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FIFA, Deemed a Victim of Its Own Scandal, Will Share $200 Million Payout

Soccer’s governing body and two affiliates in the Americas have been awarded tens of millions of dollars seized by the Department of Justice.

By Rebecca R. Ruiz and Tariq Panja

Even as top soccer officials were still being arrested as part of a sprawling corruption investigation in 2015, lawyers for the sport’s global governing body and U.S. prosecutors began to embrace an intriguing premise:

The soccer organization, FIFA , and its affiliates were not only the hosts of the scheme, the thinking went, they were also its victims.

For prosecutors, the notion distinguished between the hijackers and the hijacked: It held individuals accountable for their crimes but spared the organizations and the sport that they had defrauded. For FIFA and its new leaders and lawyers, the framing had a bigger benefit: It protected against prosecution, and it offered the organization a chance to reclaim the tens of millions of dollars siphoned away by corrupt officials.

Tuesday brought the payoff: Six years after a wide-ranging criminal indictment laid bare decades of corruption in global soccer on a stunning scale, and five years after those in power started pursuing a piece of the millions that American authorities were rounding up, the U.S. government approved the payment of more than $200 million to FIFA and its two member confederations most implicated in the scandal.

The repayment will begin with an initial payment of $32.3 million in forfeited funds, the Justice Department said , but prosecutors have approved a plan in which the soccer organizations could receive as much as $201 million.

In a statement, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, thanked the American authorities for their “fast and effective approach in bringing these matters to a conclusion, and also for their trust in general,” adding that soccer now considered itself “well past” its corrupt history.

“We will make sure that these funds are used properly and bring tangible benefits for people who really need it,” Infantino said.

The repayments will be directed to FIFA as well as to CONCACAF, the organization overseeing soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean, and CONMEBOL, which governs the sport in South America. The previous leaders of those organizations, as well as those of national soccer federations across the Americas, had been implicated in the scandal in colorful detail. More than 50 people and companies were charged in the case, and dozens have pleaded guilty. Along the way, at least two defendants have died.

The Justice Department’s decision to return millions of dollars suggested a measure of restored faith in FIFA’s management , even as the money — something the organization first requested years ago — came with strings attached: It must be walled off in a foundation and directed toward developing soccer around the world, according to Tuesday’s announcement. A significant portion of the money will be directed to projects in the Americas, FIFA said, “given that they suffered significantly as a result of the criminal activities.”

Any spending from the new account, the World Football Remission Fund, will be subject to oversight and independent audit measures, American authorities said.

The money will be held in the U.S. bank system instead of in Switzerland, where FIFA has its headquarters, according to the terms of the agreement, which were described by two people familiar with the arrangement who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details publicly.

Parameters for spending money recovered from the government have figured into other corruption cases, like the United Nations oil for food case, in which the Justice Department specifically designated restitution money for a development fund in Iraq.

“It’s not unprecedented to have the Justice Department weigh in on the appropriate use of the money,” Antonia M. Apps, a lawyer with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said. “The scale of this corruption case is much larger than your typical corruption case, so the dollars are greater than you would normally see.”

As American authorities announced their case in 2015 and dozens of powerful officials and marketing executives pleaded guilty to charges including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy , prosecutors made clear they saw the soccer organizations as victims that had been co-opted by dishonest operators.

Lawyers for FIFA and the regional confederations were quick to embrace that view, and fought further to manage the perceptions of prosecutors and the public by seeking to distance the organizations from the accused criminals, both by cooperating with the authorities and to solidify the sports organizations’ role as victims, powerless to their top leaders’ fraud.

In a court filing in 2016, lawyers for FIFA argued that the organization had lost at least $28 million paid to 20 soccer officials over 12 years, along with having suffered other incalculable costs.

CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, has already recovered millions of dollars through other channels. In July, it said it had been awarded more than $1.7 million by the Swiss authorities — money that had been in a personal account of one of its former leaders. That came in addition to the $55 million the organization said it had clawed back from the accounts of other former officials.

In the years since the FIFA corruption scandal burst into public view with raids on a luxury hotel on the eve of a FIFA congress in 2015 , the case, one of the largest criminal prosecutions in America when it was announced, has moved forward even as public attention to its proceedings and to corruption in global soccer has waned.

Just this week, Reynaldo Vasquez, El Salvador’s former top soccer official who was charged in 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn. And earlier this year, prosecutors announced the Swiss bank Julius Baer had agreed to pay more than $79 million in penalties for its role in laundering money in the scandal.

Even so, years on, key figures await sentencing, and some former officials remain at large. One, Marco Polo Del Nero, the former head of Brazil’s soccer federation, was recently recorded appearing to direct the federation’s affairs despite having been barred for life by FIFA from working in organized soccer.

But in announcing a new conviction this week, American law enforcement officials telegraphed that they were still keeping tabs on the sport. Tuesday’s announcement underscored that.

“From the start,” the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Jacquelyn M. Kasulis, said in a statement, “this investigation and prosecution have been focused on bringing wrongdoers to justice and restoring ill-gotten gains to those who work for the benefit of the beautiful game.”

Rebecca Ruiz is an investigative reporter based in New York. She previously worked for the Washington Bureau, the sports section and the business section. More about Rebecca R. Ruiz

Tariq Panja covers some of the darker corners of the global sports industry. He is also a co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade,” an exposé on soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading industry. More about Tariq Panja

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The many, many controversies surrounding the 2022 World Cup, explained

Since FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar in 2010, the tournament has been ensnared in a tangled web of scandals.

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The 2022 FIFA World Cup is set to kick off in Qatar on November 20, stirring excitement and anticipation in soccer fans around the world. But even if you’re not a die-hard soccer fan, you’ve probably heard something about the many controversies swirling around this year’s edition of the most famous sporting event in the world.

Since FIFA, the governing body for international soccer, awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar in 2010, the tournament has been ensnared in a tangled web of scandals. That web includes everything from allegations of corruption and bribery during the bidding process to host the tournament, to accusations that Qatar is using the event to “sportswash” its record of human rights abuses. According to an analysis by the Guardian, at least 6,500 migrant laborers have died in Qatar since the tournament was awarded to the country in 2010. Global tensions around the competition have been further inflamed by FIFA’s controversial decision to move it to the northern hemisphere’s winter to avoid Qatar’s infernal summer heat, a move that critics have seized on as proof that FIFA is bending over backward to accommodate an already-troublesome host.

And this isn’t the first time a World Cup has been caught up in geopolitical controversies.

The 2018 tournament in Russia raised questions about FIFA’s cozy relationship with authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil sparked an international outcry over the forced removal of tens of thousands of poor and working-class Brazilians to make room for new tournament-related infrastructure. Since at least 1934 — when the second World Cup took place in Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy — soccer fans have had to temper their enthusiasm for the game with an awareness of unsavory political compromises that inevitably accompany the multibillion-dollar spectacle.

Given that approximately 3.5 billion people tuned in to the World Cup in 2018, it’s impossible to deny the tournament’s continued global appeal. The very sources of that appeal — the sweeping stakes that accompany 32 nations competing in a month-long tournament, the power of old rivalries, the possibility that a single goal could change a country’s fate — are the same things that make these controversies so intractable.

“I know lots of people who say horrible things about FIFA [but] who are still very excited about the coming World Cup,” said Ken Bensinger, an investigative reporter and the author of Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal . “I mean, I’m excited about the upcoming World Cup, even though I think it probably shouldn’t be in Qatar.”

For ascendant nations like Qatar, the benefits of hosting the World Cup are still very real. “Qatar is a small state, and for small states, the main objective in international affairs is visibility,” said Danyel Reiche, a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University Qatar, where he leads a research initiative on the political and economic legacy of the World Cup . “Apart from visibility, it’s also about having some influence in international affairs and being able to punch above [your] weight.”

But the increased international scrutiny that accompanies the tournament also creates significant political liabilities for hosts. As Reiche and his co-author Paul Michael Brannagan argue in their new book on the tournament, “[While] Qatar intends to use the 2022 World Cup to promote a positive image of the country abroad, the tournament has, in contrast, come to introduce and educate many global audiences to the state in largely negative terms.”

In Qatar’s case, said Reiche, the pros still appear to outweigh the cons. But as global awareness of the economic, ecological, and human costs of the tournament continues to spread, FIFA and future host nations will have to answer difficult questions about the tournament’s merit. And with Saudi Arabia reportedly eyeing a bid to host the 2030 tournament, these questions aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

Controversy 1: Qatar’s bid was marred by accusations of corruption and bribery

FIFA’s decision in December 2010 to award the 2022 tournament to Qatar caught the world off guard, with many fans expressing surprise — and more than a little doubt — that a desert monarchy whose soccer team had never qualified for a World Cup had legitimately beat out global sporting powerhouses that made bids to host the tournament, like the United States, Japan, and Australia.

But even before the decision was publicly announced, soccer fans had good reasons to doubt the integrity of FIFA’s bidding process. Just two months before FIFA was slated to announce the host for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, the organization suspended two members of its 24-person executive committee — the entity tasked with choosing the host nations — who had been accused of offering to sell their votes. (Both men eventually received temporary bans from FIFA.)

These preliminary corruption allegations turned out to be only the tip of the trash heap for FIFA. In 2014, the UK-based Sunday Times reported on a trove of leaked emails and other documents suggesting that prominent Qatari soccer official and former FIFA executive committee member Mohammed bin Hammam had allegedly paid millions of dollars worth of bribes to FIFA officials. (Bin Hammam had already received a lifetime ban from FIFA in 2011 for other corruption charges.) A subsequent investigation into corruption allegations conducted by FIFA’s chief ethics investigator and former United States attorney Michael J. Garcia found evidence of serious irregularities in the bidding process but offered no conclusive proof that Qatari officials had used bribes to influence the outcome of the vote.

Yet FIFA’s troubles only deepened from there. In May 2015, the US Department of Justice unsealed indictments against nine FIFA officials, accusing the officials of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering in connection with a far-reaching scheme to sell broadcasting rights for the tournament. Soon after, authorities in Switzerland announced a parallel investigation into allegations of corruption in the bidding processes for the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 tournament in Qatar.

“I don’t think people had a lot of confidence in FIFA before any of this happened, and even going back to 2010, people were already beginning to doubt FIFA,” said Bensinger. “By the time the US criminal investigation became public in 2015, confidence just dropped off the bottom of the map.”

In the midst of the turmoil, FIFA’s longtime president Sepp Blatter abruptly announced his resignation, just days after winning reelection to a fifth term as the governing body’s leader. (Blatter was later charged with criminal fraud in Switzerland, but he was acquitted in July 2022.) Then, in April 2020, the Justice Department released fresh evidence suggesting that three FIFA officials accepted bribes from unnamed intermediaries to vote for Qatar.

