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Bayle & Rayner (2016) Sociology of A Scandal. The Emergence of Fifagate
Bayle & Rayner (2016) Sociology of A Scandal. The Emergence of Fifagate
To cite this article: Emmanuel Bayle & Hervé Rayner (2016): Sociology of a scandal: the
emergence of ‘FIFAgate’, Soccer & Society, DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2016.1228591
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Soccer & Society, 2016
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This article examines the social forces underlying FIFAgate. Why do corrupt
practices, which are often highly consolidated or even institutionalized, suddenly
become scandalous? What is a scandal? Why did FIFA fall into crisis in 2015
and not before? To answer these questions, it is necessary to look at the sequence
of thrusts and parries between all the parties involved. Our analysis embraces the
notion that social processes are based on relationships in order to provide insights
into why and how denunciations can lead to long-tolerated corrupt practices sud-
denly becoming compromising enough to force an organization’s leaders to
implement measures that would have previously been unimaginable. We use mul-
tiple sources to examine the emergence of FIFAgate and the way FIFA overcame
previous critical situations, describing how FIFA neutralized earlier allegations
and developed a remarkable ‘resilience’ to scandal. Finally, we analyse the suc-
cessive mobilizations whose domino effect led to the emergence of FIFAgate and
the measures FIFA took to contain the scandal. Our research enabled us to draw
up a new theoretical model for analysing corruption scandals.
Introduction
Christian Favre, journalist, radio news presenter: ‘To conclude, does Sepp Blatter, as
we are often told, does he run his FIFA honestly or not?’
Joël Robert, journalist, head of the sports desk: ‘Well, you know, he runs it honestly
because, logically and legally, there have been legal proceedings, but Blatter and FIFA
have never been caught out. There are still proceedings under way. I tell you that
Blatter will be re-elected very comfortably. He will keep going. He has been at FIFA
for 30 years, president since ’98, but, clearly, if a corruption or some other sort of scan-
dal breaks, well, in that case, Blatter will fall from his throne. But, at the moment, he
is solidly seated on that throne.’ (28 August 2014)1
This exchange between two journalists speaking live on Swiss public radio shows
that suspicions of corruption within the Fédération Internationale de Football Associ-
ation (FIFA) had already emerged before the ‘FIFAgate’ scandal broke in 2015.
More than just rumours, leaks by whistleblowers had led to explicit allegations by
‘critical voices’ (Andrew Jennings, Change FIFA, Transparency International, Play
the Game) and police enquiries. In fact, for many years, media investigations, nota-
bly by the BBC, The Guardian and The Sunday Times, had uncovered evidence of
corrupt practices within FIFA, although they had never managed to directly incrimi-
nate the organisation’s Swiss president, Sepp Blatter. The ability of the world’s most
whereas others see it as a vicious circle, especially for public confidence. Outside
the developing world, corruption is often analysed in the light of its supposed influ-
ence on social inequalities.6 The resulting focus on costs (economic, political,
social) within comparative quantitative studies raises the risk of decontextualization.
In the wake of the corruption indices produced by Transparency International,
researchers are increasingly using surveys and questionnaires to examine ‘ordinary’
citizens’ perceptions of small-scale and large-scale corruption.7 Here, corruption is
seen as contributing to people’s distrust of both government authorities and
companies.
These normative tendencies are emphasized even more in research focusing on
sport8, which tends to be carried out from a problem-solving perspective. This is
why revelations by investigative journalists9 and NGOs10 have been followed by
intense research into problems such as hooliganism, racism, doping, match-fixing
and corruption. For example, Masters11 argues that organized sport has entered a
fifth evolutionary phase – criminalization. In this latest phase, public policy needs to
grapple with what constitutes corruption in what has historically been a private mar-
ket. According to Becker12, FIFA can only restore public confidence by setting up a
world anti-corruption agency in conjunction with other sport governing bodies.
