Bibliotequeando
31 - FIFA MAFIA: La Historia Criminal De La Institución Deportiva Más Grande del Mundo
28 Nov 2022
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Messi, Cristiano, Neymar, all these superstars in the Qatar 2022 World Cup fields. But despite all this talent, this book reminds us that the most powerful player in all of football is FIFA. Here the criminal story of the biggest sports organization in history.
Arrancamos con este nuevo episodio del podcast de Bibliotequeando, aquí les habla Ricardo Lugo, como siempre nos pueden seguir en las redes, arroba, bibliotequeando.
Hoy les traigo un libro bastante de la época, estoy apenas, depende cuando escuchen ustedes esto, pero yo estoy a unas horas de que empiece el primer partido del mundial, Qatar-Ecuador, y por supuesto está toda esta nube negra encima del mundial, obviando las cosas de Qatar como país y toda esta cosa de los derechos humanos, de por sí la FIFA...
It brings with it this stigma, this mark of corruption, public accusations, money, exchanging hands illegally under the table. And I wanted to get a book, this for me seemed to be the best book, explaining how these things happen. Because it's very easy to say that an organization is corrupt.
but you have to explain how they are, or it is good to understand at least how this type of activity happens. And this book, FIFA Mafia, seemed to me the best. Thomas Kirchner is an experienced sports journalist in Germany and he sought to answer that question. How is it that FIFA has become an extremely small organization, something so big, that is, the nations at a certain point in history
The United Nations had fewer registered countries than FIFA. So imagine, FIFA is a country, sorry, an organization that attracts more countries than the United Nations itself.
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Chapter 2: How did FIFA become the most powerful sports organization in the world?
And that was and that will also have implications later in history. But the intention, let's put it this way, the important thing about all this is that the intention of FIFA was never to make money. There wasn't much at that time with the money until the World Cup was invented. And this is because the World Cup represents almost 85% of FIFA's income.
Imagine, in a single event for 30 days, it gives you 85% of all the money you're going to make in the next 4 years. Therefore, FIFA depends a lot on the World Cup, and that's why there's so much money involved in that event. Of course, there will be corruption, but... The event as such was the first in its style.
Maybe the Olympics are similar, but no one had created an event of a single sport, of a single discipline, that was so popular throughout the world. And the first came in 1930. And from the first, or rather, from the second, there was already the mix between politics and corruption. First of all, there was no elimination system. The countries were invited.
So there were many, of course, political favors. You owe me this, you owe me that. We see countries like the United States in the pre-second world war and in the world cup when they didn't even have any kind of talent in football. But in the second world cup of history, in 1934, already Benito Mussolini, when fascism was at its peak, organized the world cup in Italy.
And the reports are very clear. He threatened many players from other teams, officials, referees, etc. to make sure that Italy would win. Italy, of course, won. So we are already seeing from the beginning of the World Cup, without intention, because I repeat, the intention of FIFA was not...
be a political organization, a sports organization, not very different from your local organization of softball in your city. That's what they wanted to be. There was never this intention of making so much money. But of course it becomes this global organization and the new president of FIFA arrives after the Second World War who was called Stanley Rouse. This Stanley Rouse
He said, we are getting too big, we are mixing with politics, we are mixing with dangerous people. Look who we made friends with, with Mussolini, look what happened in the Second World War. I think the Olympics are also the same, right? Two years after that World Cup, the 1936 Berlin Olympics come. With, of course, Hitler. So he says, we have to put this back a little bit.
And he created a policy in FIFA of basically zero politics. We cannot have any kind of political connection with any country. We cannot criticize it. We cannot applaud it. We are simply neutral. A specialty of Swiss neutrality, but in sports. The problem was...
that this brought him problems, let's say so, because after the Second World War, he accepts that Germany will be part of the football world again when many other countries like Poland, Holland, for obvious reasons, did not want Germany, after everything they did during the war, to have the right to play football again.
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Chapter 3: What are the origins of FIFA's corruption?
And of course, he starts the race, there are 10 people, or 8, I don't remember the number, but they are all white, except Jesse Owens, and Jesse Owens leaves everything behind and wins the gold, and of course another similar competition. I imagine that Hitler on the way home was not happy.
But the point is that he realized that if this works, giving shoes to all these athletes is a good way to make money, but there has to be a shortcut. And that's when he realized that the shortcut was the organizations. and the powerful sports officials.
And you realize that FIFA is going to be the largest organization in the world and it is directed in a very disorganized way, very unprofessional. This is a businessman, a man who works for Adidas, or rather the owner at this point in life, and he realizes that FIFA, despite its size, is not well structured and does not make money.