The results of these inquiries have been mixed. Although investigators have uncovered extensive criminal wrongdoing within FIFA, they have yet to turn up a smoking gun proving that Qatari officials bribed FIFA officials, and Qatari officials have continued to deny any wrongdoing.

“We are 100% confident in the integrity of our bid,” said a spokesperson for Qatari’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, the entity tasked with overseeing preparations for the tournament, in a statement.

Corrupt or not, FIFA’s choice of Qatar does seem to be a bit self-serving: Hosting the tournament in the Middle East gives FIFA an opportunity to expand its market share in the region, and Qatar’s deep-pocketed oligarchs are attractive business partners for FIFA’s future ventures.

Nevertheless, the slew of arrests, indictments, and investigations has decisively undermined the public’s confidence in FIFA and its Qatari hosts.

“I don’t think people think of Qatar as a very positive actor,” said Bensinger. “They’re not doing a good job of instilling the public’s confidence in them [as] a clean place to have a World Cup.”

Controversy 2: The tournament’s infrastructure has been built on the backs of low-paid migrant laborers

Even for resource-wealthy nations like Qatar, hosting the World Cup is an arduous logistical undertaking, requiring billions of dollars of investments in new stadiums, transportation infrastructure, and accommodations to serve the hundreds of thousands of fans who attend the tournament. But Qatar, which has spent nearly $220 billion on new infrastructure ahead of the tournament, has kept labor costs down by relying on an extensive — and deeply exploitative — network of low-wage migrant labor to prepare for the tournament.

The horrors of Qatar’s migrant worker system are no secret , and the dangerous conditions created by that system are not unique to the preparations for the World Cup. Until the late 2010s, the vast majority of Qatar’s roughly 2 million migrant laborers — who compose about 94 percent of the country’s total labor force — were employed through a notoriously coercive labor system known as the kafala (or sponsorship) system, which tethered workers to a sponsor through a series of legally binding contracts . Although Qatar has made some major reforms to the kafala system in recent years — such as ending the requirement that workers receive their sponsor’s approval before leaving the country or changing jobs — the remnants of that system still give employers an inordinate amount of power over workers’ lives.

As Qatar has ramped up its preparations for the World Cup, the consequences of this system have been increasingly deadly. In 2021, the Guardian reported that more than 6,500 workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since 2010. (A spokesperson for the tournament organizers said there have only been three work-related fatalities and 37 non-work-related deaths.) Meanwhile, workers interviewed by nonprofit groups like Amnesty International have reported enduring an array of abuses including wage theft, excessive working hours, dangerous working and living conditions, and physical and sexual abuse.

The slight upside is that the heightened international scrutiny that has accompanied the World Cup has forced Qatar to make some reforms to its migrant labor system. In addition to the reforms to the kafala system, the Qatari government has also established a new labor dispute committee , created a state-backed insurance and support fund for workers, and set the country’s first-ever minimum wage.

Nevertheless, human rights groups say that more reforms are needed. “Although Qatar has made important strides on labour rights over the past five years, it’s abundantly clear that there is a great distance still to go,” said Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of economic and social justice, in a statement. “With the World Cup looming, the job of protecting migrant workers from exploitation is only half done, while that of compensating those who have suffered abuses has barely started.”

Controversy 3: Qatar is under fire for using the tournament to “sportswash” its record of human rights abuses

“Sportswashing” — a term coined by human rights activists in the mid-2010s to describe efforts by repressive governments to use prestigious sporting events to burnish their international reputation — is seemingly everywhere these days. In the past year, the term has been used to describe everything from China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics to Saudi Arabia’s decision to fund an upstart professional golfing league , causing some commentators to worry that the term has become so overused that it’s now basically meaningless.

But there’s a strong case to be made that this year’s World Cup is a textbook example of sportswashing.

For decades, Qatar has been criticized by international human rights groups for laws curtailing the rights of LBGTQ people and women, in particular for provisions in the country’s penal code that criminalize sexual intercourse between people of the same sex. Although prosecutions under these provisions are relatively rare, LGBTQ Qataris continue to report widespread police harassment and intimidation. The World Cup’s organizers have indicated that LGBTQ fans will be welcome and safe at the tournament, but some Qatari activists have continued to say that they fear for queer visitors’ safety .

Qatar has a similarly poor record when it comes to freedom of expression. The country’s penal code criminalizes speech criticizing the emir, blaspheming against Islam, or spreading “false news,” and the government has weaponized these restrictions to punish critics and silence dissidents. In August 2021, the Qatar government charged seven Qatari citizens who had criticized the country’s newly restrictive voting laws with “using social media to spread false news.” The regime has also targeted independent journalists who traveled to the country to report on the working conditions of migrant laborers, and the government has imposed sweeping restrictions on journalists traveling to cover the World Cup, a move that human rights groups say will have a “ severe chilling effect ” on the media coverage of the event.

Yet even while sportswashing might explain one element of the Qatari government’s desire to host the World Cup, it’s important to recognize the limits of the concept.

“To think that a country like Qatar would invest big in a football tournament just to distract from some human rights violations — I don’t think this does justice to the complexity of the matter,” said Reiche. “There are a variety of reasons why Qatar invests in sports, starting with being visible as a small state, gaining influence in international affairs, and contributing to national security.”

Controversy 4: FIFA is massaging the numbers on its sustainability pledge

FIFA has promised that this year’s tournament will be the first carbon-neutral World Cup in the competition’s history. But researchers who’ve studied the tournament’s sustainability plan say that pledge relies on some creative accounting, to put it mildly.

This year’s tournament will be played in eight separate venues around Qatar: six newly constructed stadiums, one existing stadium, and one “temporary” venue that will be deconstructed and repurposed after the World Cup. To calculate the tournament’s total carbon footprint, explained Gilles Dufrasne, a climate researcher with Carbon Market Watch, the tournament’s organizers calculated the total emissions associated with the construction of all the stadiums, then divided that figure by the average lifespan of each stadium, estimated to be approximately 60 years. Because the World Cup lasts for only one month, organizers then concluded that the tournament was responsible for only one month’s worth of emissions spread across that 60-year estimated span — a tiny fraction of the actual emissions that resulted from building the stadiums.

“This probably underestimates the [tournament’s] emissions by about 1.4 megatonnes — or 1.4 million tons — and that’s quite a conservative estimate,” said Dufrasne, who recently authored a report on the problems with the tournament’s sustainability pledge. “Adding that to their existing estimate, their total footprint is closer to 5 megatonnes rather than the 3.6 megatonnes that they have announced.” (As a point of reference, the entire country of Uruguay produced an estimated 4.7 megatonnes of carbon in 2019.)

Similar problems also befall the organizers’ plan to purchase carbon offsets to meet their carbon neutrality pledge. To offset the tournaments’ total emissions footprint, organizers will need to purchase approximately 3.6 million credits, half of which they have agreed to buy from a group called the Global Carbon Council. (So far, they’ve purchased fewer than 350,000 credits, according to their public disclosures .) But despite its name, Global Carbon Council is not, in fact, an international institution. Instead, it’s based in Qatar and is connected to Qatari state-owned entities.

These ties to the Qatari government “raise serious questions about the independence of that standard,” said Dufrasne.

To add insult to injury, the credits that the World Cup organizers have purchased will fund “non-additional” renewable energy projects — meaning projects that would be developed regardless of whether or not they are supported by credits.

“The reality is that they’re basically sending money to a project that doesn’t need it,” said Dufrasne. “It’s just inaccurate to say that this compensates for any sort of emissions.”

Is the World Cup likely to change as a result of all these controversies?

The short answer: probably not.

Since 2015, FIFA has adopted a series of reforms designed to weed out corruption and increase transparency and accountability within the organization, but it’s still too early to know whether these reforms will have their intended effect. “I think that a lot of [the reforms] seem like decent ideas, but in exercise, they don’t mark a substantive change,” said Bensinger. “If you look at the current presidency of the current president [Gianni] Infantino” — who mysteriously moved to Qatar in October 2021 — “it just doesn’t look like a transparent organization.”

Players and fans have shown a renewed willingness to speak out about the controversies surrounding the tournament in small ways. In September, a group of European soccer federations that includes England, Germany, and France announced plans to have some members of their teams wear rainbow armbands during games to protest Qatar’s treatment of its LGBTQ citizens. Meanwhile, Denmark’s national team recently unveiled a “toned-down” design for its kits, intended to signal the team’s opposition to Qatar’s mistreatment of migrant laborers. Also in recent weeks, several major cities around France announced that they will not set up “fan zones” to allow spectators to watch the games in public, as they have in years past.

Ultimately, though, the primary obstacle to overhauling FIFA remains the World Cup’s unparalleled popularity.

“FIFA knows that no matter how badly it behaves and no matter how disgusted people are with the organization, every four years, everything’s forgotten,” said Bensinger. “It’s like the Catholic church: You can do whatever you want all week as long as you go to confession on Sunday. The World Cup functions that way for FIFA.”

Correction: an earlier version of this story stated that at least 6,500 migrant laborers have died while working on the eight stadiums that Qatar constructed or renovated for the games. It has been corrected to state that at least 6,500 migrant laborers have died in Qatar since the tournament was awarded to the country in 2010.

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Expert Commentary

Corruption, sports and FIFA: Research roundup

2015 roundup of research and analyses on corruption in sports, with a focus on soccer and the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA).

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Martin Maximino, The Journalist's Resource June 15, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/corruption-sports-fifa-research-roundup/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Joseph “Sepp” Blatter first became president of the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) in 1998. In 2015, seventeen years later, he was elected for a fifth term, only to suddenly resign just four days later. While FIFA and its partners were no strangers to accusations of corruption — indeed, Blatter’s first election involved charges of bribery — his sudden decision came on the heels of a far-reaching criminal indictment, filed May 20 in the Eastern District of New York. While Blatter himself wasn’t named, 14 federation officials and associates were. On May 27, many were arrested in a dawn raid while staying at five-star Swiss hotel.

The complex investigation was coordinated among the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the FBI and the IRS. In a press conference , Lynch described FIFA’s corruption as “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted.” The charges in the indictment included “solicitation, offer, acceptance, payment, and receipt of undisclosed and illegal payments, bribes, and kickbacks” as well as “the active concealment of foreign bank accounts; the structuring of financial transactions to avoid currency reporting requirements; bulk cash smuggling; the purchase of real property and other physical assets; the use of safe deposit boxes; income tax evasion; and obstruction of justice.” Blatter attempted to distance himself from the accusations, to no avail.

In particular, the suspects are accused of benefitting certain countries and regions to host soccer events. The process that led to FIFA’s simultaneously awarding the 2018 cup to Russia and the 2022 contest to Qatar was steeped in controversy, and FIFA officials have said that the countries may lose their host status if proof of bribery emerges.

