The Collapse of the FIFA System

It's nine AM on the outskirts of Zurich. A journalist has been given an address and told to show up He finds a cafe that has agreed to open for just one man A limo pulls up. a young aide steps out first, then helps a small elderly man onto the pavement. He walks in, The staff greet him by name. He shakes every hand. His name is Sep Bladder. For nearly two decades, he ran FIFA, the Swiss based organization that controls the most popular sport on Eth Soccer. He oversaw billions of dollars. He helped decide which countries got to host the World Cup, and he survived scandal after scandal By the time of that morning, he was fighting corruption charges stemming from millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. and he wanted to talk. The FBI had alleged that he was a senior figure in corruption, but he sits down with me And he looks at me and he thinks, whoo is this guy? How do I charm him I'm sitting there realizing I'm now to be very careful not to be charmed That's Financial Times reporter and author, Simon Cooper journalist in the caafe understand Bladder and what he built and how it collapsed You first need to understand the game of soccer itself and how the World Cup came to be I'm Sony Cassum And today on fourort thousand forty Explores, we dig into the story of soccer, the FIFA World Cup and the small group of men who ran the world's game for their own benefit Stay with us Soccer is the most popular sport on eararth pereriod Its biggest event, the World Cup final, reached nearly one point five billion viewers in twenty twenty two That's roughly eleven times more than the Super Bowl in twenty twenty six And yet If you're listening in the United States, you may have spent very little time thinking about it Because to some soccer C seem boring People say that the lack of goals in soccer is a weakness sometimes That's Financial Times reporter and author, Simon Cooper But in fact, the lack of goals is a strength of soccer because when there is a goal, it's this moment of incredible excitement and emotion that you don't get in say basketball or baseball where they're scoring all the time A simple game that delivers a rare kind of suspense And every four years, that suspense builds toward the biggest event in the biggest sport in the world. World Cup which we'll get to in a moment Vversions of the game existed long before there was anything called soccer or football, as most of the world knows it P peopleeople had always kicked balls for thousands of years and so there's records of the Aztecs doing it, the Chinese. these games that existed everywhere Variations on soccer existed all over the world, maybe with slightly different rules or ways of scoring. The basic idea was the same. two sides one ball, and a fight to get it into the other side space Then slowly, the game gets standardized. The real changes when they' codified in England in eighteen sixty three. So a bunch Uppercass Englishmen got together, they'd all played versions of football at the kind of posh. Mly boarding schools And they said let's have the same rules so we can play against each other even after leaving school because each school would have its own rulle So in eighteen sixty three, they write the laws of the game And at the time, Britain is the world's superpower. It has lots of colonies And that matters because once the rules are fixed The game can travel Britain had colonies all over the world, so the game and its rules get exported everywhere The modern version of soccer is simple Eleven players on each side, one goal at either end and with one major exception the goalkeeper No hands And that simplicity turns out to be one of soccer's secret weapons. The fact you see a game, you immediately understand it. You reckon you can do it yourself And then there's not much equipment is required So you need a ball, That's kind of it. And you can make a ball out of old rags if you don't have any money at all. That opens the game up to almost everyone And so pooor people also start playing soccer It's not like fencing or canoeing It's not like crickets where you need a grass field that is kept in perfect condition. You can play soccer on any surface And once masses of people are playing it in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, masses of people start watching it too. It becomes very popular very quickly So by say nineteen hundred in a lot of cities, especially in Europe and in southern Latin America, You have very big crowds come to watch games And then there's money coming in because you can charge the spectators. they pay money And so then what do you do with that money? You pay players, you build clubs, you schedule more matches. Basically, the game starts to professionalize And once the game professionalizes, once there are paying crowds, organized clubs and national teams playing across borders, someone has to set common rules and organize those international matches, right That's where the International Federation of Association foootball AA FIFA comes in. FIA is founded in nineteen