At this point, when Joao Avelanche arrives, he does not make money. Being a member of FIFA is simply a position So Horst Dassler, the founder of Adidas, is the one who buys the votes so that Joao Avalanche becomes president. And what is Dassler's intention? Well, I can buy him because Dassler very intelligently realizes that the money is not...
So much in the shoes, the money will be in the television, in the reach, in the sponsorship, in all these things that FIFA was already starting to do, but it didn't do it very well. So Dasler said, if I control this, if I have the head of FIFA, who is in charge of the contracts, of the television rights, of the marketing rights, he and I are going to be able to make a lot of money.
And it is estimated that Dasler, through his career, spent 40 million dollars in bribes with FIFA. And how did they do it? Well, Horst Dassler founded an ISL company, International Sports Leisure, a company that was in charge of buying the television rights and sponsorship of the World Cup.
So, Avalanche, or FIFA, sold the rights to Adidas, so to speak, and then Adidas, through ISL, resold those rights to other companies. So, it was a very good business for both. Illegal, of course, because Duster paid under the table to Havilland to make sure that the ISL was always the company that bought the rights and so it was for 40 years.
In other words, for 10 World Cups in a row, more or less. The ISL was the company that was always buying the rights to the World Cup and then they, in the case of television rights, the ISL goes and sells the television rights to the soccer channel that wants to pass it. For example, Fox Sports in the United States. Fox Sports Argentina, Meridiano, ESPN, etc.
So, ISL was left with 100% of that resale. They didn't have to pay anything to FIFA. And they did the same with sponsorships. I pay the exclusivity contract to sponsor the World Cup. I, as the ISL, In reality, it's Adidas, but me as the ISL. And then the ISL goes and resells that to other companies in the world. And they made a lot of money. And it seems like a lie. Everything was illegal.
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Chapter 4: How did Adidas influence FIFA's policies?
In this event so big in the world. And I think that for most of us it sounds very obvious, like, of course, the World Cup, there is a lot of money in the World Cup that has something special, but the way FIFA organizes the World Cup is very interesting. During a World Cup, they suspend the laws of the host country. And they also ask the country to cover all kinds of costs.
In other words, I, like FIFA, FIFA is basically a wedding organizer. They don't do anything. They just take your money and set up the party. That's all. But they didn't pay anything. They tell the country, let's say in this case Qatar, Qatar, you pay the stadiums. pays the infrastructure, the hotels, etc.
I bring you all these 32 soccer teams, their fans who are going to be a million, two million people and they are going to spend money in your country, etc. And I'm in charge of selling the tickets. So, because of the same power, FIFA can demand a country to change the laws. It happened with the Budweiser in Brazil. In Brazil it was illegal to sell beer in football stadiums.
Not for religious reasons, like in Qatar, but for reasons of violence. Violence in stadiums is so dangerous in Brazil that they said we can't... sell alcohol to avoid consequences. Now in Qatar they are doing the same, they are changing certain laws in Qatar, normally only alcohol can be obtained in the bars of the hotels, as you will see in the chapter of the next week.
I went to the World Cup of Russia in 2018, for example in Russia everyone has a gun on top, which I did not know. And there were letters that said, for this month of the World Cup, you can't have guns in the subway, you can't have guns in the street, etc. So FIFA has the power to demand from a country that changes certain laws. And at the same time they demand that they pay.
So let's give the example of Brazil 2014, the World Cup of eight years ago. Brazil spent 13 billion dollars to organize the World Cup. All that was in stadiums, infrastructure, hotels, renovation to airports, etc. FIFA sells the tickets. And they keep the money from the tickets. They don't give anything to the country.
And also, they sell to the ISL the television rights, sponsorship, and marketing. All of that represented around 4.5 billion dollars. And FIFA didn't spend anything. Nothing. 13 billion spent by a country. I, FIFA, sell 4.5 billion and I don't spend anything. And the ISL only spends the money that the sponsorship cost them. They put everything else in the resell.
And we are going to add the cost of bribes, which was also going under the table. But in this case of the 2014 World Cup, the ISL was no longer there. FIFA has a new model. But that is the typical World Cup. So, of course, for the ISL and for FIFA there was a lot of money and a lot of interest in this event.
And to give you an idea of how delicious it must be for FIFA to organize a World Cup, they demand that the country be an amphitheater, that they take away the taxes. Tu no me puedes cobrar impuesto. Yo voy a hacer 4.5 billones de dólares en tu país en un periodo de un mes. No me interesa, yo no voy a pagar impuesto. I'm not going to pay taxes on the sale of tickets either.
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Chapter 5: What role did Sepp Blatter play in FIFA's history?