Mass sporting events are popular in every sense of the word, from the public at large to elected officials and business interests, and immense amounts of money, power and influence can be at stake. Previous research has studied the economic impact of the Olympics and found mixed results at best. Huge infrastructure projects can be immensely profitable, however, and the Associated Press revealed evidence of widespread corruption in Brazil in the buildup to the 2014 World Cup. A 2014 study in Public Administration Review found that, similarly, the most-corrupt U.S. states tend to spend more on construction projects because they present a wealth of opportunities for bribery, kickbacks and more. Host countries often hope to boost their international stature through such high-profile events, but many — including Russia and Azerbaijan — are not known for their commitment to transparency.

Below is a selection of recent research and analyses relating to corruption in sports, with a focus on soccer, that can help inform reporting on the system and its challenges.

—————

“Corruption in Sport: From the Playing Field to the Field of Policy” Masters, Adam. Policy and Society , 2015, Vol. 34, Issue 2. doi: 10.1016/j.polsoc.2015.04.002.

Abstract : “How is corruption in sport evolving into a global public policy issue? In the past century, four trends have affected sport according to Paoli and Donati (2013): de-amateurization at the turn of the 20th century, medicalization since the 1960s, politicization and commercialization to the point where sport is now a business worth more than US$141 billion annually. Each of these trends had a corrupting effect on what is generally perceived as a past ‘golden age’ of sport. In the 21st century more public funding is being directed into sport in the developed and developing world. As a result this paper will argue organized sport has entered a fifth evolutionary trend – criminalization. In this latest phase, public policy needs to grapple with what constitutes corruption in what has historically been a private market.”

“Investigating Corruption in Corporate Sport: The IOC and FIFA” Jennings, Andrew. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, December 2011, Vol. 46, No. 4 387-398

Abstract : “Global sport governing bodies proclaim lofty ideals and espouse generic principles that set high moral standards for themselves and others. None more so than two of the world’s largest, most influential, and most high profile sporting organizations, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Behind the façades of principled rhetoric is often something quite different. Focusing on some of the most powerful figures who have walked the corridors of power in the IOC and FIFA, using the methods of investigative journalism, this article investigates the gap between principle and practice in corporate sport. It concludes by arguing that a lack of transparency and accountability in these global sport governing bodies goes hand in glove with a propensity for corruption. It further urges sports academics to take a much more critical approach to the task of researching and investigating power relations in world sport.”

“Deceptive Development and Democratization: Stadium Construction and Securitization in the FIFA World Cup Host Countries of South Africa and Brazil” Peet-Martel, Jasper. Journal of Politics and Society , Columbia University’s Academic Commons, 2014. doi: 10.7916/D8QF8RJB.

Abstract : “The past few decades has seen increasing attention given toward mega sporting events in the context of development. As countries, especially in developing regions of the world, strive to enhance their political, economic, and social standing, hosting mega events is viewed as an opportune path to growth. However, this view often does not take into consideration how fall-out, particularly for local communities, affects a country’s overall experience with the event it hosts. The question I pose to test these two competing views of mega event hosting is the following: are mega-sporting events, specifically the FIFA World Cup, a viable avenue for furthering development and democratization? I examine the dual processes of stadium development and securitization for the 2010 and 2014 FIFA World Cups to answer this question, and argue that the neoliberal governance that drives FIFA World Cup securitization and stadium construction results in significant consequences for local development and compromises democratization for developing host countries.”

“From the 2014 World Cup to the 2016 Summer Olympics: Brazil’s Role in the Global Anti-Corruption Movement” Spalding, Andrew Brady; Barr, Patrick; Flores, Albert; Freiman, Shaun; Gavin, Kat; Klink, Tyler; Nichols, Carter; Reid, Ann; Van Orden, Rina. International Law, 2015

Abstract: “Brazil has the rare fortune of hosting the world’s two highest-profile sporting events back-to-back: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. So too does it find itself in the midst of an historic anti-corruption movement. As recent Olympics have reminded us, mega sporting events can gauge the host-country’s effectiveness in combating corruption. This paper, co-authored by a professor and eight students, uses the window between the World Cup and Olympics to reflect on Brazil’s successes to date and its remaining challenges. It briefly surveys recent allegations of corruption in international sports generally and the Olympics specifically, and discusses Brazil’s recent anti-corruption reforms. It concludes with a series of research questions that the authors will continue exploring in the months prior to the 2016 Games.”

“Does FIFA’s Corruption Hurt the Beautiful Game?” Davis, Noah; Cappello, Juan C. Americas Quarterly , Summer 2013, 7.3, 22-25.

Excerpt : “[C]orruption at the highest levels of FIFA reduces the incentive to deal with problems on the field that affect fan experience, namely racism on the pitch and match-fixing. The organization does an excellent job in the eyes of fans, players and advertisers, with its range of tournaments and competitions, international friendlies, and massive events like the 2013 Confederation Cup and 2014 World Cup in Brazil…. FIFA’s immense geographical reach has given it the financial resources and clout to withstand any outside efforts to impose reforms — and to argue it is capable of policing itself.”

“World Cup 2026 Now Accepting Bribes: A Fundamental Transformation of FIFA’s World Cup Bid Process” Becker, Ryan. International Sports Law Journal , April 2013, Vol. 13, Issue 1-2, 132-147.

Abstract : “The perception that football is corrupt became a reality after the allegations of bribery and vote trading that surrounded the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid process. This article argues that to restore the public confidence in FIFA, specifically in the World Cup bid process, FIFA must aggressively punish individuals, nations and confederations guilty of accepting or offering kickbacks, bribes or vote trading, as well as protecting those guilty, or reasonably believed to be guilty, of such crimes. To assure that such a fundamental shift will occur, FIFA must work with other sports governing bodies to establish a World Anti-Corruption Agency. Additionally, FIFA must internally change its World Cup vote procedures to ensure fairness and transparency…. This article outlines the current rules and regulations that govern the selection of the host nation for World Cup, addresses the controversy centered on the selection process for 2018 and 2022 World Cup, and recommends a three-part solution detailing the necessary steps both FIFA and FIFA members must take to ensure the integrity of the FIFA World Cup bid process.”

“Corruption Does Not Pay: An Analysis of Consumer Response to Italy’s Calciopoli Scandal” Babatunde Buraimo, Giuseppe Migali, Rob Simmons. Conference proceedings, “The Informal Economy, Tax Evasion and Corruption,” September 2012.

Abstract : “The literature on economics of corruption is lacking in evidence on consumer responses to identifiable scandals. The Calciopoli episode affecting Italian football in the 2005/06 season serves as an opportunity for an empirical investigation into consumer (fan) behavior following punishments imposed by the Italian league on clubs whose officials were found guilty of corrupt practices. Using a difference-in-difference estimation method, where the convicted teams are the treatment group, we find that home attendances for treatment teams fell relative to control group teams defined as those clubs not subject to league-imposed punishment. We show further that the fall in attendances identified with Calciopoli punishment resulted in non-trivial gate revenue reductions. Our results suggest that a sizable number of fans of the punished clubs were subsequently deterred from supporting their teams inside the stadium.”

“Using Forecasting to Detect Corruption in International Football” Reade, J. James; Akie, Sachiko. Research Program on Forecasting, George Washington University.

Abstract : “This paper further develops methods to detect corrupt activity using data from 63 bookmakers covering over 9,000 international football matches since 2004, in particular assessing a claim made in early 2013 by Europol that the outcomes of almost 300 international matches since 2009 were fixed. We explore the divergence between two kinds of forecasts of match outcomes: those by bookmakers, and those constructed by econometric models. We argue that in the absence of corrupt activity to fix outcomes, these two forecasts should be indistinguishable as they are based on the same information sets, and hence any divergence between the two may be indicative of corrupt activity to fix matches. In the absence of corroborating evidence we cannot declare any evidence procured in our manner as conclusive regarding the existence or otherwise of corruption, but nonetheless we argue that is it indicative. We conclude that there is mild evidence regarding potentially corrupt outcomes, and we also point towards yet more advanced strategies for its detection.”

Keywords: sports, corruption, infrastructure, Olympics, world cup, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar, Sochi, Baku.

About The Author

Martin Maximino

United Nations

Office on drugs and crime,   joint press release, fifa and unodc wrap up year-long global programme to tackle match manipulation in football, vienna, 3 august 2022.

- FIFA Global Integrity Programme developed in collaboration with UNODC

- Integrity workshops hosted with all six confederations

- Programme aimed to boost education and building integrity capacity within 211 member associations

FIFA and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) concluded its first-ever international integrity education programme, designed to support all 211 member associations in their efforts to tackle match manipulation in football.

Launched last year by FIFA in collaboration with UNODC, the FIFA Global Integrity Programme aimed to educate and build integrity capacity within 211 member associations, and to share knowledge and resources with integrity officers in football.

Since its launch in March 2021, some 400-plus representatives from governments and football associations across the globe took part in 29 workshops which covered several key topics, including establishing an integrity initiative, reporting mechanisms, competition protection, cooperation between and among member associations and law enforcement.

"Corruption and cheating have no place in our societies, and certainly no place in the world’s most popular sport. Through the Global Integrity Programme, FIFA and UNODC have made a real impact in advancing integrity in football. We will continue working in partnership with FIFA to protect the beautiful game from match fixing and other crimes, and to leverage the global force that is football in our efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals," said UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly.

Gianni Infantino, FIFA President said: “Integrity, good governance, ethics and fair play – these are values that lie at very heart of football and are fundamental to ensuring trust and confidence in our sport. Bringing together over 400 participants from around the world, the FIFA Global Integrity Programme delivered together with the UNODC has provided an important platform to educate and strengthen ongoing efforts to combat match-manipulation and protect the integrity of football.

“I would like to thank the UNODC and Ms. Ghada Waly for the ongoing collaboration and look forward to continuing our future work and programmes together.”

As part of the FIFA Global Integrity Programme, workshops were held all six confederations, including the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), the Confederation of African Football (CAF), the  Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), and the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL).

The FIFA Global Integrity Programme was developed in line with FIFA’s overall vision of making football truly global and the UNODC’s objective of supporting governments and sports organizations in their efforts to safeguard sport from corruption and crime.

Additional information

The Global Integrity Programme was implemented within the context of a joint FIFA-UNODC partnership, established following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2020 committing to zero policy tolerance on corruption in football.

For more information on UNODC’s work on safeguarding sport from corruption and crime, please visit unodc.org/safeguardingsport .

For more information on the FIFA Global Integrity Programme and FIFA Integrity, please visit legal.fifa.com .

