If you have followed the trajectory of international football governance over the last decade, the question is not whether FIFA has lost control of the World Cup, but whether it ever truly had it. A British-led parliamentary inquiry has now demanded answers, poking at the carcass of an organisation that once fancied itself a sovereign power, a little Vatican for the beautiful game. The inquiry, led by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, is investigating the influence of nation states and private equity in the World Cup. The subtext: what is the point of FIFA if it cannot even choose its own host countries without bending to the will of autocrats and consortiums?
The parallels with the late Roman Empire are irresistible. There, too, the central authority persisted in name, but real power had long since devolved to provincial warlords and moneyed elites. FIFA today is a curia of ageing bureaucrats, presiding over a tournament that has become a vehicle for soft power projection and financial speculation. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was the harbinger: a tournament awarded under a cloud of bribery allegations, constructed with migrant labour, and staged in a climate that required it to be relocated in the calendar. That FIFA survived that farce is testimony to its institutional durability, but also to its irrelevance. The real decisions about the future of the World Cup are made in Riyadh, Beijing and the boardrooms of sovereign wealth funds.
Consider the current controversy: the 2034 World Cup is almost certain to be awarded to Saudi Arabia, a nation with a human rights record that makes Qatar look like a liberal paradise. The bidding process has been so opaque that it has prompted even the usually supine European associations to murmur unease. The British inquiry is a rare moment of accountability, but one suspects it will achieve little more than a few newspaper headlines. For FIFA is no longer a regulator; it is a brand licensing agency. It sells the rights to its tournament to the highest bidder and then washes its hands of the consequences.
The intellectual decadence here is staggering. We have convinced ourselves that the World Cup must be a global festival of fraternity, when in fact it is a piece of property, an asset to be leveraged. The modern World Cup has more in common with a leveraged buyout than a sporting contest. The host nation buys the tournament, often through opaque infrastructure contracts and generous sponsorship deals with FIFA's corporate partners. In return, it gets a veneer of international respectability and a platform to polish its reputation. That this exchange corrupts the very idea of fair play is obvious, but we are too enamoured of the spectacle to care.
What the British inquiry should ask is whether FIFA can ever reclaim its authority. The answer is probably no. The rot goes back to the 1990s, when FIFA began to treat the World Cup as a cash cow rather than a trust. The commercialisation under João Havelange and Sepp Blatter was a slow poison, and the antidote was never administered. The reforms after the 2015 corruption scandal were cosmetic: a new president, Gianni Infantino, who talks of transparency but governs by fiat. The World Cup remains a captive of forces far larger than FIFA, namely the geopolitical ambitions of petrostates and the insatiable appetite of global capital.
We are witnessing the death of international sport as a levelling institution. The World Cup was once a fantasy of equality: a small nation could dream of lifting the trophy. Now it is a spectacle designed to lubricate business deals and whitewash reputations. The British inquiry is a quixotic gesture, a parliamentary dart thrown at a hydra. But it serves a purpose: it forces us to ask whether we still believe in the thing itself, or only in its brand. The answer, I suspect, will distress anyone who still remembers the innocence of a football match.
