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by Roger Pielke, Jr.
Transparency International
August 10, 2015
As the presidential candidates start jostling to take over from beleaguered Sepp Blatter at FIFA, here I provide an update of my “FIFA Reform Scorecard” to set the stage for evaluating the claims that the process has already started and highlight what is left to do for his potential successors.
Blatter has expressed a desire to implement reforms before but unfortunately, these past announcements were mostly illusory. We can show this with some simple accounting.
After FIFA’s so-called Independent Governance Committee put forward recommendations in 2012, I compared FIFA’s subsequent actions with those recommendations. I also compared FIFA’s actions with the recommendations of Transparency International and those of Mark Pieth, a Swiss governance expert who FIFA hired to develop proposals for reform and then to lead its IGC.
I also evaluated the significance of the reforms using the framework of Jean-Loup Chappelet and Michael Mrkonjic (CM13 in the slide below and here in PDF).
FIFA’s performance, summarized in the slide below, was not very inspiring.
You can read all of the details of what I found in a book chapter found here in PDF.
Blatter has framed his reform agenda in two parts. First, he has announced his intention to step down upon the election of a new president on February 26, 2016. Second, he called for FIFA to implement the balance of proposals recommended by the FIFA IGC, focused mainly on salary disclosure and integrity checks. Blatter announced that an 11-person committee would be established to help finish the uncompleted work of the IGC. Read more …