Media enquiries

Ronan O’Laoire Mobile: +43-699-1459-5637 Telephone: +43-1-26060-5637 Email: ronan.olaoire[at]un.org

FIFA Media Department Telephone: +41-43-222 7272  Email: media[at]fifa.org

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President Infantino addresses G20 on tackling corruption in sport

FIFA President shares experience with members of G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group

11 key reforms to combat corruption in football

FIFA offered as a global partner to help governments to fight corruption

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has addressed the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group on the last day of its videoconference summit.

Invited to speak on the fight against corruption in sport, President Infantino shared the lessons that the new FIFA has learned through its post-2016 reforms, as well as from the corruption scandal that brought down the previous administration.

Laying out the path taken by world football’s governing body in the first five years of his presidency, the FIFA President listed 11 key reforms designed “to tackle corruption, to bring back accountability in FIFA, in football more generally, and to safeguard the integrity of football and, of course, FIFA.”

In particular, those reforms were:

a fully transparent bidding process for the FIFA World Cup;

the separation of political and executive powers;

terms limits and eligibility checks for elected officials;

transparency of finances and compensation;

a transparent and centrally supervised transfer system;

audited football development investment with accountability, which includes a five-time increase in such investment (USD1.8bn) when compared to the past;

internal and external compliance overseen by an independent Audit and Compliance Committee;

judicial bodies guided by a new FIFA Code of Ethics;

strict tender processes for transparent procurement;

the promotion of women to decision-making positions in football administration; and

the formalised protection of human rights, and the protection of minors and children in sport, as it is important that our children are in a safe environment.

President Infantino expressed FIFA’s desire to establish partnerships with the members of the G20, and pointed to the power of football to help combat corruption: “It’s crucial that the G20 takes an interest in these matters and gives a clear policy direction because football is much more than just a sport. Sport in general is so important for our society, economically and socially, but also in terms of education. We are here to offer our collaboration, we are here to offer our part as a player of a global team to fight corruption.”

Tackling racism in football: from silence to speaking out

Senior Lecturer in Events and Leisure Management, University of East London

Disclosure statement

Naz Ali does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of East London provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Data released this year has highlighted the not-so-beautiful side of the beautiful game – bringing to the forefront, yet again, deeply rooted racist behaviour and attitudes on and off the pitch.

Despite numerous campaigns, initiatives and movements aiming to tackle racism in football, figures from inclusion and diversity charity Kick It Out have shown cases of racist abuse rose by 53% between 2019-2020.

The walk-off by players from Paris St-Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir during a Champions League game on December 8 may be one such example of players feelings of disillusionment about the way the industry handles racism. Both teams walked off the pitch and the match was abandoned following an alleged racist slur from the fourth official towards Istanbul Basakshehir’s assistant coach.

Recent analysis of Millwall fans booing players for taking a knee before a game against Derby on December 5 also reflects the wider “toxicity” of racism on the pitch as in everyday life.

As Herman Ouseley, chair of Kick it Out explained to the Institute of Race Relations in November 2011, “the reality of racism in sport is the reality of racism in society” . In other words, if sport is considered a microcosm of society, then narratives we’re seeing today reflect the state of race relations in society.

Therefore, tackling racism in football involves confronting institutional racism, systemic prejudice, toxic behaviours and unconscious biases across society for change within and beyond sport.

Football, Racism and Me

The recent BBC One documentary Anton Ferdinand: Football, Racism and Me provides a clear picture of the challenges facing the industry. Broadcast on November 30, the documentary revisits instances of racism in football to reveal the effects of racism on and beyond the pitch.

In one of the biggest racism cases in English football, we see the former professional footballer and Premier League player Anton Ferdinand reflect on the impacts of racial abuse during a Premier League match between Queens Park Rangers (QPR) and Chelsea in October 2011. Ferdinand, playing then for QPR, found himself in an altercation with the Chelsea captain John Terry, leading to Ferdinand being subjected to an alleged racist slur from Terry. Terry was found not guilty in a court of law, but the Football Association (FA) found him guilty of racist abuse and issued a £220,000 fine and a four-game ban.

Long-term effects of Racism

Ferdinand’s personal accounts of the incident provide rich insights into the effects of racism experienced and encountered on the football pitch that then seep into other public and private domains of a player’s life. One key message is the need to move beyond confinements of silence to finding the strength to speak out for change. But talking about the impacts of racism is not an journey, nor does it yield instant results. It took Ferdinand nine years to bring his story to the public sphere.

Other footballers who also recently broke their silence over racism in football are Paul Parker and Paul Williams, former 1990s Premier League players, whose experiences occurred decades ago. As Ferdinand explains in the documentary, coming forward meant going through a spectrum of intense emotions. He describes feeling “scared of the whirlwind of what happened”, “the abuse on social media” and the potential impact speaking out would have on the court case.

A study conducted between June 17 2020 and July 26 2020, commissioned by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) charity and supported by Kick It Out, found 43% of Premier League players had experienced racist abuse on Twitter .

Being a victim of racial abuse, like any other form of abuse, inflicts on psychological and emotional well-being, which may require intervention, including counselling and therapy. Footballers are being given support – according to the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), the PFA has offered counselling to England footballers subjected to racial abuse. According to the BACP, a rising number of players are experiencing feelings of stress, depression and anxiety, highlighting the multifaceted aspects of mental health issues experienced by footballers following racial abuse.

Breaking the silence

By speaking out about the impact of racism on their professional and personal lives, footballers are challenging institutional racism in the industry. As noted by Chris Grant (a board member of Sport England) this wider “systemic problem” (the social agencies and structures that govern us, such as education, health, justice, and politics) fuels racism in sport.

Still, the industry’s ability to empower change is immense and there is research showing the positive impact athletes have in society, beyond just being role models for their fans. As Stanford University study has shown, the “Mo Salah effect” is one example of this. The arrival of Egyptian-born Mo Salah, a Muslim man, at Liverpool Football Club has been said to contribute to a decline in Islamophobia in the Merseyside area of Liverpool , as well as anti-Muslim racism from Liverpool fans. Ferdinand’s account of shortfalls in football when it comes to tackling racism is another example of this kind of “prejudice-reduction effort” , although further research is required to measure the impact in terms of tackling racism in football.

Tackling Racism in Football

New concepts of diversity can be applied to combating racism in sports. What journalist Matthew Syed refers to as [“the power of diverse thinking”] [https://www.matthewsyed.co.uk/resource/rebel-ideas-the-power-of-diverse-thinking/], for example, involves working with people who have or have had different experiences in life that are different to the majority. Take the ability of overseas football managers and players to improve performance on the pitch through their different styles of play and leadership, for example. Change can emerge through the representation of non-Western leadership styles and by drawing on international cultural capital to reach out to global networks.

Engaging with different perspectives and embracing them can contribute to driving similar change and creativity in organisations and wider society. When various Black, Minority, Asian and Ethnic (BAME) groups are represented on sport boards, their socioeconomic status and schooling can involve different characteristics to majority members, and as such need to be taken into consideration.

By joining forces with social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #TakeAKnee, it appears anti-racism is moving to the centre stage. While race equality initiatives have helped, recent incidents show there is still a long way to go.

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Corruption In Football

So it is that cases of corruption have enveloped world football and, more specifically, the governing bodies that are supposed to keep things in some sort of order. The precise nature of the corruption that has been revealed in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA for short, is convoluted and complicated. It also developing all of the time, so we’ll update this article as best we can moving forward.

Here we’ll attempt to explain the most recent developments regarding the corruption that appears to be systemic inside FIFA, as well as having a look at other cases and examples of times when football has been less than a straightforward and honest sport.

FIFA Corruption

There is nowhere better to start when exploring the murky waters of football corruption than at the head of the snake itself, FIFA. You would have to be either a hermit who has been living under a rock far far away from everything or else wilfully ignorant in order to have missed the recent news about the organisation and the arrests that have been made, but just in case you’re either of those things, here we go…

Cash-For-Contracts, The Marketing Scandal

Most sensible football fans have suspected for years that all was not quite above board with world football’s governing body. In May 2006 a British reporter named Andrew Jennings caused shockwaves and controversy when he released a book entitled “Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals”. He also produced an episode of Panorama with the BBC in which the former chairman of the English Football Association, Lord Triesman, described FIFA as ‘behav[ing] like a mafia family’.

There are three main areas where FIFA officials are accused of being slightly naughty, to understate things a touch, and we’ll look at them individually, starting with the cash-for-contracts scandal that followed the collapse of FIFA’s previous marketing partner, International Sport and Leisure. ISL had been accused of paying large bribes to senior officials at FIFA, namely, Nicolas Leoz, Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira, from 1989 until 1999. The bribes, according to ISL insiders, were necessary to ensure that the company was awarded the marketing contract for numerous World Cups.

Once ISL collapsed in 2001 – with debts amounting to around £153 million – there was then a free-for-all for various marketing companies that wanted to take over the marketing of World Cups for FIFA. It was such a big deal for the companies because they were able to arrange the sale of TV coverage; something that had a huge amount of money wrapped up in it and that could involve skimming from the top of the pile, so to speak. The allegations suggest that the television rights rigging goes all the way back to 1991, with plenty of money to be made during that time.

For example, the TV rights for showing the 2010 and 2014 World Cup tournaments were bought for $600,000 to a TV company owned by a FIFA member Jack Warner. His company then sold them on to a different company for $18 million, earning a profit of £17.4 million. Not bad work if you can get it. With bribes being paid by companies for the purchase of the TV rights and then the sale of those rights for a huge amount of money, it’s no wonder that so many members of FIFA appear to have been tempted by the forbidden fruit.

The Awarding Of World Cup Hosting Rights

Though numerous investigative journalists had been looking into the dodgy dealings of FIFA for some time, it was perhaps not until 2010 that the entire footballing world sat up and took notice and questioned whether everything really was above board in Switzerland . For it was in 2010 that FIFA announced the countries that had been selected to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups .

Perhaps, though it seems unfair to say, English journalists decided to kick up a storm about it because England was one of the countries bidding to host one of the tournaments and they lost out. Whatever the reasons, it’s true to say that the fact that Russia was awarded the 2018 tournament and Qatar the one in 2022 caused many to believe that the lunatics had taken over the footballing asylum.

Russia might not seem like too strange a choice for a World Cup and that’s true, especially with Sochi having hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014. Qatar, though, is unquestionably a strange choice for a country to host a World Cup. For starters, the country didn’t even have any football stadiums at the time that it was awarded the tournament. What it did have was sand, heat and lots and lots of money.

The notion of a World Cup in Qatar gets increasingly ridiculous the more that you know and think about it. For example, World Cups are traditionally held in June and July, however the average temperature for those months in the Arab state ranges from 29 to 42 degrees centigrade. That’s really, really hot. Far too hot to play football in or even sit in a ground and watch other people play football in.