Research in the field of sports management, much of which has focussed on FIFA
and the IOC, has identified links between corruption and deficiencies in the control
and accountability of international sports organizations13, as well as looking at the
possible positive effects of social responsibility.14 With these tendencies among
scholars (problem-solving, focus on transgressions and/or on media, i.e. media-cen-
trism), sociology of sporting scandals is in limbo.15
Research into corruption, whether in sport or other sectors, has furthered under-
standing of the phenomenon, but the feasibility of denouncing corruption is an issue
that is never addressed. Nevertheless, we see this as a fundamental point in under-
standing the mechanisms underlying corruption scandals: the practices (misappropri-
ation of funds, bribery, breach of trust, fraudulent use of property, etc.) covered by
this polysemous word only become scandalous when the people who see them as
scandalous manage to gain support in several social spheres. Despite the common
understanding of the word, and in contrast to most scientific papers on corruption,
which usually confound the committing of scandalous acts with scandal16, it takes
much more than revelations of wrongdoing to create a scandal and thereby strip the
people and institutions accused of these acts of their legitimacy – indignation, just
like denunciation, mobilization or sanctions, cannot be taken for granted.
mobilizations that take place in and between several social sectors.19 A scandal can
occur even if the ‘scandalous facts’ are unfounded (e.g. due to false accusations),
but most ‘scandalous facts’ (such as paying bribes) fail to lead to scandals. Conse-
quently, it would be misleading to equate scandal with transgression. Multisectoral
mobilizations are essential if a dispute between a few individuals is to turn into a
scandal, but they are rare because they are subject to the difficulties facing any col-
lective action, which are exacerbated when the practices being challenged are pro-
tected by strong collusions within and between powerful institutions. Such
collusions are not necessarily illegal or explicit. Often, they are based on the shared
expectations of leaders, who tend to close their eyes to the other party’s activities
(accepted as a field of competence), feeling that they would have acted in a similar
way. These tacit agreements contribute greatly to the consolidation of institutions.20
As a result, only a miniscule fraction of scandalous acts result in scandals. Moving
the focus from transgressions to the protagonists’ perceptions and mobilizations
makes it easier to consider another central property of scandals, that is their configu-
ration as a series of emergent properties, that is, feedback loops in which ‘causes’
produce ‘effects’ which in turn affect the ‘causes’. This process is extremely impor-
tant in determining changes in how the protagonists perceive the situation.21
A scandal depends on an entanglement of independent and reversible points of
view produced in the light of mobilizations. Without these mobilizations, there is no
scandal; if the mobilizations stop, the scandal stops. These mobilizations, which cre-
ate and re-create each scandal, are highly dependent on changes in the protagonists’
evaluations of the situation. They are linked to oscillations in perceptions of what is
(im)possible,22 that is, evaluations that arise out of the action via the senses, calcula-
tions and habitus23 of interconnected players. If an individual’s opinion of what is
(un)feasible convinces that person to relay an accusation, other parties could do so,
too, because people base their actions on their perceptions of what others are doing
or will do. People are persuaded or dissuaded to move in a certain direction by their
assessments of what others are likely to do and of what is/is not doable. Because
perceptions of what is possible are interconnected, they can change very quickly,
with one perception reflecting on another. People’s contributions and their depen-
dence on the ‘context’ (i.e. the meaning they give to their environment) depend on
this reflective interplay. People act by observing others and react to fluctuations in
their expectations. This is why scandals can abruptly produce a collective align-
ment24 and, by doing so, invert the balance of power. For example, the Festina
affair, which rocked the 1998 Tour de France, came to light because the ‘law of
silence’ that had long been obeyed by most of the protagonists (cyclists, doctors,
sports managers, journalists, organizers, politicians, etc.) was suddenly broken when
the Festina team doctor was arrested in possession of a stock of performance-
enhancing drugs and then cooperated with investigators by giving details of how
teams obtained banned substances. Our main thesis is that analysing these variations
in what the different players are prepared to do will provide insights into how scan-
dals of any sort erupt, grow and die out. Hence, accurately mapping the sometimes-
disconcerting variations in the feasibility of denouncing transgressions is central to
understanding scandal, especially for explaining the collapse of collusions – a
crucial factor in removing a protagonist’s legitimacy. For example, in 2007, the cred-
ibility of the organizers of the Tour de France was threatened by desertions and
threats of desertion by the media (two German television networks suddenly stopped
broadcasting the race), sponsors (two major German companies stated they would
Soccer & Society 5
not renew their sponsorship), the IOC (leading to a rumour that cycling would be
excluded from the Olympics) and the Danish cycling federation (which excluded
yellow jersey holder Michael Rasmussen from the national team for the world cham-
pionships), etc.