four by men from a few European countries Communications have improved. their railways, soccer is growing. She want to have a national team. plays against men's national teams from other countries National Federations popped up in most countries. They organized the sport inside their borders. What FIFA does is it sits right above these federations. It brings those federations into one international structure setetting rules for competition between them and gradually becoming the body that governs world soccer You might be wondering, wait Why would these national federations agree to give up power Well, because on their own They can't run international soccer at all Every country sets its own rules, its own schedules, its own standards There is no global game It's just sort of anarchy Okay. Understand what happens next, you need one more piece of context In the early nineteen hundreds, international soccer mostly lived at the Olympics That was where national teams met. and where the game presented itself to the world there is a problem The Olympics are for amateurs Meaning players aren't supposed to be paid. As we've seen, soccer is changing. Clubs are growing, crowds are exploding, and the best players are now professionals So the biggest international stage in the sport has a basic flaw It can't fully accommodate the sport as it actually exists. The game's top global competition is still built around amateurs And so FIivA starts thinking. If soccer is going to become a truly global sport, Eezip's own tournament One that belongs just to soccer Not one that shares the stage with track and field and Hammer throwing They say We should have a World Cup We shouldall have a kind of tournament where the best teams in the world play against each other a world championship This idea becomes reality in nineteen thirty when FIFA stages the firstirst World Cup in Uruay It's all very early days. It's small and almost experimental Of the four European teams competing, three come over on the same ship And they all train on the ship's deck It's like a holiday outing. It's incredibly exciting And that excitement fills the home country The Uruguay stadiums are packed And at the end, it's decided, you know what? this woke upp experiment, it kind of works. We like it Let's do it again. And they do. What follows is a series of escalating successes Newspapers start writing about it. Radio starts to broadcast games And because the rules are easy to grasp and the drama is easy to feel The World Cup quickly gives soccer a global reach Even if in the United States It never quite catches on the same way Oshadowed by baseball and later American football. And then in the nineteen fifties comomes the next great accelerant TV with television It reaches these new territories and it starts to become really the global game. not just the Euro Latin American game. And television doesn't just make the World Cup more visible. it makes it more valuable. With the tournament now broadcast into millions of homes, the audience explodes And the money follows By the nineteen sixties, the World Cup was starting to look like the World Cup of today Every four years, the whole world tries to qualify of these teams around sixteen make it to the knockout phase. Lose once, then you're out Seven games to win it all One country lifts the trophy and for four years calls itself the best in the world And the scale is massive By the modern era, the final match alone draws over a billion viewers entire countries stop to watch It's not just a tournament This is one of the largest shared events on the planet By the nineteen seventies and eighties, under FIFA's longtime president Joo Habalangee And a Swiss number two, Sep bladder. The World Cup is no longer just a championship. It's a stage where politics, national identity, and power all play out. And nowhere is this more on display than in the nineteen eighty six World Cup spepecifically the quarter final match between Argentina and England So four years before in nineteen eighty two Britain and Argentina I fought the Falklands war over the possession of a few islands off the coast of Argentina. Britain won, but some six hundred and fifty Argentinian soldiers were killed. When Argentinian leegend Diego Maradona takes the field against England, this is not just a game It's loaded with a revenge and national pride Dononna The schoolores. England Tim Ramball. Mavanona scores two legendary goals. One with his hand, he cheats And then soon after that hand goal, he scores a go away dribbles through the whole England team, just one of the best goals in the history of so. Radonna That two runs away from Reid Past butcher And past another, A maradona goes on why it's so famous. is because it's about more than soccer. it's about politics And national pride and nationalism of the field. It's about the soccer but it's also around more than the soccer World Cups are a great way to understand the world And as the World Cup grows, FIFA's power grows with it becausecause FIFA doesn't just run the tournament also controls one of the