Gallo Images—Getty Images Former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov plays a game of chess with school children on March 25, 2012 in Pretoria, South Africa.
The corrupt games must not go on
Sepp Blatter was the president of the international football federation, FIFA, for 17 years before he announced his resignation last week. His resignation came in the wake of two notable events: a set of U.S. indictments against top FIFA officials for bribery and racketeering and Blatter’s re-election by a wide margin. This sequence is a perfect illustration of the sense of impunity Blatter and FIFA enjoyed for so long. That Blatter resigned after such a show of bravado likely indicates the scope of the charges yet to be announced.
The global attention this scandal has received reflects football’s status as the world’s pastime. “The beautiful game” has a unique position due to its overwhelming popularity, and the financial and political clout that come with that popularity. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) may be more prestigious, but the Olympic Games pale in comparison to the day-to-day passion people all over the world feel for football. FIFA has exploited that spiritual element to build a temple of corruption, one that was practically immune to the law until now.
Perhaps it took a nation with more respect for the rule of law than for the game to achieve this long-overdue breakthrough. Football is such an outlier historically in the U.S. that it even goes by another name here. But it doesn’t matter if the growing list of indictments against FIFA officials call the sport soccer or football. The corrupt games must not go on.
International sports federations often exist in a strange, extraterritorial legal netherworld. Their power structures are opaque, and those who arrive to power
are often quick to rig the system to perpetuate their control. The myriad sources of cash—public and private, individual and corporate—combine with the lack of institutional transparency and personal accountability to create an ideal breeding ground for corruption.
I spent most of my 30-year professional chess career battling with FIDE, the international chess federation, and its army of entrenched and shady bureaucrats, who took over seamlessly from their Soviet predecessors. In 1993, as world champion, I helped launch a new professional association in an attempt to free chess and its leading players from FIDE. Although the new organization enjoyed some modest successes, the schism it created in the chess world damaged the sport’s reputation.
By 1996, FIDE was back in full control under the chess world’s version of Blatter, president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Russia, who has now been in charge for nearly 20 years. I ran against him in 2014 on a well-funded reform ticket, crisscrossing the globe for a year. It was all for naught, unfortunately for me and for the chess world, which continues to be run by those who take resources out of the game instead of bringing them in.
Ilyumzhinov, like Blatter and IOC president Thomas Bach, received personal support from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and Russian embassies around the world mobilized against my campaign. Chess has a special place in Russian culture, but the real interests of those in charge are power, prestige, and money.
Dictatorships have a longstanding mutual affection with great sporting spectacles. The “Nazi Games” of 1936, when the Olympics were held in Berlin, are the most famous example. It’s less widely known that imperial Tokyo and fascist Rome were the next scheduled hosts of the Games, which were canceled due to World War II. Argentina’s brutal military junta acquired the 1978 World Cup and covered the city in propaganda.
