Review: FIFA UNCOVERED
Over the weekend, I watched the new Netflix documentary series, FIFA Uncovered, a deep look at the webs of corruption that lubricated the daily workings of football/soccer’s international federation for decades. The timing of this documentary’s release is obvious. The World Cup begins next week in Qatar, and while the four episodes span the 1970s to the present, one of its big questions is how this year’s World Cup ended up in an extremely small country without much of a football/soccer tradition and that is so hot in June and July that the event has to happen in November, disrupting the European league schedules.
FIFA Uncovered tells a grim story. Under the leadership of João Havelange (president of FIFA, 1974-1998) and Joseph “Sepp” Blatter (1998-2015), FIFA and world football are transformed from a near-amateur/modestly professional endeavor into a corporate behemoth where World Cups are awarded to unsavory regimes through bribery. The series is at its best when it moves away from Zurich and into the Global South, and the most compelling parts, for me especially, focus on the goings on within CONCACAF, the FIFA confederation for North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Jack Warner, the Trinidadian president of CONCACAF from 1990-2011, used the logic of FIFA’s ‘one country, one vote’ system to make the Caribbean unusually important within FIFA wranglings. He effectively became a kingmaker, until his partner-in-crime, FIFA General Secretary Chuck Blazer, reported him for handing out cash to Caribbean delegates, seemingly in exchange for their votes against Blatter in an upcoming presidential election. From there, things fall apart quite quickly for Warner and many others, culminating in the 2015 press conference where US Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a series of charges against a number of FIFA officials.
As good as it is, the documentary ties itself to a binary between amateur idealism, the loss of which the series implies we should mourn, and professional corruption. More concerning, that binary often reads as a choice between a game centered in Europe/South America and a game which includes the whole world.
The series depicts Havelange’s election as the moment when FIFA lost its way, since his English opponent Stanley Rous believed in the old amateur ideals. According to one interviewed expert, Rous made “mistakes,” like supporting the inclusion of apartheid South Africa within FIFA, which Havelange, a Brazilian, opposed. Is supporting an apartheid state an election campaign “mistake”? Or is it instead important insight into the worldview of amateurism? The amateur ideal was developed in the nineteenth century by European imperialists, who spread the games they had codified—mostly in England—around the world to train both colonial officials and colonized peoples. The series never gets into this, leaving behind an impression that the appropriate stewards of the game were Europeans who believed in an ideal straight from late-nineteenth-century high imperialism.
What’s more, the only people the show presents as advocating the expansion of the game into other regions were those involved in corruption, while the only figures we see embodying the amateur ideal are Europeans. To be sure, there were many Europeans involved in corrupt machinations—Havelange remains the only person not from Europe to serve as FIFA president. Still, the people that the series depicts as the real movers and shakers, the people caught moving money around, whose names are on emails and receipts, are almost all non-Europeans and are almost all people of color from the Global South. (Blatter is the major exception, but aside from a payment made to Michel Platini, for which Swiss authorities brought charges, he was not charged for his role in the larger affair.) If Blatter’s opponent in the 1998 presidential election, Lennart Johanssen, had a similar vision of bringing the World Cup to a wider array of nations, and especially to South Africa, the series does not let that be known. In other words, the series sets up an association that it should not, between organized corruption on a global scale and the development of the game beyond Europe and South America.
There are ways to tell a story about how corruption entered world football through a cynical appeal to ignored regions. For one, it should say directly that this particular appeal to ignored regions was cynical, but expanding the game’s presence around the world is essential. It could also have highlighted more instances where the players and local federations who were supposed to benefit from the largesse did not. There is an all-too-brief segment that focuses on Trinidad’s 2006 World Cup team. The players on that team had negotiated bonuses with Warner for the team’s participation in the World Cup, but that money disappeared. Presumably there were other incidents of this kind. Third, is there anyone who has a plan for separating football from these obscene amounts of money without leaving Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia behind? Could we hear from that person? Instead, the series is slightly too comfortable leaving us with the idea that the system we should mourn as the one that was happy to tolerate apartheid South Africa.
Throughout the series identifies some of the grimmest examples of sports washing, which is when authoritarian regimes use international sports competitions to legitimize their regimes. They mention the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The extensive section on Qatar’s bid delves into this as well, though since the filmmakers secured an interview with the chairman of Qatar’s successful bid, who is also a brother of the current emir of Qatar, we the viewers don’t get an especially clear cut answer on how many workers have died building stadiums. There is also precious little discussion of whether LGBTQ+ players, fans, and journalists will be safe during the event.
There is also a glaring omission: Russia, on which the series is nearly silent. There are images of Putin, and the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which took place on the same day, are both described as unexpected aberrations. (That said, it is weird to be asked to view England, the expected winners of the 2018 World Cup, and the United States, described by many interviewees as the best of the 2022 bids by a distance, as forlorn victims of corruption.) But the documentary ducks the Russia question entirely. Russia held the 2014 Sochi Olympics1 and the 2018 World Cup. Its Olympic athletes have competed under a different flag and anthem for the past two Olympics, because of state-sponsored doping. Russia has now invaded Ukraine. By effectively ignoring Russia, and focusing all sportswashing attention on Qatar, the film never severs the association it’s implying between the Global South and corruption.
Still, as the machine ratchets up to get us all excited about another World Cup and we start to hear journalists and former stars tell us that the only way to highlight human rights abuses is to do match commentary in the stadium, FIFA Uncovered does just enough to make us ask again whether we should be watching this World Cup at all.
When it comes to sportswashing, I think we need to pay closer attention to the awarding of Winter Olympics. Two of the last three have been in authoritarian states. The logistics around facilities construction and weather make Winter Olympics especially tricky prospects for democratic nations whose citizens are increasingly aware of the costs.