most coveted decisions in global sports gets to host it. Countries would spend years building their case, Stadium plans, transit plans, new hotels, security, They would lobby super hard and make huge promises But the final choice was not made by the full FIFA membership, meaning the two hundred and eleven member associations This is basically how the Olympics operate. You have hundreds of member associations that all vote No, this decision used to be made by a small executive committee Just a few dozen men voting behind closed doors This is where the scale of the World Cup starts to collide with the FIFA that is still really small and insular. Because while this is now the biggest event and the biggest sport in the world Some of the most important decisions still sit in the hands of a tiny circle of officials. Investigators would later say it was a setup that invited abuse In twenty fifteen, the US Department of Justice accused FIFA officials of running a sprawling bribery scheme involving more than one hundred fifty million dollars And looming over all of it was FIFA President Sepp Bladder. He had run FIFA for seventeen years. He was not charged in the main US. case. but he led at the institution at the center of it He had mastered its politics and outlasted almost everyone around him Now that whole world was starting to collapse After the break, Simon Cooper sits down with Bladder in a cafe outside Zurich Face to face with the man who knew better than almost anyone Al FIa. I'm told to go to this Cafe at the edge of Zurich So I go out to the edge and it's becoming farmland, there's hills It's nine in the morning on the outsirts ofZurich, Switzerland Simon Cooper. has been given a street number where he's supposed to meet Sep Bladder the longtime FIA president And for years, one of the most powerful men in world soccer After some searching Simon finds the cafe Cafe is closed Cafe is opening especially for set. And then this limousine stops outside and this young man gets out and he helps this tiny old manhouse in the limousine. The FBI had alleged that he was a senior figure in corruption. He was fighting all these corruption allegations that he comes out And he sits down with me And he looks me in the eye and a lot of powerful and important people you interiew, they don't really care who you are They're not interested in people around them He looks at me and he thinks, whoo is this guy? How do I charm him And I'm sitting there realizing I'm now to be very careful not to be charming If you want to understand how FIFA worked at the height of its power, Bladder is your guy He didn't just witness that world. he grew up inside it For nearly two decades, he sat at the top of FIFA If corruption became part of the institution, it happened on his watch. And so I sit down with him for a couple of hours. He gives me the story of his life. in football and how he rose to the top of soccer Bladder joined FFA in nineteen seventy five. He was in his thirties. The FIFA president at the time was Joo Havalangee The Brazilian who had taken over in the nineteen seventies and FIFA still looked small. at Zurich headquarters had just twelve staff members Bladder rose fast inside that world. He started as technical director. In nineteen eighty one, he became General Secretary, which was basically the top administrator in the building Then in nineteen ninety eight, he took over from Habalangee and became FIFA president himself What does the Pident of FIFA really preside over First The most valuable thing FIFA owns. The biggest property maybe in all of sports is the men's World Cup which we're having again this summer And the Menzuel Cup brings in several billion every four years. And that money comes from television rights, sponsorship and marketing deals, licensing, hospitality, and ticket sales In FIFA's own finances, the World Cup is the engine For the twenty nineteen to twenty twenty two cycle FIFA brought in seven point six billion dollars mostly tied to the tournament In theory, that money is supposed to go back into the sport. to its two hundred and eleven member associations. to training centers, fields, equipment, travel, and youth programs. As we'll see That's not always what happened The president's other huge job is helping decide where the World Cup goes next Countries bid and make their case then FIFA chooses And that prize is so prestigious The governments line up for it even though economists have spent years warning Posting often doesn't pay off and it can even hurt tourism So to recap, the FIFA president oversees the bidding process for who gets to host sells the television and commercial rights, and decides how the money moves Back in the cafe outside Zurich, Simon is sitting across from Sepp Bladder taking it all in as he recounts his life and the ins and outs of his rise to the presidency. Bladder leans in as he talks holding eye contact gesturing with his hands, drawing Simon in with the ease of someone who has spent decades winning people over There's a warmth to it a sense that you've been brought into his circle