unturned thoroughness—is also its greatest flaw: More academic than pragmatic, the Report neither prioritizes its proposals nor sufficiently considers their financial feasibility. Given that the Panel attributes economic challenges—such as the under-compensation of lower-ranked players and the lack of resources allocated toward the TIU—as major reasons for widespread corruption in tennis, it seems unrealistic to think that the Governing Bodies could afford an across-the-board implementation of the Panel’s proposals. Thus, the Governing Bodies’ implementation plan should prioritize the Panel’s various recommendations, with an eye toward financial feasibility. Specifically, the Governing Bodies should: Continue reading →

Corruption in Tennis, Part 1: Why the Sport Is Especially Vulnerable to Corruption

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Although wagers on tennis make up only a relatively small fraction of the global sports gambling market (estimated at around 12% of that market in 2015, compared to 65% for soccer), tennis seems to account for a disproportionate share of gambling-related match fixing and other forms of corruption. For example, ESSA (a non-profit dedicated to integrity in sports betting) reported that of the 496 cases of “suspicious betting” that it flagged across all sports in 2015, 2016, and 2017, 336 (68%) stemmed from bets on tennis matches. Of course, a suspicious betting alert does not necessarily indicate that match fixing or other corrupt activity actually occurred (see, for example, here and here), but still, that a sport comprising just 12% of the global sports betting market could generate over two-thirds of suspicious sports betting activity is striking, and consistent with expert assessments on the prevalence of corruption in tennis. Indeed, in 2005, Richard Ings, then the Executive Vice President for Rules and Competition for the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), wrote that “if a sport could have been invented with the possibility of corruption in mind, that sport would be tennis.”

Two factors in particular make tennis particularly susceptible to gambling-related corruption: Continue reading →