PHOTO: Belgium v Egypt at Seattle in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, SounderBruce on Wikimedia Commons
“FIFA remains neutral in matters of politics and religion.” (FIFA Statutes art 4.2)
“FIFA remains neutral in matters of politics and religion.”
(FIFA Statutes Article 4.2)
It is a claim that, as bold as it is, proves difficult to sustain on examination. Layer onto it the constitutional mandate that FIFA’s President uphold “integrity, ethics and fair play,” and protects “human rights and humanitarian values,” and the picture that emerges is of an institution built not merely to run football, but to model a kind of global civic virtue.
These are not incidental commitments but the moral justification for FIFA’s extraordinary reach across 211 member associations – more members than the United Nations’ 193 states, giving FIFA a significantly powerful role in shaping global sport and its political consequences.
And arguably, the neutrality they promise, is largely a fiction.
Over the past three decades, corruption scandals, tournaments awarded to authoritarian states, and the persistent failure to enforce its own anti-discrimination rules have exposed FIFA not as a neutral arbiter of sport, but as a political actor in its own right. One that does not merely respond to political pressure from outside, but generates it from within. Its decisions carry diplomatic weight. They reshape geopolitical relationships and they reveal how thoroughly the language of values can be deployed to obscure the pursuit of power.
FIFA is not alone in this. Other sporting bodies such as the Olympics and Formula 1, each publicly commits to neutrality and universality, and each has proven, repeatedly, that when institutional interest conflicts with institutional principle, principle loses. This does not seem like a governance problem, but a governance choice.
Corruption
PHOTO: Media in front of FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, reporting on the corruption case and Sepp Blatter’s resignation. Albinfo on Wikimedia Commons
n May 2015, United States federal prosecutors unsealed indictments against fourteen individuals, among them senior FIFA officials and sports marketing executives, on charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. It was not a single act of misconduct but the exposure of a system: over two decades of bribery woven into how FIFA conducted its most consequential business. At the centre was the awarding of World Cup hosting rights, the process through which FIFA exercises its greatest influence and extracts its greatest revenues. More than $150 million had passed through that system in bribes alone.
Sepp Blatter resigned days after the indictments, but stayed on until a successor was found. His successor, Gianni Infantino, campaigned on reform. Term limits were introduced and an Ethics Committee was reconstituted. While the personnel changed, the structural incentives did not.
PHOTO: Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter in a press conference in Tehran in 2014, Mohammad Hassanzadeh on Wikimedia Commons
In 2025, the US Department of Justice dismissed a bribery prosecution connected to the 2015 scandal, informing the court the case “no longer fits the administration’s priorities.” Taken together, these episodes show how easily FIFA’s governance framework bends when political leverage is applied, and how readily the institution departs from its own rules when doing so aligns with the interests of powerful states.
This is what FIFA’s governance framework was designed to prevent – and it is precisely what that framework has produced.
There is a temptation to read all of this as states using sport for political ends, the logic of bread and circuses , updated for the era of global broadcast rights. Authoritarian governments have understood, with considerable sophistication, that the spectacle of a World Cup is a political instrument, a mechanism for projecting legitimacy, laundering reputation, and keeping populations focused on the pitch rather than the government.
But FIFA is not simply a tool in that process. It is a participant in it and a willing one. What the corruption record reveals is not an institution that was captured by powerful states, but one that built its own market for influence and then sold access to the highest bidder. Its centralised power structure, its vast network of national federations each holding a vote in presidential elections, its billion-dollar revenues disbursed through confederations with minimal oversight – all of this created an incentive structure that made corruption rational.
Nowhere is that more legible than in the story of how Qatar came to host the 2022 World Cup.
The Qatar Test
PHOTO: Korea Republic vs Uruguay at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Republic of Korea on Wikimedia Commons
Three years on, the 2022 World Cup is still making headlines, and not for football.
In September 2025, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim filed a defamation complaint against the New York Post, disputing the paper’s claim that he had been accused by the US Department of Justice of presiding over bribery and corruption in Qatar’s World Cup bid.
The courts will settle the specifics, but the lawsuit did something the original indictments alone could not: it thrust the entire issue back into public view, and reminded anyone paying attention that the questions surrounding how Qatar won the right to host the world’s most watched sporting event have never been answered.