Consequently the idea is that the tournament will be played in late November, disrupting the football calendars of every major country in the world. The temperature then will be around 30 degrees, so not exactly cool as a cucumber. For that reason the stadiums will employ cooling technology that is supposed to be able to reduce the temperate by about 20 degrees. There was even talk of fake clouds being created to aid in the cooling and refreshment of players and supporters.

Qatar also has a less than exemplary human rights record, especially when it comes to the workers and members of LGBT communities. The workers on the stadiums have reportedly been denied food and water, had their immigration papers and passports taken away from then and many thousands have also died building the grounds. It has resulted in Qatar requesting that they build just eight or nine stadiums rather than the twelve proposed in the country’s initial bid for the tournament.

So a country that didn’t even have football venues on a continent that had never previously hosted a World Cup was awarded the tournament in spite of the fact that they have a terrible human rights record, don’t acknowledge the rights of homosexuals or gender-aware members of the community and regardless of the fact that it’s too hot to actually play football there. All seems totally above board, no?

It’s not the first time that an accusation over bribes for the hosting of a tournament has taken place, either. Our old friend Jack Warner, a former Vice-President of FIFA, was accused of asking for $10 million from South Africa in order to vote for them to host the World Cup in 2010. He allegedly received the money and distributed it around his companies, though that is denied by Warner and South African officials.

Sepp Blatter

The poisoned apple that so many officials seem to have taken a bite out of comes in the form of Joseph “Sepp” Blatter. Blatter became the General Secretary of FIFA in 1981 before taking over from João Havelange as President in 1998. It is ever since his rise to the top of the FIFA food chain that allegations of corruption have dogged the organisation.

Blatter won four more elections during his Presidency, though not without controversy. From not long after he took office there have been suggestions that plenty of his cronies have furthered their own interests through bribes, cash-for-votes and even money laundering. The man himself has also been responsible for the abandonment of numerous investigations into the dodgy dealings of the organisation he supposedly runs.

Somehow the Swiss administrator managed to avoid being uncovered as a corrupt official for years, most likely because of his determination to increase the influence of countries in Africa and Asia, thereby winning himself support. As FIFA is currently set up, each country that is part of the organisation gets an equal vote on FIFA related matters. As such, the African and Asian countries that have never won a major tournament have as much say in matters as Germany, the country that has appeared in eighteen World Cups and won four of them. In 2015 he was banned from any FIFA related activities for eight years – later reduced to six – by the organisation’s amusingly named ‘Ethics Committee’.

UEFA Corruption

Perhaps unsurprisingly, FIFA isn’t the only footballing body guilty of misbehaviour on a grand scale. It’s European counterpart, UEFA, has also been caught up in the mire of corruption that has swept through world football.

Michel Platini, who was the head of UEFA at the time that Blatter headed up FIFA and the corruption allegations were taking place, had to deny receiving a ‘disloyal payment’ last year. He was paid £1.35 million for, he describes, ‘legitimate consultancy work’. The problem he had, however, was that he received the payment in 2011 – a full nine years after his initial payment for work with FIFA and just three months before Blatter was re-elected at FIFA boss in 2011.

Platini was seen as the natural successor to Blatter as the head of FIFA, but his involvement in those suspicious payments ended any hopes he had of moving to the top of the pile. Along with Blatter he was also banned from any FIFA related activity for eight years, with that also being reduced down to six.

Instead the Presidency of FIFA was awarded to Gianni Infantino, a man who started working for UEFA in 2000 and became the head of the organisation’s Legal Affairs and Club Licensing Division in 2004. He was promoted to General Secretary in 2007 and then the confusingly named Secretary General two years after that. In April of 2016, however, his name was also dragged into the corruption quagmire that had seemed to infect everything it touched.

The now infamous ‘Panama Papers’, which are 11.5 million documents that got leaked and detailed how numerous wealthy individuals used illegal offshore accounts for such things as fraud and tax evasion, revealed that Infantino co-signed papers with a company owned by a man named Hugo Jinkis. Jinkis was indicted in America for £100 million worth of fraud.

The wrongdoing of Infantino in this matter was to do with the same TV rights being sold for cheap and resold for much more money thing that we talked about earlier, though UEFA released a statement saying that at the time it occurred there was no reason to believe there was anything suspicious about the deal. Sufficed to say, it may be harder to find someone involved with either FIFA or UEFA who has not done something wrong over the last twenty or thirty years than it will be to find someone who has.

Other Incidents Of Corruption In The Sport

Of course it is not just the major governing bodies that have been guilty of getting up to no good over the years. In some instances it’s been a one-off, whilst in others it’s been endemic in the culture of the footballing society.

Here we’ll have a look at the best of the rest, so to speak…

Problems In England – The Bung Culture

2006 wasn’t exactly a great year for English football as far as the country’s reputation was concerned. Admittedly, after learning about the sort of thing that members of FIFA and UEFA were allegedly getting up to this will all seem like small fry, but it’s hardly impressive nevertheless.

Once again it was a Panorama investigation for the BBC that seemed to reveal the culture of accepting bribes, or bungs, in order to sign certain players was rife in the English game. The then Luton Town manager, Mike Newell and Ian Holloway, who was managing Queens Park Rangers at the time, both admitted that such ‘backhanders’ were common place in the sport.

One of the most implicated people in the whole affair was Sam Allardyce, then the manager of Bolton Wanderers. Two agents, by the names of Teni Yerima and Peter Harrison, were separately filmed in secret admitting that they had paid money to Allardyce through his son Craig in order to get him to sign certain players. “Big Sam”, as he’s known in the game, denied ever doing anything of the sort.  Sam was also later caught trying to bypass transfer rules leading to him losing the England managers job.

Kevin Bond, who was the first-team coach of Newcastle United when the report went out, was filmed when he was the first-team coach of Portsmouth admitting that he would discuss receiving a payment from an agent for signing a new player. He was sacked by Newcastle not long after the programme aired.

At Chelsea, concerns over the transfers of Didier Drogba, Petr Čech and Michael Essien were never really answered, with the agent Pinhas Zahavi failing to co-operate with an FA investigation. There were also question marks over the illegal approach made by the club’s then director of youth football, Frank Arnesen, for Middlesbrough’s Nathan Porritt, with the youngster reportedly offered £150,000 over three years to make the move to Stamford Bridge.

Corruption Around the World

In Goa in 2004 Wilfred Leisure and Curtorim Gymkhana were vying for promotion out of the country’s Second Division. Wilfred needed by win by seven goals more than their rivals in order to get promoted, so they must have felt pretty good when they took a 55-1 lead over Dona Paula Sports Club. Curtorim officials found out the scoreline, however, and Curtorim went on to win 61-1. All four teams involved in the games were subsequently banned for a year.

In 2006 a probe into corruption in Vietnamese football discovered that up to 150 games, over a period of twenty years, might have been fixed. The league itself was nearly suspended when the majority of teams and players had been banned for corruption.

Finally, In one of the most famous cases of all, Italian giants Juventus were stripped of their previous two Serie A titles in 2006 and relegated to Serie B for their part in fixing matches in the Italian league. AC Milan and Fiorentina were also caught up in the allegations of wrong-doing, with the General Manager of Juve ensuring that the club’s matches were officiated by referees that would be ‘kind’ to his club.

Corruption in football – player transfers, agents and the “privatisation of regulation”

Nick De Marco KC

Corruption and football are two words that are unfortunately found all too often associated with another, particularly in respect to the business side of football. Leaving aside, if we can, the incredible activity of the world governing body in football, FIFA, whose top officials faced multiple counts of racketeering, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and obstruction of justice in US Court proceedings,  there has been considerable comment, on a perennial basis, about the corruption involved in relation to the transfer of football players and associated agents’ activity.

This post considers the reality and sources of corruption in football before discussing solutions to the problem. I conclude that the various shortcomings and retreats of the regulator mean that the burden falls increasingly on private participants [1] in football themselves to remedy the prejudice they suffer as a result of corruption or “ cheating ”, and I try to set out a brief guide to the framework to achieve that remedy for participants and their lawyers. [2]

   “Football for Sale”

In September 2016 the Daily Telegraph ran a series of front page stories about alleged corruption in English football. The “ investigation ” under the name “ Football for Sale ” started with revelations that England’s then manager, Sam Allardyce, had negotiated a “£400,000 deal and offered advice to businessmen on how to ‘get around’ FA rules on player transfers ”. [3] The paper promised further scandalous exposés about the extent of corruption in English football, but it turned out to be a damp squib. QPR’s then manager, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was enticed into asking requesting a fee of £55,000 to speak to football agents and Leeds United’ Chairman, Massimo Cellino, explained to his entrappers that whilst they could not purchase a share in football players, if they invested in the Club they could have a return on profit from player sales. Apart, perhaps, for the unfortunate Assistant Head Coach of Barnsley, Tommy Wright, set up by the Telegraph with a £5,000 “ bung ” to agree to place players in the team, none of this revealed any breaches of the FA Rules, let alone the criminal law. Wright lost his job, as did Allardyce, the latter more as a result of The FA’s embarrassment then any rule breaches. To date, nobody has been charged with breaking any rule.

10 years before the Telegraph’s much trumpeted scoop the BBC put on a similar sting.  BBC’s Panorama broadcast a programme under the salacious title “ Undercover: Football's Dirty Secrets ”. It featured allegations about rule breaking and “ bungs ” about (amongst others) the then Bolton Wanderers manager, Sam Allardyce, and then Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp. A centrepiece of the programmes was a secret film recording of football agent Charles Collymore caught on camera saying “ There's managers out there who take bungs all day long. I would say to you comfortably there's six to eight managers we could definitely approach and they'd be up for this no problem .”

 I represented (and cleared) Mr Collymore in disciplinary proceedings brought against him and others by The FA arising out of the programme. We watched the entire unedited secret film recordings. It was obvious that Mr Collymore had gone out of his way on several occasions to make clear the way he conducted his agency business was by identifying and putting in the hours with young talented players, not by corrupt schemes. But those secretly filming him over a series of dinners and meetings did not give up. They kept pressing him, saying that their investors wanted a short cut and asking why they could not just pay a manager to place players instead. Finally, after many hours, they got the sound bite they wanted for the programme. 

Mr Collymore later said he had become suspicious of those filming him and he was trying to “ smoke them out ”. The FA, no doubt embarrassed by the tabloid headlines of corruption and bungs in football that followed promptly decided to fail to investigate any of the serious allegations made in the programme about high profile premier league managers, passing that buck to others, but instead decided to throw the book at a few of the smaller players mentioned including Mr Collymore, charging them with breaches relating to a relatively low level transfer of a player from Luton Town to Bristol City. This turned out to be a typical response of The FA.