But Simon knows that's not really why he's there at a certain point, The conversation has to move away from the polished life story and toward the harder chapter When that system came under real pressure when scrutiny intensified and when things inside FIFA began to come apart So Simon pivots to that period. and starts walking us through what they talked about If you're a president of a small federation, say, on a Caribbean island and there's maybe five hundred people in your country that play soccer, organized soccer. whichich is not unusual. You know, there's a lot of small countries in the world. And then FIFA typically gives each federation the same amounts of money. So whether you're Germany, China or island in the Caribbean Sea You get say twenty million dollars from the FIFA World Cup rights is the basic Now if you're the president of a small island football Federation You get twenty million dollars from FIFA. Well, you don't have to necessarily tell anyone put it in your pocket You get it paid into a bank account or shore bank account So a lot of that money disappears Simon says, it's not just the small countries. In the US as well, you had Chuck Blazer, who was the main American within FIFA. He was taking enormous amount of kickbacks So a lot of the money that was meant for US soccer was disappearing into Chuck Blazer's accounts The guy had two apartments at one point in Trump Tower paid for from FI for money One of which was for his cats. Bladatter understood is that power inside FIFA didn't come from the biggest countries It came from the votes. And there were a lot of them Dozens of smaller federations, each with the same vote as Germany or Brazil Many of them reliant on FIFA money to run And so over time, FIFA and Bladder built a system where worldld Cup money flowed out in the name of development, with so little oversight that it was ripe for abuse We should mention, the striking thing about Bladder is that he didn't seem driven first of all, by the fantasy of becoming super rich The reporting on him points instead to something more political A man obsessed with holding the presidency with staying at the center of the game being the one person world soccer ran through. Simon Cooper says There was never much of a real enforcement system here No serious mechanisms checking where the money was going No real appetite to look too closely ifer doesn'tready have that FfA doesn't want his most senior, most powerful people to be sent to jail I mean, freea exist to serve those people There's very little control on ThFA. It's just kind of a few guys in a cash box in Switzerland. Switzerland historically has left them alone to do what they want And under Bladder, that weak oversight didn't just create opportunities for abuse. It created leverage. Okay, you've given them money They vote for you as fee for presresident. And also, if you ever, one of them turns against you makes trouble for you He said, o well, I have some evidence that you've been stealing money And then you produce that evidence and the guy is disciplined and he disappears is where the fault lies Bladder personally pocketed every dollar that went missing in some federation far from Zurich There isn't a clear public finding that he knowingly approved of every theft The problem is that he ran a patronage system FIFA money went out, political support came back And the lack of oversight meant officials could misuse funds while the president got their loyalty That feedback loop is what made the whole structure so rotten By this point, the problem inside FIFA wasn't just money flowing out with too little oversight The real problem was that the World Cup was now one of the most valuable events in the world Countries wanted the prestige, the contracts, and influence that came with hosting it. And for years, the decision of who hosted rested not with all of FIFA's members, but with the small executive committee That's important becausecause by now VFA had spent years operating in a culture where money, favors, and political loyalty were all mixed up When countries competed for the World Cup, They entered a system that was already vulnerable By twenty ten, the stakes were unusually high FIFA was choosing two hosts at once twenty eighteen and the twenty twenty two World Cups The United States wanted twenty twenty two badly. put in a serious, well funded bid that carried the weight of the world's most powerful country And when Simon Cooper looks back on Sepp Bladder's presidency, This is the moment he returns to I think the big thing he regretsed is kind of the biggest moments of his tenure. It's december second, twenty ten in Zurich. Bladderer is on stage. The cameras are on He's about to announce the hosts of the next two World Cups big, splashy, slightly tacky event But for soccer This is the Oscars No one knows what's inside the envelope He takes one envelope And So the twenty eighteen FIFA Wor Cup Ladies and gentlemen, we will be organized in Russia And even that is unsettling Russia is already a controversial choice Fresh off the two thousand eight