An often-neglected aspect is that scandals evolve as they progress. Whether to
continue or halt one’s efforts, accuse or remain silent, desert or stay loyal, deny,
counter-accuse or retract – all these decisions depend on their makers’ evaluations
of the situation. These inter-subjective evaluations may be approximate and fickle,
but they are crucial to the relations between protagonists. Swept along by unforesee-
able changes in relationships, new projections lead people to adopt a (new) position
on whether to support or oppose a public accusation. A scandal’s dynamic depends
on these micro-turning points.25 This type of self-generation means that each scan-
dal, rather than following a pre-established path, can be viewed as an open process
whose players, location, duration, stakes, balances of power and outcomes are not
fixed in advance. Instead, they depend on a complex series of thrusts and parries
with uncertain and partly contingent outcomes. The size of a scandal depends on the
size of the mobilization and the amplitude of the oscillations in perceptions of what
is (im)possible. These two processes are correlated as the more the occupiers of a
field are confronted with intrusions by outsiders, the more likely it is that these
intrusions will affect their assessments and actions. Thus, in the case of the scandals
affecting the Tour de France, the sudden and unexpected scrutiny of their actions by
journalists, police officers, customs officers, investigating magistrates and sports
ministers, etc. may have increased the temptation felt by some competitors to spill
the beans about doping. Using a relational perspective to move on from studying the
object of scandals to studying scandals as an object allows this type of dynamic to
be resituated in the continuum of social relations. A scandal is a reconfiguring pro-
cess involving the recombining of these relations between and within several sectors.
The motors of this dynamic – multisectoral mobilizations and oscillations in percep-
tions of what is (im)possible – co-vary by varying the feasibility of denunciation.
Scandals can severely threaten the targeted institution, potentially wreaking
havoc on its hierarchy, rules and agenda. This is why officials have to review their
positions and, whether they like it or not, set in motion institutional countermeasures
(implement reforms, suspend targeted staff, adopt or strengthen a code of ethics,
etc.) in order to contain or take control of the accusation, as the desectorization gen-
erated by a scandal could be extremely dangerous for the institution’s future. From
the officials’ point of view, the effectiveness of these countermeasures, which are
sometimes very costly as they go against powerful interests (in 2012, the Union
Cycliste Internationale stopped protecting Lance Armstrong after years of collusion),
is measured in terms of their ability to stop the multisectoral mobilizations.
Reducing these mobilizations and oscillations in perceptions of what is (im)possible
allow the institution under threat to overcome the crisisby enablingit to regain some
of its autonomy. If this is not achieved, the crisis worsens and becomes systemic
(see Figure 1).
Our case study examines an on-going scandal and therefore faces a number of
methodological problems, including the protagonists’ lack of time and/or reticence
to give interviews, no access to archive records, a fluid chronology and dependence
on journalistic sources. However, this situation has the advantage of not being
susceptible to the ‘retrospective illusion’.26
6 E. Bayle and H. Rayner
No reaction
Restricted
Denunciation Sectoral crisis
mobilisation
Multisectoral
Systemic crisis
mobilisation
Oscillations
(Breaks in)
in perceptions of what
collusion
is (im)possible
Institutional
ripostes
FAILURE SUCCESS
Our sources for this research were newspaper articles from around the world
(Switzerland, France, United States, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom – approx. 500
articles), FIFA files, general investigative media (Mediapart in France, Il Fatto
Quotidiano in Italy, Der Spiegel in Germany, Sunday Times and The Guardian in
the UK, New York Times in the USA, Le Temps in Switzerland), specialist sports
newspapers (e.g. L’Equipe and France Football), materials produced by some of the
Soccer & Society 7
prolong infighting, but they are of no real consequence. In 2000, Germany was
narrowly awarded the 2006 World Cup (by 12 votes to 11) ahead of South Africa,
possibly thanks to the abstention of the Oceania Football Confederation’s president,
the New-Zealander Charles Dempsey. One of the reasons Dempsey gave for his sub-
sequent resignation from the executive committee was the pressure he had been put
under. In 2002, it was the turn of FIFA secretary general, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, to
resign after noting in his report ‘abuses of power’ and Blatter’s ‘dictatorial’ manage-
ment. In May 2011, Blatter’s challenger, Bin Hammam was accused by Chuck
Blazer, the secretary general of CONCACAF, of attempting to buy votes at a meet-
ing of Caribbean representatives by distributing envelopes containing $40,000. He
allegedly did this with the complicity of Jack Warner, who was suspended from
FIFA during an internal enquiry and who then accused Blatter of making a donation
of $1 million to his confederation. The accusation was quickly swept aside and
Bin Hammam withdrew shortly before the election, making Blatter the only
candidate.