The Telegraph’s sting 10 years later represented much more of the same. More secret film recordings apparently trying to set up football managers and others (with some of the same characters involved), more embarrassment for The FA, but an underlying sense that nothing much was actually been exposed and also nothing much has changed.

The Telegraph’s story was much more hot air and hype than substance. Yet the interest in the story, just like the BBC’s programme ten years before, reflects a growing disquiet about perceived corruption in football amongst the public, the press, and also politicians. If you asked many people working in the football industry about the story they would express surprise, not at what the media uncovered but rather the fact so little of what is known does go on was actually exposed. The more serious allegations of corruption, some of which have been made in public, remain largely uninvestigated.

The reality of corruption in football

What, then, is the reality and extent of corruption in football? In the widest sense of the word, corruption is prolific. I use the term “ corruption ” here to include everything from the obvious bribe to persuade a club to engage a player or a player to sign with an agent, to deliberate and concealed breaches of the rules so that a club, player or agent may achieve some financial or sporting other advantage, such as occurred in respect to the Tevez affair discussed below. Corruption in this sense is not necessarily criminal activity (though it may be), it might not even create civil liability (but it usually, and increasingly will), it may involve a dishonest breach of the regulators rules in order to obtain some advantage (which can often be referred to as simple “cheating” and might be lawful conduct at civil law) or, as a result for example of de-regulation, may not even breach the relevant regulations.

Corruption in football has, and in many cases continues, to operate on many levels, but it mostly centres on the lucrative and highly specialised transfer market of football players. Previously allegations of corruption in football focussed on “ old school ” English football managers receiving cash payments for signing players from particular agents. Whilst that no doubt continues at some levels it is much less widespread today than it was years ago. Football clubs, particularly at the top level, have moved away from allowing managers to conduct their most important and risky financial business. The advent of the modern football Chief Executive or Director of Football, sometimes decried by English fans, in large part reflects the fact that football clubs understand the need to act more as professional businesses than they did in the past, and that owners who plough millions of pounds into the clubs expect some kind of checks and balances on spending.

 But this does not mean football is now “ clean ”. Far from it, if anything there has been an increase in arrangements in breach of the rules, including the payment of bribes, in the transfer market. As even greater amounts of money pour into football the competition between the top clubs for the best players increases. What in most other businesses might appear to be unorthodox payments to or from agents, or to families of players, often undeclared and in breach of the FA Rules, are not uncommon, even at the highest level. There is a widespread perception that sometimes the only way to secure the signing of a player is to engage in the same type of conduct that everybody else seems to be engaged in, otherwise the club or agent will miss out on a player to their competitors.

The failure and retreat of regulation

The regulators have proved incapable of tacking the problem. Its scale is too large. The FA does not have the resources, even if it had the will (which is questionable) to investigate and charge every suspicious transfer or payment. Instead it concentrates on a tiny fraction of suspicious transfers, not necessarily the most serious alleged rule breaches, or those involving the highest amount of money, but those it thinks are the easiest to prove, or those that sit well with a particular policy objective in vogue at the time, or involve a charge against an unpopular individual in the eyes of The FA.

In addition, the FA’s disciplinary processes have come under increasing scrutiny in the last few years. Many participants have little confidence that they shall receive a fair hearing, or that the FA’s Regulatory Commissions or Appeal Boards, and the way they are selected, are genuinely independent of The FA. A widespread perception exists that once The FA decides to charge a party the result is almost a fait accompli . As such, it is often The FA’s discretion to investigate and charge those allegations it is interested in pursuing, a process that is naturally even less transparent or independent than the subsequent disciplinary process, that is determinative. These flaws in the regulatory process lead to a general lack of confidence in its integrity and effectiveness.

The problem has been made worse by FIFA. In particular, the decision to scrap the licensing of football agents and replace it with a far lighter touch regulation of “ Intermediaries ” from 2015 has led to an increase in precisely the type of corrupt payments (often to young players’ families), “ tapping up ” and “ poaching ” that many of us predicted it would. In March 2015, I published a paper on the topic suggesting the de-regulation would cause:

an increase in disputes between Intermediaries themselves, between clubs and players on the one hand and Intermediaries on the other, and an increase in disciplinary/regulatory disputes between the FA and Intermediaries (and others). [4]

And so it has. Even after The FA’s Agents license was first abolished in 2015, the number of Intermediaries registered with The FA started at just over 770. In only two years that has increased to over 1,700 individual registered Intermediaries and over 160 registered Intermediary companies. [5] Yet the number of football players, clubs and transfers will have remained more or less the same in those two years. There are many more Intermediaries chasing the same deals today as there were two years ago, most of the new Intermediaries have not received any training and never been subject to a licensing regime, and many of them shall not start out with their own clients.

In addition, when The FA replaced its Football Agents Regulations with the Regulations on Intermediaries, it decided to scrap the prohibitions on agents “ tapping up ” (approaching players under contract to a club in an attempt to induce them to leave the club and join another). This activity was prohibited by the old FA Agents Regulations which contained a presumption that an agent of a player who had unlawfully terminated his playing contract had induced a breach of contract.

Further, unlike the previous Agents Regulations, the FA Intermediaries Regulations do not prohibit an Intermediary approaching a player already under a Representation Contract with another Intermediary. In the past, attempts by agents to poach the clients of other agents could sometimes be swiftly rebuffed by making it clear to the poaching agent that he could not do so without breaching the Agents Regulations (and thus risk suspension of his license by the FA) whilst the player already had a valid Representation Contract. This opportunity to protect their clients by engaging the regulator has been lost to Intermediaries.

The consequence of this de-regulation has been what I describe as the “ privatisation of regulation” – it is left to the parties to enforce their rights against each other with little recourse to regulation. The “ poaching ” scenario is the best illustration of this. With many more Intermediaries as there were previously Agents, and most of the new Intermediaries presumably having few or no clients, the inevitable increase in attempts to poach players from existing Intermediaries is aggravated by the fact that there is no longer the deterrent of action by the regulator against the poaching Intermediary. The Intermediary who has his client poached only has one recourse, to privately sue the new Intermediary for inducement to breach contract. There has thus been a predictable escalation in the number of FA Rule K arbitrations between Intermediaries and Intermediaries and players in the last couple of years. The FA as regulator stays out of this, leaving it to the parties to appoint their arbitrators and lawyers and sue for damages.  Anecdotally, and according to other lawyers working in the industry I speak with, we have seen this tendency repeated internationally, with an increase in private contractual disputes between players, clubs and Intermediaries being brought in arbitration before FIFA and/or the CAS. Despite the arbitration clause in FA registered Intermediary Representation Contracts, there has been a greater tendency to involve the courts too. FIFA, on the other hand, does not mandate arbitration for Intermediary disputes at all any more (it did so under the old FIFA Agents Regulations), so there is also increased uncertainty as to the right forum for resolution of disputes arising from certain international transfers.

FIFA’s decision to end the licensing of Agents gave The FA, and other national federations, little choice but to follow suit. So why did the FIFA retreat from this important area of regulation?  Two reasons are apparent from those who pushed the change through FIFA. [6] First, FIFA concluded that its regulation was not effective enough, because only a minority of international transfers were conducted by licensed football agents (FIFA claimed around 25-30%). As regulation was not working, they concluded they would scrap the regulation itself. Second, some within FIFA took the view that payments to agents meant money leaving football, and de-regulation couple with a cap on fees would be a good way to break the power of the more successful agents and reduce the amount of money paid in agents’ fees.

Both these reasons were profoundly misguided. The idea that because a system of professional regulation is not yet effective enough, or that many parties are avoiding the regulation and acting outside it, should lead to a de-regulation, a levelling down to reflect the practices of those intent on rule breaking, is a recipe for exactly the type of problem that has since emerged. One can imagine the outcry if a financial or medical regulator decided to de-regulate requirements on lenders or doctors because many of them were breaching the regulations placed on them.

In any event, FIFA’s statistics, that only 25-30% of international transfers were conducted by licensed agents under the old regulations, were most likely misleading. In recent statistics provided by the head of FIFA TMS, [7] “ 21% of all transfers in 2016 had at least 1 intermediary involved ” (i.e. similar to the situation with licensed agents) but for “ transfers with fees this number is as high as 51% ”. Not surprisingly, it is those transfers where money is at stake where Intermediaries are most likely to be involved, and it was the same with licensed agents. It also follows that where more money is at stake, it is more likely agents or Intermediaries shall be engaged. FIFA’s TMS’ figures show that England tops the league for spending on Agents/Intermediaries since January 2013, with a total of $381.2 USD million spent on fees. England also had probably the most effective regulation of agents under the old FA Agents Regulations. The rest of the league table reflects the fact that it is the big leagues that spend the most on Intermediaries (Italy came second, Germany third, followed by Portugal, then Spain and France). So whilst only 25% of international transfers may have been conducted by licensed football agents previously, the figure where substantial transfer fees are involved (i.e. transfers in or out of the major European leagues) must have been and remains much higher, much more like 80% and above. And it is precisely in relation to these high value transfers, where substantial agents’ fees can also be earned and where there is likely to be increased competition between clubs, that the risk of corruption is great.

The second FIFA justification, reducing the sums of money “ going out ” of football was equally confused for other reasons not the subject of this paper but, in any event, FIFA’s attempt to cap remuneration of Intermediaries at 3% has not succeeded. Those of us involved in the challenge to potential domestic regulations suggesting a commission cap were able to compromise that challenge precisely because national federations, in Europe at least, have avoided putting it into any real effect. The commissions earned by Intermediaries in the big deals remain at the same level (as a proportion of, for example, the player’s salary) as they were under the licensed agents scheme (i.e usually around 5%, rarely, but sometimes, more than 10%. It is even more rare for them to be less than 5%).

In addition to de-regulating Agency Activity FIFA decided, also from 2015, to bring in a worldwide prohibition on Third Party Investment (‘TPI’) in football players. Previously, and quite properly, Third Party Influence was banned, but many parts of the world allowed third parties to invest in the future transfer value of a player thus allowing poorer clubs to borrow money and arguably players from poorer countries or backgrounds to be promoted on a bigger stage. Opponents of Third Party Investment compared the scheme to human trafficking, perhaps forgetting that if a Third Party doesn’t have an interest in a player then only the club, his employer, does – and the club as employer has even greater control over the transfers and future moves of the player.

But whatever the arguments about TPI (and there are strong ones on both sides), FIFA chose to simply prohibit TPI outright rather than setting up a transparent system of regulation of it. Some of us suggested at the time that the inevitable consequence of these twin moves (de-regulating agents and banning TPI) would be to drive practices underground and outside a regulatory framework. This is indeed what appears to have happened. Some investors still see the opportunities of investment in the potentially lucrative risk of a player’s future transfer value, and certain players, agents or clubs still have a need for investment of this kind. Because FIFA has retreated from regulating the activity, it is now conducted in an even more concealed fashion that it was previously. It is perhaps no surprise that the Telegraph’s sting was largely based on pretend scheme to “ get around ” the ban on TPI.

