Lying.
Cheating.
Secret handshakes.
Dark alley deal-making.
Secret Swiss bank accounts.
Money laundering, racketeering, and bribes for millions of dollars.
No, we are not talking about the mafia.
We are talking about sport, what’s romantically called “the beautiful game.”
Beauty, it seems, fell in love with the beast, as so often happens when lots of money is
involved.
Let us start from the beginning.
It’s called football.
Some say it’s soccer, and they credit Americans for that term, but the Brits invented the
term soccer.
It comes from the “Football Association,” which became known as “Association Football.”
That was later shortened to “assoc” or “assoccer” and that’s how we got the
word soccer.
The Americans just called it what the Brits called it, but when people started using the
term football, the Americans had their own version of football, and they didn’t bother
changing it from soccer.
So, arrogant Americans - as Europeans like to say - didn’t actually invent the word.
The English did.
Over thousands of years, there have been games that involved balls.
The Mayans in Mexico had one, and at times that involved people dying.
The Chinese had a game with a ball, as did the Greeks and Romans, but the English invented
the game as we know it today.
They took a game that had earlier consisted of masses of players trying to kick a ball
from one end of a town to another, often with lots of fighting involved.
Then later, it became popular in British public (private to Americans) schools.
Two schools that played it were Rugby and Eton, where the posh folks go and predictably
end up ruling the country.
At Rugby, as the name might suggest, the emphasis was on using the hands.
At Eton, the emphasis was on using the feet.
Rugby had “the running game,” and Eton had “the dribbling game.”
It was still all a bit lawless, but over time, more rules were created, and then in 1863,
the Football Association was created in London, and universal rules were applied to the game.
It was similar to the game now, not including biased video assistant referees and multi-millionaire
men who can literally cry over nothing.
Also, even though it was invented in those schools for the elites, it became a very working-class
sport.
In 1888, the Football League was introduced, which has now morphed into the English Premier
League.
Some of the first teams were Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Everton, Notts County, Preston
North End, and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Preston won the league for the first two seasons, something their fans never got to see again.
Fast-forward a few decades, and most of Europe had its own leagues, as did countries in South
America.
European teams played against each other, with Spain’s Real Madrid being the bee’s
knees in the 1950s.
They’re not too shabby nowadays, either.
In 1904, the International Federation of Association Football, FIFA, was founded so European countries
could play each other.
By 1914, FIFA had added a few more nations, namely the US, South Africa, Argentina, Canada,
and Chile.
Football is now easily the most popular sport on the planet.
You can go just about anywhere and see kids kicking a ball about while using their sweaters
as goalposts, whether in the desert, in mountain villages, or on the beaches of tiny islands
in the Pacific.
Go to Timbuktu, Tajikistan, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, or Tibet, and you’ll find folks
screaming at the TV on weekends for their favorite team, often English teams, as the
Premiership is very popular worldwide.
No game in history has brought so many people together.
John Lennon once annoyed a lot of American folks by saying the Beatles were “more popular
than Jesus.”
Man, did that lead to an outcry!
If he’d said football instead of the Beatles, those angry bible-belters would have had to
admit he was right.
Football is more popular than Jesus by a long way.
It’s easily more popular than any other sport.
The English literary theorist Terry Eagleton once rightly said if religion was the opium
of the people in the past, then football is the crack of the masses today.
If people showed as much passion for solving social issues as they did in football, we’d
likely live in a better world.
This makes football extremely valuable.
And as you’ll soon see, many people have dipped their dirty hands into the feeding
trough of this beautiful game.
It’s thought about 256 million people play the game seriously.
FIFA says about 5 million referees are employed worldwide to watch over the games.
Just about every country has school leagues, village leagues, town leagues, pub leagues,
work leagues, and professional leagues.
It’s hard to find a country where it’s not played from north to south, and east to
west.
There are currently 211 national teams belonging to FIFA, so to get to the World Cup, they
have to go through a qualifying period.
In almost every World Cup, you get the usual suspects that qualify, but only Brazil has
qualified for all 22 World Cups.
Still, Germany, Argentina, Italy, Mexico, Spain, France, and England are usually there.
It’s always good when an outlier team qualifies, such as when Haiti did in 1974, Angola in
2006, Israel in 1970, Ukraine in 2006, Jamaica in 1998, and, this time, Qatar for the first
time.
Football brings us all together like no other sport, besides perhaps the Olympics.
Qualifying means a lot to many nations.
It’s a matter of pride.
And many people who don’t normally watch football tune in every 4 years to see their
national team play.
It is not just a game; it’s a culture, conflict, and a form of national pride.
It really has filled a hole that Jesus used to occupy.
For sure, it’s often tribal, and many bad things have happened off the field when the
tribes, aka, hooligans, have fought running street battles with each other.
This just shows you what it means to people.