Much less 13 billion, much less 220 billion, which is what Qatar has just spent. The reason is because, as I told you, all the money from the entries goes to FIFA, the commercial rights go to other people. And the people in the city really suffer.
In South Africa, for example, thousands of residents had to move, had to close their business because they were going to sell articles of other things in FIFA. And all those articles were made in China, they were not articles made in South Africa. Even the mascot of that World Cup, the bubucelas, if you remember the bubucelas, 90% of them were made in China.
The business of Match Hospitality, which is basically... a kind of hotel sponsored by FIFA, and everything is included, food, visits, you can meet players, it's all an experience, they go and book all the hotels, in this case Johannesburg, or right now in Qatar, Doha, the best rooms, the best hotels, and they block them.
And then they have the right, two days before the World Cup starts, to say, ah, well, They don't want it anymore and they let it go. And of course, in all that period, close before the World Cup started, a quarter that used to cost 55 euros in the case of South Africa, suddenly now cost 538 euros at night.
So it's something that affects the local people, plus the common and current football fans who would like to go to the event. But returning to the FIFA president of the time, Joao Avelanche. Joao created a development program that took the money from FIFA and gave it to countries that had to develop football. African countries, Latin Americans.
The idea sounds very nice, but the concept really was that I assure the votes of these countries. If I give money to these countries to create football, they will vote for me. As I told you at the beginning of the episode, the podcast. FIFA has always been very Eurocentric. And that word is used in different ways politically, but it's not a secret.
FIFA for 60, 70 years, always was, well, we're going to help the European countries first and then we help the rest, because this is where football comes from. Yoao tried to change that in part, maybe because he's Latino, but mainly because it was a way of staying in power. But of course, this was a way of being corrupt.
First and last Latin American president of FIFA, and of course he does corruption. Latin America, we don't hit one. His crimes were not discovered until much later. In fact, the ISL remained in contract with FIFA until the 1998 World Cup. And after it was proven that the ISL was doing illegal things for the 2002 World Cup.
And the 2006 World Cup in Germany was that that company, let's say, broke due to financial pressure, demands, etc. And Avalanche retires and he's never been arrested, really. He never, he escaped. But other characters, which we're going to talk about soon, weren't as lucky. So we're already in 98. Joao Avalanche is already 24 years in power.
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Chapter 6: How did FIFA manage the World Cup's financial aspects?
So Blatter offers himself as a kind of president and vice president, as if he were a political party saying, I'm going to be president, this is my vice president, he was always with Platini by his side, and he wins the elections, and that's how this modern era of the 21st century of FIFA begins. And he wins those elections because he realizes two things.
He wins the elections 111-80, basically 31 countries above his opponent. The reason why he wins is that he realized that, one, the democratic system of FIFA is useless. Each country in FIFA has a vote to elect the president. So each representative of each country elects his vote and says, I want you to be the next president. Those elections are made in Switzerland.
Normally, sometimes they are televised and it is decided who is going to be the new president of FIFA. The problem with, let's say, democracy is that everyone is worth the same. So England is worth the same as Haiti. Trinidad and Tobago is going to be the same as India, countries with totally different impacts on football and different economies, different positions.
So if you go to a place like CONCACAF, where Central America or North America, all those barbados, ancient islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, you arrive and tell them, to a complete block, vote for me, and there you have 30, 40 votes without having to dialogue with Europe, Asia, etc.
At the same time, he also realized that there were many countries that still did not have money, that there was a lack of returning more to the countries below, and he started, or rather, well, he started the program, but in his campaign, he said that he was going to give $250,000 a year to each country, plus $400,000 a year to build academies and offices. All that money, of course, for football.
And he, as Secretary General, knew that that money could be given, one. And two, he knew that people were going to vote for him if he did that, or at least the people who imported it. A kind of image From Robinhood, but there's always the doubt, like, what happens when you give money to people like that? If you give a country $650,000 a year, what's going to happen?
And what happened was mixed results. There's the example of Kenya, the African country, that literally those $400,000 of construction, FIFA gave them to them. When they went to look a year later, how the construction was, there was nothing. There were chickens and a football, literally nothing, sand and not even any intention of building something in that area.
But there are other countries that have improved. Senegal, Costa Rica, Ghana, many countries where their football has grown thanks to this program. Cape Verde is the main example, a country that did not have a single field, an African country that did not have a single field in 1998. Today it has 25 and all have been paid for this Goal program.
The same Wales and Iceland, European countries that had never gone far in any type of sporting event, have begun to rise and have said their federations, which is thanks to this program. In fact, even the new president of today, Gianni Infantino, who is the current president of FIFA, has increased that amount by 4. So that they have an idea of the political power that this program has.
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