Accusations can also come from whistleblowers who take part in or who witness
illicit transactions. In a documentary shown on the German public television channel
ARD on 4 May 2015, a former employee of the Qatar bid repeated her accusations
(published in France Football in December 2014), this time naming three African
members of FIFA’s executive committee who had been offered $1.5 million ‘encour-
agements’ by the Qatar delegation. Nevertheless, no sanctions were handed down.
More commonly, FIFA is called to task, or even targeted, by critical reports from a
number of institutions (FATF, 2009; Transparency International, 2011). Because
these accusations are not just allegations by journalists and/or insiders and are in the
public domain, FIFA is forced to react.
Through a repertoire of actions ranging from threatening libel suits or sacking
one or more administrators to adopting a code of ethics or reforming the federation’s
rules, FIFA is usually successful in quashing such accusations. Thanks to its crisis-
management experts, the co-option of members of internal commissions of inquiry
and (self-)censorship, investigations intended to get to the bottom of allegations
always remain confidential and only the resulting decisions are divulged. This is also
the case for external checks, such as those carried out by the auditors KPMG, which
revealed hardly any irregularities in FIFA’s accounts for 2007–2010. Critical voices
within FIFA are removed by pushing people to resign (Michel Zen-Ruffinen in
2002, the marketing director Guido Tognoni in 2003), expelling representatives who
lack protection, often those from small federations, launching disciplinary proce-
dures, which have been unending since 2013 to the detriment of officials from Sri-
Lanka, Mongolia, Nepal, India and Tahiti, and, more rarely, sanctioning important
officials (vote carriers).
The reforms introduced by FIFA are one of the main ways in which it responds
to mobilizations it sees as hostile. An ethics committee and code of ethics were set
up in 2004, with revisions added to the code of ethics in 2006, 2009 and 2012. In
2011, following Blatter’s campaign promise to steer the ‘FIFA boat back into clear,
transparent waters’, an independent governance committee was formed, presided by
Mark Pieth, a Swiss university professor and expert in governance. Some of the rec-
ommendations contained in Pieth’s report,36 including dividing the ethics commis-
sion into investigatory and adjudicatory chambers, were adopted. The amendments
to FIFA’s statutes were put to the vote at the federation’s congress on 25 May 2012
and massively approved. They included strengthening the audit and compliance
Soccer & Society 9
The collusion between Warner and Blazer collapsed in 2010 when Warner supported
Qatar’s bid for the World Cup and Bin Haman’s bid to become FIFA president,
while Blazer had supported the United States and Blatter.
In conjunction with the publication (on the Internet) of this indictment, the Swiss
police, acting on an American warrant, arrested seven officials in a luxury hotel in
Zurich (New York Times journalists, tipped off by Brooklyn’s district attorney, were
at the scene). FIFA’s head office was searched under a warrant issued by
Switzerland’s attorney general, who was investigating the attribution of the 2018
and 2022 World Cups, while the US authorities searched CONCACAF’s headquar-
ters in Miami. At the same time, the head of the DoJ, Loretta Lynch (who, impor-
tantly, had supervised the investigation as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn) held a
news conference in New York alongside the heads of the FBI, James Comey, and of
the IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division, Richard Weber, who spoke of a ‘World
Cupof fraud’ spanning ‘at least two generations of soccer officials’. Lynch stated:
‘the indictment alleges corruption that is rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted both
abroad and here in the United States’.40 The cooperation between the Swiss and
American authorities surprised many commentators (‘Switzerland is playing an
unexpected double role’41), as there was no solid legal basis for it. In fact, this
action was part of the wider cooperation between the USA and Switzerland that had
arisen out of the banking scandals involving Swiss UBS (fined $780 million) and
Crédit Swiss (fined $2.6 billion, paid in 2014 in order to keep its trading licence in
the USA), which were prosecuted under the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance
Act (FATCA), which came into force in 2014.