As a famous former Liverpool manager once said, “Some people believe football is a
matter of life and death.
I am very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
If you don’t believe him, look at these stats.
For the 2018 World Cup held in Russia, 3.572 billion people watched in total from screens.
The final alone was watched live by a staggering 1.12 billion viewers worldwide.
32 teams qualified, and over 191 million people watched each of the 64 games on average.
In comparison, the 2021 Super Bowl was watched by 96.4 million viewers, quite a distance
from 1.12 billion.
When you have billions of eyes on screens, there’s more going on than a sports game.
As you’ll know, if you’ve watched the Super Bowl, advertising tends to get shoved
down your throat.
Everyone wants a piece of the money from major sporting events, which is why McDonald’s
currently has an ad campaign in 75 countries for this World Cup.
What’s more, brands want to sponsor the World Cup, knowing how many people will be
watching it.
A football is like a golden egg, and the goose that can help you lay it is FIFA, but let’s
just say all that cash floating around has led to some pretty dark practices.
As the golden egg fable tells us, greed usually leads to crisis.
Before we get to that crisis, you might want to know if the country that holds the World
Cup gets any help.
After all, stadiums need to be built, roads need to be fixed or built, public transport
systems have to be made, and security systems have to be created.
The media is reporting that Qatar will spend $220 billion in all, although it’s been
spending since it was told it would host the competition in 2010.
Still, with Qatar’s entire GDP being around $180 billion in 2022, the World Cup has been
one hell of an expense.
It’s truly the gamble of the century.
There is a total of $440 million in prize money for this World Cup.
$42 million goes to the winner.
$9 million each goes to all those teams that don’t even get past the group stage.
Then you have the $247 million for TV operations, $207 million for labor management, and many
more millions related to operations.
It’s reported that operating costs in total should be about $1.7 billion.
FIFA has said it will foot the bill for this part, so you have to ask how FIFA will get
its hands on that much cash.
A few decades ago, FIFA was just a bunch of gray-haired geezers who ran the organization
out of a small office.
They probably struggled to pay the person who cleaned the windows.
FIFA can pay out all this cash partly from all the money made from television.
It gets tons of cash from ticket sales, hospitality, and all those lucrative corporate sponsorships.
With all that in mind, it’s thought FIFA stands to make a total of $4.7 billion, which
is quite a lot more than its output of about $1.7 billion.
Still, it has to put a ton of cash into the countries that belong to the organisation
for the development of football and, in general, just to ensure they can keep playing football
following FIFA rules.
We’ll return to this later since FIFA has some rather embarrassing skeletons in its
dusty closet.
It’s reported that all those good-looking stadiums that Qatar has built and the ones
that have been improved have set the country back about $10 billion.
A further $36 billion has gone on security, telecommunications, a metro system, hotels,
a new airport, various kinds of hospitality, and more.
Of course, all that stuff will still be there after the World Cup, so in a way, it’s an
investment in what will be important infrastructure.
Still, not everything that glitters turns to gold.
Brazil spent a whopping $1 billion on the Mane Garrincha Stadium in Brasilia, and it’s
now being used as a bus depot.
Well, it was not long ago.
We don’t know if that has changed.
But if the World Cup shows how great things look in your nation, all those hotels and
all those new roads might be very profitable for many years to come.
It’s a gamble that most countries would likely take.
Amnesty International says about 1.6 million migrant workers helped build this new part
of Qatar, and it says many of them were underpaid, which has caused quite a stir of late.
Still, if you want to build that many things that fast, you need an army of workers, and
you need to spend big.
The next countries that’ll take this gamble are the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, who’ll
host the 2026 World Cup.
At least they can share the costs.
And we doubt they’d do it if they thought it would have a negative impact.
Countries make a lot of money back over the period the competition is being played.
Qatar estimates that 1.3 million people will travel to the country to watch the World Cup.
Each person will spend varying amounts of cash, but as one website points out, even
if they spend on average $300 a day, Qatar will only net about $1.56 billion.
Still, as we said, it might lead to the country becoming a major tourist destination in the
years ahead.
It can make use of all that extra development, and hosting the World Cup gives you a bit
more respect on the world stage.
Nonetheless, all the negative criticism that has come Qatar’s way of late could be said
to be a bit of a setback for the country.
If it had thought about that and treated its migrant workers better, there would have been
far fewer problems.
Ok, now we’ll talk about something we’ll call the World Cup’s Dark Economy.
First of all, that mammoth amount Qatar has forked out in preparing for the World Cup
is more than other nations in the past have paid by a long way.
It’s thought that Russia spent about $11.8 billion to prepare things and run the competition.
It’s hard to know just how much Russia made, but some reports state the competition added
something like $14 billion to the economy.
When it was held in the US in 1994, it’s thought LA alone saw an economic profit of
623 million dollars.
Many cities raked in the bucks while many other folks were hired for the competition
directly or indirectly.