The broad outline of the allegations are well recorded. Documents obtained by the Times of London alleged that Mohamed bin Hammam, Qatar’s top football official at the time, paid at least $5 million in bribes to FIFA officials. A 2020 DOJ superseding indictment acknowledged that FIFA executives “received bribe payments in exchange for their votes in favour of Qatar.” State-owned Al Jazeera, according to reports, offered FIFA $400 million for broadcasting rights, with a $100 million bonus written in, contingent on Qatar winning the bid.
What is worth considering is not what Qatar did, but what FIFA chose to do about it.
States pursue their interests – they always have. Qatar’s strategy, using sport to diversify its economy, raise its international profile, and secure its position in a volatile region, was coherent and not fundamentally different from the approach of any other government that has ever competed for a major sporting event.
The question is not why Qatar wanted the World Cup. It is why FIFA, having commissioned a 350-page internal investigation that found sufficient evidence to examine the bidding process in detail, declined to release the report and published a 42-page summary that its own investigator Michael Garcia called “materially incomplete”, and declared the crisis concluded. And when Garcia resigned in protest, saying he had lost confidence in FIFA’s ability to police itself. His departure, and the organisation’s refusal to revisit the bidding process, underscored a deeper truth: the problem was not Qatar’s bid, but a governing body willing to protect itself from scrutiny even when its own rules demand transparency.
Qatar’s investment in global sport was statecraft, but FIFA’s suppression of the investigation was a choice. These are different failures, made by different actors, and conflating them lets the institution most responsible for maintaining integrity off the hook.
Reform
There are moments when major events appear to nudge domestic policy Qatar’s revisions to the kafala system, a labour framework that tied migrant workers to their employers, restricted job changes, and in practice often prevented workers from leaving the country, are frequently held up as an example that global sport can pressure states into improving labour protections. Even if such reforms were partial or politically motivated, they demonstrate that international scrutiny can matter.
But the mechanism behind those reforms is telling: they were driven by external scrutiny, NGOs, media, and foreign governments, applying pressure, rather than FIFA enforcing its own principles.
If hosting can catalyse change, it is despite the governing bodies, not because of them. Reform may happen, but it is never the governing body that drives it.
PHOTO: Demonstration against 2022 FIFA World Cup in Warsaw, Tomasz Molina on Wikimedia Commons
FIFA is not an outlier. It is the most visible example of a pattern that has reshaped global sport over the past two decades, one in which the governing bodies of major international competitions have become political actors in their own right, their hosting decisions and institutional structures shaped less by sporting merit than by the financial and diplomatic weight of powerful states.
What distinguishes this pattern from straightforward political interference is the active role of the institutions themselves. In FIFA’s case, the structural conditions make this clear. The organisation is built around a highly centralised presidency elected by 211 national federations, each holding one vote regardless of size, resources, or governance standards. This creates a political marketplace: candidates for the presidency win by securing loyalty from dozens of small federations, many of which rely on FIFA funding and development grants. Those grants are distributed with limited oversight, giving presidents enormous discretion and creating incentives for patronage. When billions of dollars flow through channels, and when electoral success depends on maintaining the support of federations that benefit from that opacity, the system naturally rewards leaders who can manage and sustain those networks.
In this environment, bribery is a predictable outcome of the structure itself. The result is a governance model that consistently elevates leaders who preserve the system rather than reform it. These are not governing bodies captured despite their best efforts, but institutions whose incentive structures, leadership dynamics, and accountability gaps make them willing participants in the political processes they publicly claim to stand apart from.
The Olympics
The International Olympic Committee has long presented itself as the gold standard of international sporting governance, politically neutral, globally inclusive, and anchored to a Charter that commits it to human dignity, non-discrimination, and the autonomy of sport from political interference. The reality of its host selection process tells a more complicated story.
With multiple cities now in continuous dialogue with the IOC over the 2036 Summer Games, Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh has emerged as one of the most prominent candidate cities, a bid rooted explicitly in Vision 2030, the kingdom’s state-led programme to diversify its economy and project a modernised international image. The IOC has not yet formally advanced the bid, and its own host selection framework requires human rights assessments. Saudi Arabia’s record presents clear challenges: international organisations have documented restrictions on freedom of expression, the criminalisation of dissent, discrimination against women, and the use of mass trials and harsh sentencing under counter‑terrorism laws.