  The privatisation of regulation

My main argument in this paper is that the various factors discussed above, in particular the ever increasing sums of money pouring into football and revolving around football transfers on the one hand and the failure and retreat of regulation on the other, has led to what I describe as the “ privatisation ” of regulation. The tendency is for the parties themselves to enforce the Rules as against each other, to seek compensation from each other, rather than redress from the regulator, for the loss caused to them by various forms of corruption, fraud or cheating.

The bellwether case for this dynamic was the Tevez case(s), and barristers from Blackstone chambers can be proud to have been in the forefront of this important development. [8] West Ham United acquired the Argentinian player, Carlos Tevez’s registration in circumstances where a third party maintained an interest and influence over the player in breach of the Premier League’s rules, and West Ham was fined for its breach by the Premier League. [9] Sheffield United then brought arbitral proceedings against the Premier League arguing that West Ham ought to have been subject to a points’ deduction by the regulator  for its rule breach – had it been so West Ham would have been relegated instead of Sheffield United. The Arbitral panel failed to overturn the decision not to impose a points’ sanction instead of a fine for this breach. [10]

Sheffield United then changed tack and brought a direct private claim (in FA Rule K arbitration) for breach of contract against West Ham. After establishing that the Premier League rules constituted a contract not only between each club and the regulator but between each club with each other, and that West Ham’s breach of the relevant rule caused Sheffield Untied loss, in that it would not have been relegated had West Ham not benefitted (in points) from its breach, Sheffield United succeeded in securing many millions of pounds in compensation from West Ham for breach of the contractual obligation that it owed Sheffield United to comply with the rules. [11]

The case remains the high-water mark for participants wishing to secure compensation for   losses they have suffered as a result of rule breaches by others, but it is also significant because it reflected, or perhaps heralded in, the new more common creative response to rule breaches, cheating and corruption generally by participants no longer confident that they can achieve a remedy via the normal regulatory means.  Football is big business, why should clubs, players and agents rely on the unpredictable discretion of an under-resourced regulator that lacks the appetite to effectively regulate the sport?

Nearly ten years later private remedies for corruption and breach are far more common than complaints to the regulator. Disputes concerning the transfer of players and payments to agents, especially, are far more frequently determined now by claims for damages (and sometimes other relief such as injunctive relief) between participants, whether in the courts, FIFA and CAS, or FA Rule K arbitration.  This is the key development for lawyers acting in this field.

Because these disputes are largely determined in arbitration, and arbitrations are generally confidential (though many of the decisions in disputes of this kind before the FIFA Dispute Resolution Chamber or the CAS are published), there are less precedents that one can rely on or refer to than one might like, but there are nevertheless a number of cases and sources of law that should help practitioners and clients involved in disputes of this kind. In this next part of this paper I set out some of the key cases in English law that lawyers practising in cases of this nature should be familiar with.

Key cases and principles for resolving corruption disputes in football

Arbitration clauses

Given the increased importance of private arbitration in football disputes, it is important for practitioners to have a good understanding of commercial arbitration generally, and how it works in football in particular. The starting point is usually to determine whether or not an arbitration clause exists, and if it does who the right arbitrator is. This is increasingly straightforward:

First, if the parties have an express contract between each other, such as a Representation Contract between an agent and a club, an employment contract between a play and a club, or a transfer agreement between clubs, the contact shall often contain an express arbitration clause (and indeed there are often regulatory requirements for one). The most likely forums for the resolution of disputes will be FIFA (from which there is usually always an appeal to the CAS) and/or CAS alone for contracts made with international parties (such as foreign players, clubs or agents), the Premier League, Football League, or Football Conference for the resolution of certain specified disputes, such as most contractual disputes between players and employing clubs, and FA Rule K arbitration, which covers nearly all other disputes between participants.

Second, in the absence of an individually negotiated contract between the parties incorporating an arbitration clause between them, the relevant rules shall often constitute a contract by which the parties have agreed to arbitrate. Most significantly, FA Rule K provides that “ any dispute or difference between any two or more Participants … shall be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under these Rules .” FA Rule K means that there is, as a starting presumption, mandatory arbitration for football disputes in England. Despite clear authority on the point, including from the Court of Appeal, [12] some participants have continued to attempt to litigate in courts despite the breadth of FA Rule K, usually with negative effects – such as their claims being stayed for arbitration and having to pay the other side’s costs, often on an indemnity basis.

FA Rule K.1(a) makes an exception where there are other applicable arbitration clauses – most usually these will be those between the parties that mandate the Premier League, Football League or FIFA shall have the applicable arbitration clause. It is often important to determine which arbitration clause takes precedent.

Whilst FA Rule K arbitrations are valid and Arbitration Act compliant they have certain important limitations. The most significant is that The FA have contracted out of section 69 of the Arbitration Act 1996 [13] whereby a party can appeal to the court on a question of law arising out of the arbitration award. Thus, if an FA Rule K Arbitral Tribunal makes an error of law there is ostensibly nothing a party can do about it. In addition, FA Rule K excludes sections 44 and 45 of the 1996 Act, whereby a party can apply to court for an order in support of the arbitration or for the determination of a preliminary issue. There seems little justification for these exclusions which pose legal and practical difficulties for the parties. It is noted that maters subject to arbitration under FIFA generally include an appeal to the CAS, being the world’s highest sporting arbitral body, but even after a final determination of the CAS a football player has been able to have the decision of CAS overturned in the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. [14] Whilst a party can still apply to court to set aside an arbitral award of an FA Rule K tribunal, or for that matter a Premier League arbitral tribunal pursuant to section 68 of the 1996 Act (serious irregularity) the recent decision of the High Court in Pulis v Crystal Palace FC [15] , another case concerning deceit and football managers, demonstrates that section 68 will only be of assistance in “ extreme cases ”.

 In England & Wales Cricket Board v Kaneria [2013] EWHC 10474 (Comm) the court established that the ECB’s disciplinary appeal procedures were an arbitration for the purposes of the 1996 Act, despite them being disciplinary in nature. This was followed in Bruce Baker v The British Boxing Board of Control [2015] EWHC 2469 (Ch) with respect to the Boxing Board’s appeal procedures. The FA, on the other hand, has expressly determined that its internal disciplinary procedures “ are disciplinary, rather than arbitral, bodies ”. [16] This is perhaps not surprising given the lack of independence in the FA’s procedures, but it does mean a party can challenge any decision of an FA Regulatory Commission or Appeal Board under normal principles of law (such as pursuant to the Bradley jurisdiction [17] ), in an FA Rule K arbitration, making the FA a defendant – and such challenges are these days not uncommon.

It is also important to remember that the right (and obligation) to arbitrate applies to participants with disputes against the football regulator also (whether the FA, Premier League or Football League). Increasingly participants are challenging the decisions of regulators that have a detrimental impact on them – for example the challenge by QPR and others to the legality of the Football League’s financial fair play rules which is subject to confidential ongoing arbitration. In Hull City v The FA , [18] an FA Rule K arbitral tribunal quashed the decision of the FA Council refusing its application to change the club’s playing name from Hull City to Hull Tigers, accepting the club’s case that the decision was tainted by bias and could not stand.  Where an unlawful decision of a regulator causes a party financial loss then that party should contemplate using arbitration to claim damages against the regulator.

Causes of action and defences

Any English law cause of action that can be brought in the civil courts can naturally be brought by way of arbitration. Whilst the majority of claims in football arbitration remain claims for breach of contract, we are increasingly seeing more complex claims including allegations of fraud, conspiracy, and inducement by third prates to breach contract.

Normal principles of English law shall apply to the determination of these claims. Some participants and practitioners are confused by the label “ FA ” Rule K Arbitration into thinking that the tribunal is a football tribunal applying football rules (such as the FA Rules and Regulations). It is not. It’s approach to a claim is (or should properly be) the same as the approach an English court should take. For example, the argument (often run, rarely with any success), that a contract is not binding because it does not comply with an FA Regulation is unlikely to succeed as a defence to a claim for breach of contract. It usually matters not that a contract may be invalid for the purposes of FA Regulations, and thus could not be enforced via the regulator, if it nevertheless amounts to a valid lawful agreement under English law.

The recent Court of Appeal decision in Anthony Mcgill v. The Sports and Entertainment Media Group (‘SEM’) and Others [19] is a rare and useful indication of the way the law approaches agreements that do not comply with the regulations. Rare, because it was not subject to arbitration but determined in the court, and useful because the basic facts are common in disputes relating to player transfers and agents. McGill claimed he had reached an oral contract to act as agent for the player in a transfer to Bolton Wanderers FC, but that SEM and Bolton induced a breach of the contract. SEM had entered into an agency agreement with Bolton to find the player and received commission from Bolton. McGill brought various claims (including inducement to breach contract and conspiracy) against both SEM and Bolton. The defendants argued, amongst other things, that McGill had not reached a valid contract with the player as there was only an oral contract that he would act as agent – there was no executed written Representation Contract (that would have to be lodged with The FA) that would have entitled McGill to act as agent in the deal and receive fees. At first instance, the Judge accepted that there had been an oral contract but dismissed the claim, holding that McGill had not demonstrated that the player would have entered into a written contract with him had it not been for the defendants’ unlawful conduct. The Court of Appeal held that whilst the Judge had been entitled to find on the balance of probabilities that the player would not have entered into a written contract with McGill, that was not the end of the matter. McGill was entitled to an award of damages on the basis of loss of the opportunity to earn a fee under a written agency agreement when the player’s transfer to Bolton was completed. The correct approach was not (only) whether the player would or would not have signed a contract, but what percentage chance was there that he would have. As the Judge had been entitled to find the player would not have signed, the percentage could not be more than 50%, but the case was remitted to the Judge to determine what percentage chance there was that the player would have signed with McGill, and for that to then inform the damages to McGill.

Another important Court of Appeal football case that remains relevant to many disputes where corruption is alleged in relation to player transfers and agents is Imageview Management Ltd v Jack . [20] A football agent owes fiduciary duties to his client and the non-disclosure of a conflict of interest between the agent’s own interest and those of his player client was a breach the agent’s duty of good faith to his client. In the circumstances of the case, the agent forfeited his right to the commission he was otherwise contractually entitled to, and the fee he earned in breach of the duty was a secret profit, recoverable by the player, subject to the possibility of subject to an equitable allowance. Imageview is not only relevant to allegations of secret profits (though they are not unusual in football), but to any breach of fiduciary duty – the principle being that if a fiduciary (such as a football agent) acts dishonestly he will forfeit his right to fees by the principal (subject to that being inequitable). [21]

  Conclusion

Corruption in football remains a considerable issue. The “ battleground ” has shifted from the conventional perspective of regulator on the one hand and the wrongdoer on the other, to one where participants seek their own remedies (or defences) against other participants. It is in applying these issues general principles of contractual and commercial law, along with a good understanding of the regulatory framework, arbitration and industry practice, that sports lawyers can be of most valuable assistance to their football clients.