This operation, which was unprecedented in terms of the resources employed
and its multi-level coordination, led to an almost immediate response from FIFA.
On 27 May, the ethics commission’s adjudicatory chamber temporarily suspended
11 FIFA representatives. Another three officials were suspended between 28 May
and 2 June. FIFA’s director of communications, Walter de Gregorio, repeatedly
stated that Blatter was not implicated and many people, including Blatter’s declared
opponents, believed he would be re-elected president once the scandal had blown
over. At the end of a congress marked by an unprecedented media mobilization and
demonstrators brandishing signs reading ‘Game over for Blatter’, the president’s re-
election (by 133 votes against 73 votes for Prince Ali, who decided not to force a
second round) suggested that the ‘unbudgeable’ would extricate himself again:
‘Despite the scandals, Sepp Blatter manages to win’,42 ‘The secrets of the unsink-
able “captain”’.43 Nevertheless, the chairman of the English Football Association
said he would be ‘very surprised’ if Blatter were to last more than two years.
However, the scale of desertions exceeded all expectations, precipitating Blatter’s
fall. In fact, most Swiss newspapers had already turned against him by 28 May: ‘Mr
.Blatter, go’ was the title of the editorial of the Vaud canton’s biggest daily paper,
24 Heures; ‘Blatter has lost his credibility’ was the headline in Le Matin, while an
editorial in Le Temps announced ‘The end of impunity’ and L’Hebdo wrote of ‘Sepp
Blatter’s seven deadly sins’. In the UK, members of parliament called for a boycott
of the 2022 World Cup and, as a gesture of protest, England’s FIFA representative
David Gill refused to serve on the executive committee. At the same time, FIFA’s
corporate sponsors (more than a third of its revenues) voiced their fears by threaten-
ing to review their sponsorship, as the scandal had given them the opportunity to
renegotiate their contracts. Long-term critics of the ‘FIFA system’ were even
harsher, with Guido Tognoni writing: ‘for the last 40 years, since Havelange was
12 E. Bayle and H. Rayner
enthroned, FIFA has had a culture of corruption. Blatter didn’t start it, but he has
always tolerated corruption. It was a way of staying in power’ (he estimated
Blatter’s annual ‘salary’ to be CHF15 million).44 Two members of the Swiss parlia-
ment put forward an action plan to combat corruption in sport and in its 3 June edi-
tion The New York Times noted ‘the widespread impression of FIFA as a corrupt
rogue state’. At the same time, the European newspapers behind many of the inves-
tigations of FIFA renewed their enquiries (The Guardian and The Sunday Times in
England, Mediapart in France, Il Fatto Quotidiano in Italy, Der Spiegel in Germany,
etc.). Some referred to ‘practices worthy of a mafia clan’,45, and it became quite
common to draw parallels between FIFA and a mafia organization. Others, which
had supported Blatter, distanced themselves from him.