But critics note that the framework has rarely proven a decisive obstacle: Beijing was awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics despite extensive, documented human‑rights abuses, a decision that underscored how geopolitical considerations and commercial priorities outweigh the values the IOC claims it upholds. Beijing offered the IOC a uniquely reliable and commercially valuable bid, with China’s vast domestic sponsorship market and global broadcast reach in domestic commercial revenue for the 2022 Games.
The IOC, like FIFA, has shown a structural preference for revenue and expansion over the harder work of enforcing the values it publicly champions.
PHOTO: A countdown clock to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, N509FZ on Wikimedia Commons
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Formula 1
PHOTO: 2015 Malaysian GP opening lap. Morio on Wikimedia Commons
Formula 1’s commercial expansion into the Gulf states is perhaps the starkest illustration of what is commonly called sportswashing, though the term, as scholars have noted, risks oversimplifying the arrangement it describes.
Jonathan Grix and Paul Michael Brannagan argue that “sportswashing” is not simply the act of covering up human rights abuses through sport, but rather a reciprocal relationship: capital-rich states seek to acquire cultural prestige through investment in globally admired sporting institutions, while those institutions, and the Western sport ecosystems that underpin them, are happy to take the money offered. What makes sportswashing structurally significant is not the bad faith of the investor but the willing complicity of the investee.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain have each secured Grand Prix contracts, each presenting documented human-rights concerns from restrictions on expression and arbitrary detention to systematic repression of migrant workers. Qatar has even signed a ten-year hosting deal. But what matters for F1 is not the human rights profile of these states; but that F1’s commercial leadership actively pursued those arrangements, trading cultural prestige for capital in a transaction that served both sides These hosting deals serve F1 directly: they delivered guaranteed state-backed financing and access to lucrative markets that strengthened F1’s revenue model and protected the sport from the financial volatility of traditional hosts.
Human Rights Watch noted in March 2026 that multiple 2026 Grand Prix host nations continued to draw serious human rights concerns, with human rights advocates bringing attention to situations such Saudi Arabia’s increasing restrictions on expression and dissent while investing in sports
For the argument that sport can be insulated from geopolitics, the cancellations demonstrated something fundamental: that the two are inextricably linked, in no small part because F1’s own commercial leadership chose to link them.
Global Consequences
The institutions examined in this article share a common architecture: public commitments to neutrality and ethics, paired with governance structures that have proven consistently inadequate to enforce them.
FIFA declares itself neutral and then awards tournaments through processes that investigators describe as corrupt. Formula 1 signs decade-long hosting deals with states that show a pattern of limiting free-speech and expression. The IOC enshrines human dignity in its Charter and then enters dialogue with states with questionable human rights records.
In each case, the gap between stated principle and institutional practice is not incidental. It is structural, and it is the governing bodies themselves, not merely the states that pressure them, that have allowed it to persist.
What has filled that gap is the dominant frame: soft power – the pursuit of international prestige through attraction – which captures part of the story, but not its full architecture. In a 2025 analysis of power and sports mega-events, Grix and Brannagan argue that states with the most at stake do not simply deploy sport for image; they deploy it as smart power: the intentional integration of security, diplomacy, and development strategies into a coordinated whole.
That credibility extends well beyond sport because the institutions that uphold it serve a function analogous to other bodies of international governance. The credibility of the World Trade Organisation depends on the perception that its dispute mechanisms are not simply instruments of great-power politics. The credibility of FIFA, the IOC, and Formula 1 depends on the same perception.
The whistle, it turns out, was never neutral. The question now is whether the institutions that blow it are willing to reckon honestly with that fact or whether the more lucrative path, as it has so often been, is to keep insisting otherwise.
An honest reckoning would require more than another round of self-exonerating reform, it would mean subjecting these bodies to the only pressures that have ever forced meaningful change: external legal jurisdiction, regulatory exposure, and commercial leverage. These are the levers capable of closing the gap between principle and practice. Without them, neutrality remains a slogan.