Moreover, it was a good old time for the US to show off its great hospitality and for
soccer to see a rise in popularity, which was beneficial for developing the sport in
the US.
It’s always a gamble, but a gamble that countries are willing to take.
That’s why they make bids to host it for future tournaments.
And let’s remember, while not everyone will benefit from having a bunch of beer-guzzling,
rowdy Englishman fighting and throwing up on your cities’ streets, those that push
the bids will be doing so because they see millions of silver linings on potential dark
clouds.
But some of these people do business behind closed doors.
They deal with the Dark Economy while talking about the cohesive spirit of the beautiful
game.
Let’s just say that many of them are more interested in fancy cars than they are in
watching a phalanx of fit men chase after a leather orb for 90+ minutes.
Take, for the instance, the former FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke.
This nefarious Frenchman understood very well how much cash you could make from unofficial
deals, which is why he was given a suspended prison sentence not long ago.
It’s a long and complicated story, and it's likely not over yet.
Let’s just say he was accused of doing some shady World Cup broadcasting deals and was
also accused of transferring a cool $10 million to someone belonging to the South African
Football Association.
This bribe money was to ensure South Africa hosted the World Cup, and lo and behold, it
did.
How was that for a deal you can’t refuse?
This was mafia-style business conducted by men who talk about the wonderful spirit of
football and how it brings us all together.
Al Capone would have been envious of such skullduggery.
The money was supposed to go to developing sports in the Caribbean.
Still, it seems nearly half of it went to a Trinidadian supermarket chain, and a good
part went into corrupt officials' pockets.
South Africa's sports minister Fikile Mbalula said, “We have not bribed anyone to host
the 2010 World Cup.
Payment for projects cannot be construed as a bribe.”
All we’ll say is documents were forged, money went missing, bank accounts were stuffed,
and kids in the Caribbean didn’t see too many new soccer balls.
The South African businessmen got what they wanted, as did all the others involved.
In fact, a series of lengthy investigations have looked into dark money switching hands,
either for World Cups being hosted in certain countries or for companies wanting certain
contractual rights.
Remember, this is an event of intergalactic proportions.
Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but trust us, it’s worth a company’s while to get the
contract for TV rights, transport rights, selling beers and hotdogs, and building bathrooms
for hundreds of thousands of beer-blasted bladders.
We are not saying the whole thing is corrupt.
It’s not, not by a long way, but it seems some people just couldn’t resist getting
in on the action.
About 34 people have so far been indicted, but there will be more for sure.
This isn’t over yet, not by a long way.
Take, for instance, Aaron Davidson, a former Miami Soccer Executive.
He was arrested by the FBI in a FIFA corruption probe in 2015.
The indictment read that he and a few others had “corrupted the enterprise by engaging
in various criminal activities including fraud, bribery, and money laundering.”
11 FIFA officials were charged with similar crimes from countries such as Argentina, Brazil,
Trinidad and Tobago, and Costa Rica.
Companies were also indicted, firms that not surprisingly moved about in the rarefied spaces
of offshore tax havens.
More arrests followed, with various charges, but we’ll just use the umbrella term corruption.
Although on many of the indictments, you could see the word “racketeering,” which reminds
you of that old favorite organization we call the Italian American Mafia.
You can just imagine FIFA officials having sit-downs and telling each other to “Fuhgeddaboudit.”
We just hope that when the movie about the corruption scandal comes out, it starts with
an official saying, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to work for FIFA.”
In 2015, two of FIFA’s top dogs received an eight-year ban from all things football
related.
They were Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini.
Blatter had resigned anyway as FIFA head, but Platini had hopes of replacing him.
They weren’t done for corruption, but it seems FIFA had a lot of cleaning up to do,
so heads had to roll.
Bad things had happened on their watch, so they had to take some of the flak.
It remains to be seen if Qatar bribed its way to hosting the World Cup.
You have to wonder how a scorching country in the desert with no football history won,
and countries with rich football histories didn’t.
Qatar has been cleared regarding corruption, but there are those who believe FIFA officials
were paid to vote for Qatar.
Blatter has even said the vote was partly down to an arms deal between Qatar and France.
Meanwhile, the man behind Qatar's Word Cup has said things like this about his country’s
critics, “European countries feel they have a monopoly over the World Cup…We can say
that they are highly racist given that a country like Qatar, an Arab Islamic country, a small
country, was able to compete with large countries that consider that they are more deserving
of hosting this tournament.”
Still, football is like drug trafficking, the rewards are just too good not to take
the risk of getting involved.
Some people actually say that football is a drug, but the real opiate is the money.
The game is a mere stimulant.
Even so, we still can’t wait to watch this World Cup!
Now you need to watch “Soccer Player Killed for Scoring a Goal.”
Or, have a look at “What Does the Mafia Even Do Anymore?”