warar with Georgia and increasingly seen in the West as an authoritarian state using big global events to polish its image. That's not the real shock Plenty of people already suspected twenty eighteen might go to Russia. And then Ladder opens the second envelope for twenty twenty two The winner to organize The two twenty two FIFA World Cup is Paa. So when he pulls the word, the name Katar out of the envelope And he holds it up. And he says, Qatar. He is not smiling which you're supposed to smile. Obviously, you're emmailing host of the World Cup But he's thinking, oh my My twenty two guys have chosen Russia and Qatar. That reaction is telling becausecause Bladder had, yes, helped build the system But he actually didn't fully control every person inside it And now the executive committee had made two decisions that were going to bring enormous scrutiny Russia was controversial for many reasons was explosive. It's a tiny golf state, three hundred thousand Qataris This country is way too hot to host a summer World Cup. You know, temperatures is well above one hundred and ten degrees in summer And there's no soccer culture, you know, games there might attack three hundred spectators And for the United States to lose that vote to Qatar made the result much harder to brush off. This wasn't just surprising Suspicious evenven before the vote two FIFA executive committee members had been suspended over allegations they were willing to sell their boats Later, U. S. prosecutors would allege that bribes were paid in connection with Qatar's bid. At the cafe, Simon puts its to blladder directly Some executive committee members took money to vote for Qatar, right Bladder stays firm know that. he says I don't know People said they have given money in the know or not in the know Bladder is no fool Standing there on stage, he has to sense that this is the moment the scrutiny is about to become impossible to contain The Western countries are going to be very angry and the U.S is going to seek retribution and the US was quite right to seek retribution because bribes were paid. But I think if the US had won, the FBI would not have been been pushed to investigate bribbery within FIFA for years. FIFA's internal culture had been tolerated This vote forced the system into the open The same closed structure that let money move quietly through FIFA had now touched the most visible decision the organization could make Once Russia and Qatar won, the scrutiny intensified Investigators, journalists, and prosecutors started pushing harder Questions became sharper had voted for whom exactly Promises had been made. What shady payments were made As Simon sits across from him, taking it down nearly word for word Bladder says, quote, if the U.S had had the World Cup. then the whole organization of FIFA would not have been in such a critical situation the Americans bad losers attacked Viva Blatter wasn't charged in the main U. S. bribery case and was later acquitted in Swiss court But this was still the beginning of the end for him The system he had spent years mastering was now impossible to contain. spponsors start to pull back FIivA's leadership is unraveling And the legitimacy of the World Cup itself is now in question Days after being reelected president, Bladder announces he will step down After nearly twenty years at the top The system that kept him in power is the same system that brings him down Back outside the cafe, the morning has settled into something quieter Blder's driver was waiting by the car Press staff are also nearby inside The cafe staff who opened early for Bladder were still moving about Each one had been greeted with a handshake as Bladder walked in. a small procession of recognition a familiarity of a man who for a long time, was used to being at the center of things Tward the end of their conversation, Simon asks Spllatter one more question. How does he want to be remembered? By this point, blladder is tired, Simon tells me. So he switches to German And he says one word meaning proper or accurate If the judgment of him was truly correct She tells Simon. quote, You should say he's the man who brought international football into the world twoo billion followers In his telling, soccer's global rise, this massive shared thing wasasn't driven by television or history or the millions of people who played it. It was him Many thanks to Simon Cooper, author of World Cup Fver, A soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments for joining us in today's episode, and thanks to all of you for listening to fourteen forty Explores I'm Sony Kasum. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And let us know what you thought of this episode at podcasts at joinfortteen forty dot com fourteen forty Explores is a production of Frime media for fourteen forty media This episode was produced by Nicolo Minoni and edited by Dan Bobkof Our fact checker is Alice Jones, and our sound designer is Jake Howitt The executive producer at Rime is Dan Bob Koough, and the executive producers at fourteen forty are me and Drew Steigerwald.