Nevertheless, some collusions continued. By sitting next to Blatter at the opening
of the congress and having defended him the day before at the Swiss Media Forum,
Switzerland’s Minister of Defence and Sports Ueli Maurer, showed his continuing
support, while Peter Gilliéron, the president of the Swiss Football Association and a
member of UEFA’s executive committee, carefully watched his words. In the eyes
of some of FIFA’s staff, Blatter had not lost his credibility and on 3 June he was
applauded at FIFA headquarters. The same day, Switzerland’s Council of States (the
upper chamber of parliament) refused, by 23 votes to 22, to follow the Federal
Council’s recommendation on prosecuting private corruption, which would not,
therefore, be prosecuted automatically. It seemed it was still possible to publicly
acknowledge instances of give and take. For example, the president of the French
Football Federation, who had supported Blatter’s election because France had just
been awarded the 2019 Women’s World Cup, claimed: ‘our relations with FIFA are
extremely good (…) I like to return a favour when someone has given us
something’.46
Four days after his re-election, Blatter, in a dramatic turn, announced: ‘I have
decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective congress’. This deci-
sion was taken following the accusations levelled at FIFA’s secretary general and
Blatter’s right-hand man, Jérôme Valke, in an article in The New York Times about a
payment of $10 million to CONCACAF in 2008 as a ‘commission’ in exchange for
votes to award the 2010 World Cup to South Africa. This turnaround made
denouncing FIFA much easier: ‘Blatter, the fall of FIFA’s big boss’, ran the headline
in Le Nouvelliste on 3 June, a daily where Blatter worked in the 1960s,47 with the
American media suggesting that the FBI was investigating Blatter. The destruction
of Blatter’s and FIFA’s reputations led Swiss political leaders to voice their fears
about Switzerland’s image.48 The heads of several Western governments (especially
in the UK, France and Germany) simultaneously came out against Blatter, some-
thing that only the British prime minister, in 2010, and the Brazilian president,
Dilma Roussef, had done previously. On the other hand, President Putin gave Blatter
his official support against ‘yet another flagrant attempt (by the United States) to
extend its jurisdiction to other states’.49 These official positions reflected other pow-
erful geopolitical interests, with governments considering sport an important vector
of soft power.50
Many people quickly saw how vulnerable FIFA had become, a turnaround
(effect) resulting from a series of defections (cause), which, in turn, facilitated these
defections, hence the effect acted on the cause in a form of expanding loop. It is in
this way, as an emergent process, that a scandal can so rapidly disrupt a powerful
institution. The crisis achieved a dimension never before seen at FIFA, which had to
Soccer & Society 13
was found. Nevertheless, FIFA’s new strongman felt he had to resign following
Gianni Infantino’s decision at the FIFA Congress in Mexico City in May 2016,
which passed an amendment giving FIFA’s executives the power to appoint and sack
the presidents of the ethics and audit commissions. Hence, the FIFA crisis appears
to be continuing, as its new executives, in contrast to the IOC in 2000, have been
unable to contain the never-ending series of disputes (revelations at the beginning of
June: $80 million of suspicious payments to Blatter and two other top officials, con-
troversy over the new president’s salary and the appointment of the new secretary
general, accusations by Blatter of rigging of the draws for major competitions, etc.).
Conclusion
We have shown how, for many years, FIFA’s executives managed to contain the
mobilizations that formed around allegations of corruption. However, when these
mobilizations became multisectoral, on 27 May 2015, they created an uncontrollable
and self-perpetuating serial-feedback process that, most importantly, made it easier
for new denunciations to emerge. Hence, within just a few weeks, numerous protag-
onists with a variety of motives came forward to level accusations at FIFA’s top
executives, leading (at last) to a vehement public outcry against the corrupt practices
within the federation.
The primary objective of this article is to propose a new theoretical framework
for analysing scandals. A scandal is both the product and the producer of changing
anticipations, a complex, moving and disruptive reconfiguration of the relationships
inside and between several fields. As for any huge scandal, FIFAgate can be under-
stood in terms of a sequential phase of multisectoral mobilizations (across the legal,
political, economic, media and sport fields) linked to major changes in the actors’
perceptions, which allow them to do things they would previously considered
unthinkable. These new perceptions are conducive to new kinds of action. They are
self-fulfilling, but still very contingent and reversible. The feasibility of denunciation
can vary enormously during this process, which is why scandals are unanticipated
and uncontrollable. They also tend to occur in clusters, as can be seen in the web of
scandals that emerged in the wake of FIFAgate (IAAF in November 2015; match
fixing in tennis January 2016; doping by British athletes in April 2016).
The ultimate lesson to be learnt from FIFAgate is that the involvement of one or
more powerful institutions (in this case, the US DoJ and FBI) is a necessary but
insufficient condition for a scandal to occur, as mobilizations must be multisectoral
and simultaneous if they are to generate a crisis within the collusions that underlie
the formation of a culture of corruption within an institution.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Radio Suisse Romande, Forum, August 28, 2014.
2. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practise.
3. Rayner, De quoi les scandals sont-ils faits? (From what scandals are made?).
16 E. Bayle and H. Rayner
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