Appendix 8 - Where are FIFA’s ethics?

Whether you are a football fan or not, I’m sure you will have heard something surrounding the ongoing scandal involving the sport’s governing body, FIFA. Alongside Volkswagen, there has barely been a week gone by in recent months without more shocking revelations. Ethical issues have hung over FIFA for over 4 years now, dating back to early 2011 when executives were banned for involvement in bribery and wrongdoing.

From reading articles on the scandal, including this one on the FT, I was amazed at the number of people involved in the scandal.  41 individuals and entities have been charged so far, with the key phrase being ‘so far’ with the prediction there will be more to come. US authorities have recently announced criminal charges against 16 current and former FIFA executives for ‘sustained abuse of their positions for financial gain’. One fundamental principle in business ethics is behaving professional and it does not take a genius to figure out that those that have been charged have failed to do just that. Rather than acting professional, many officials have used their position to abuse the system for their own self-interest.

Alongside this, FIFA’s stance on tax is another ethical issue. Having headquarters in Switzerland has enabled them to benefit from low tax rates, whilst for a country to host a world cup they must agree to a number of conditions, for example the event to be tax free for FIFA. Whilst they may argue this is completely legal and therefore they are not doing anything wrong, is it ethical correct to run an organisational like this to avoid taxes? What if all major companies did this across the world, who would suffer then? The public would as they would be forced to pay the difference.

So far the consequences of this scandal have been significant. The negative press coverage has given FIFA an extremely bad image across the world, even among those who do not follow football. This has led to many of the organisations main sponsors, such as Adidas, Coca-Cola and McDonalds threatening to withdraw their financial support, which was hardly surprising. Why would multinational organisations want to sponsor an organisation that is involved in corruption? This would just lead to a negative public image for those companies having involvement with FIFA.

In responding to the scandal, FIFA ‘s ethics committee has temporarily suspended the president, Sepp Blatter, who announced he would step down from his role after seven officials were arrested in May. What I found astonishing and rather laughable is that his possible successor, Michel Platini has also been suspended as well as Jérôme Valcke. How long have these people been getting away with all this wrong doing? Surely someone must have known about it, and isn’t the whole point of having an ethics committee to prevent anything like this happening in the first place?

Whilst suspending those suspected of involvement, FIFA has a long road ahead of them if they are to recover from this. One suggestion is that FIFA should rotate their president every two to four years, following an EU-style rotating presidency, in order to avoid future corruption and scandals. In my opinion this would be a positive move as it would give clear transparency into the governing body as people from different backgrounds would be able to come in every few years and see what has gone on in the past and ensure that everyone is behaving as they should.

If FIFA doesn’t know what the best response should be, maybe they should look at how Mattel acquitted themselves having discovered a major health and safety issue with their products. Some toy’s contained dangerous levels of lead, and the company responded by being clear and transparent, as well as recalling more than 20 million toys. This turned out to be an extremely successful response as Mattel were praised for their response and sales rose by 6%.

It seems to me that ethics today are having a major influence on the success of businesses across the world, due to the way which news spreads instantly. One harmful report could have a disastrous impact on the performance of a company, and the chances are that if you are behaving unethically you will be caught sooner rather than later.