[1] I use the normal common sense meaning for the term “ participant ” in this paper, i.e. a participant in regulated football. It accords generally with the defined term “ Participant ” under The FA rules, which is one of the main means by which The FA exercises regulatory and disciplinary jurisdiction over participants and by which participants agree to arbitrate disputes as between each other. The definition of Participant in Rule A.2 of The FA Rules is as follows: 

“Participant” means an Affiliated Association, Competition, Club, Club Official, Intermediary, Player, Official, Manager, Match Official, Management Committee Member, member or employee of a Club and all such persons who are from time to time participating in any activity sanctioned either directly or indirectly by The Association.

[2] Other colleagues from Blackstone chambers are speaking about and providing papers about various different remedies in corruption cases for the same seminar. It might be helpful to read their papers along with this one.

[3] “ Exclusive investigation: England manager Sam Allardyce for sale ”, Daily Telegraph, 27 September 2016 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/26/exclusive-investigation-england-manager-sam-allardyce-for-sale ).

[4] The new FA Football Intermediaries Regulations and the disputes likely to arise , Nick De Marco, 26 March 2015, paragraph 38. Available to download here: https://www.blackstonechambers.com/news/analysis-the_new_fa_football/

[5] See: http://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/policies/intermediaries/fa-registered-intermediaries-list

[6] See, for example, the comments attributed to Marco Villiger, then FIFA's head of legal affairs, discussing the proposals to scrap the licensing scheme in 2011, as reported by Reuters at the time: “ FIFA plans caps, more transparency for agent fees ” (21 September 2011: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-fifa-agents-idUKTRE78K69G20110921) .

[7] These figures were provided by Kimberly Morris, Head of FIFA TMS Integrity and Compliance department, in her PowerPoint presentation for the 2016 Player Contracts Conference in London during a panel discussion I joined about the FIFA’s Intermediaries Regulations.

[8] Ian Mill QC and Adam Lewis (now QC) acted for Sheffield United; Michael Beloff QC and Nick De Marco for Fulham. David (now Lord) Pannick QC sat on the Premier League arbitral Panel; Robert Englehart QC on the FA Rule K arbitral panel.

[9] FAPL v West Ham United , FAPL Disciplinary Commission, decision dated 27 April 2007

[10] Sheffield United v Premier League, Premier League Rule S Arbitration, Sir Philip Otton, David Pannick QC and Nicholas Randall (now QC); and see West Ham’s failure to overturn the decision of the arbitrators in the Commercial Court: Sheffield United v Premier League , 13 July 2007 Smith J Comm Ct.

[11] Sheffield United v West Ham FA Rule K arbitration, Lord Griffiths, Sir Anthony Colman, Robert Englehart QC, 18 April 2008 and 18 September 2008; and see [2008] EWHC 2855 (Comm), [2009] 1 Lloyd's Rep. 167, [2008] 2 CLC 741, (2008) Sport and the Law Journal vol 16 iss 2 SLJR 4, 10 November 2008 Teare J (West Ham restrained from challenging the FA Rule K arbitral award in a purported appeal to CAS, and limited to challenge in the Commercial Court to the extent permitted by the Arbitration Act 1996). Fulham separately contended that it had also suffered damage but failed to establish that the findings in Sheffield’s arbitration were admissible in its arbitration: Fulham Football Club v West Ham United Football Club FA Rule Arbitration 2011 International Sports Law Review 1, SLR1-7.

[12] See, Stretford v The Football Association Ltd. & Anor [2007] EWCA Civ 238, and see Fulham Football Club (1987) Ltd v. Richards [2011] EWCA Civ 866.  According to the learned editors of Lewis & Taylor Sport: Law & Practice , 3 rd ed, 2014, para E2.31: it is now “ very difficult for a participant in a sport governed by rules set down by a sports governing body which include an arbitration agreement to succeed in an argument that he or she was not contractually bound by the arbitration agreement .”

[13] See Rule K.1(e)

[14] Francelino da Silva Matuzalem v. Fédération Internationale de Football Association FIFA , Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, 1st Civil Law Chamber, 4A_558/20111, 27 March 2012. A sporting sanction against the player, Matuzalem, imposed by FIFA and upheld by CAS, banning him from playing football because he had not paid substantial damages for unjustified termination of contract to his previous employer was overturned on public policy grounds, the sanction being a serious violation of personal rights. It remains to be seen whether a decision of an FA Rule K Arbitral panel of similar effect, which might be an unlawful restraint of trade in English law or breach a person’s fundamental human rights, can be open to challenge in the English or European courts despite the contracting out of section 69 of the 1996 Act.

[15] [2016] EWHC 2999 (Comm)

[16] See Regulation 1.1 of The FA General provisions relating to Inquiries, Commissions of Inquiry, Regulatory Commissions of the Association, other Disciplinary Commissions, Appeal Boards and Safeguarding Review Panel Hearings (1 August 2014)

[17] Bradley v The Jockey Club [2004] EWHC 2164 (QB)

[18] Hull City v FA   FA, Rule K Arbitral Tribunal (Rt Hon Sir Stanley Burnton (Chairman), Tim Kerr QC, Nicholas Stewart QC), 23 February 2015.

[19] [2016] EWCA Civ 1063; [2017] 1 W.L.R. 989

[20] [2009] EWCA Civ 63; [2009] 2 All E.R. 666; [2009] 1 All E.R. (Comm) 921; [2009] Bus. L.R. 1034; [2009] 1 Lloyd's Rep. 436; [2009] 1 B.C.L.C. 724

[21] For a recent restatement of this principle see, Jeremy Hosking v Marathon Asset Management LLP [2016] EWHC 2418 (Ch); [2017] 2 W.L.R. 746

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FA, Premier League and EFL to investigate corruption allegations

Wednesday 28 September 2016 20:08, UK

The FA, Premier League and EFL say they will use "the full force of the rules" to look into any "substantive allegations" of corruption in English football.

A report in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph alleged that eight current or past Premier League managers have been accused of taking money for player transfers.

Two Championship managers were also implicated in a series of taped conversations between agents and undercover reporters, according to the newspaper.

The Telegraph, which says it has been conducting a 10-month investigation into corruption in football, says it will make transcripts of the conversations available to the FA and the police.

Managers' association 'concerned'

The League Managers' Association said on Wednesday it was "extremely concerned" by the report, and a joint statement issued by English football's three leading bodies later in the day read: "English football takes the governance of the game extremely seriously with integrity being of paramount importance.

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"Any substantive allegations will be investigated with the full force of the rules at our disposal, which are wide-ranging and well-developed.

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"In addition, should we find any evidence of criminality we would inform and seek the support of the appropriate statutory authorities."

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The FA's Governance Division has a number of measures in place to protect the game's integrity, including a dedicated Integrity Team specifically tasked to undertake investigations into any alleged breaches of FA rules.

Premier League rules, meanwhile, allow their board to demand bank statements and phone records as part of investigations into suspected rule breaches.

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Corruption in football

2006 was a dark year for the Italian football nation. The former manager of FC Juventus Turin, one of the most popular teams in the league, was accused of manipulating games with the help of corrupt referees, players and officials. As a consequence, the team had to dismount to the second league and its last two-championship titles 2005 and 2006 were withdrawn. The manager was punished to 5 years of occupational ban. In total, 26 officials were accused.

Another of the major football scandals in Europe, the “Golden Whistle”, occurred in 2004 in Portugal. 171 persons, including 110 arbitrators, two mayors and the league’s president, were accused of having manipulated the outcome of championship games. In China, an official referee was accused for manipulating games in the Chinese football league. In South Africa, 34 of the 40 best-qualified referees are accused of the same crime. However, the manipulation of games and sport events is not a phenomenon limited to modern society only. History shows that corruption was also an issue in ancient sports. In the Olympics of Ancient Greece, corrupt athletes were imposed to finance the building of columns located in the entrance of the Olympic stadium to symbolize their disgrace. Usually, sports which depend strongly on the subjective decisions of referees, such as boxing or tennis, are more affected by corruption. The results in sports like the 100-meter sprint, where the starting point and the finishing line are clear, are unlikely to be manipulated by corruption.

Today, one of the sports most affected by corruption is football. As a result, the reputation of football is falling, potential athletes are dismissing opportunities and sponsors are decreasing their assistance. The aggregate damage caused by corruption in football is barely calculable. Despite this, many representatives of football organizations worldwide still deny, or at least downplay, the threat of corruption. Corruption destroys the essence of football. The wilful violation of sporting values, such as fairness and open competitions, eliminate the central meaning of the sport. It is the uncertainty of the game that makes the event so exciting. A team can play better than its opponent for 90 minutes, but still not leave the field as a winner. A single mistake can determine the team’s victory or defeat, the joy or disappointment of thousands of people, sometimes even of an entire nation. Perfection in sports is not possible, mistakes are part of the game and that is what makes it worth watching. However, errors can also be made voluntarily, for personal interest. The viewer notices nothing or hardly anything. Only doubts remain, today more than ever. Generally, corruption in football appears in many forms and in many areas. In countries in which the betting markets are less developed, corruption generally aims to achieve better rankings in the league. In countries with developed betting markets, corruption aims at manipulating individual games in order to maximize betting revenues. Corruption also appears in connection with the construction industry, for example in the decision of whom to contract to build football stadiums, or in which location certain events shall take place. One of the most famous cases occurred in Germany, where the president of a premier league football club received 2.8 million Euros from a construction company for insights that allowed the company to obtain the building contract for the stadium. Corruption can also appear in sponsorship, in television reporting and even in the process of appointing officials.

However, it is clear that today corruption in football is far more than just the manipulation of games. Nowadays, corruption has also affected another, more lucrative area of football: the deal with players. As an example, a former couch of Brazil’s national team is under suspicion to have appointed 91 players in order to profit later from their higher market value. In a globalised world, corruption in football has obtained a whole new dimension.  Markets are networked, transactions are inscrutable, and profits are high. Corruption has become a crime without borders, a veritably transnational organized crime. These circumstances imply that an international approach is necessary to fight the phenomenon. Cooperation between the private and public sector are fundamental. The involvement of the media and the civil society is indispensable. On this basis, UNICRI has developed a project, including all of these stakeholders.

As a first step, the project intends to develop an exemplary strategy to prevent and control the various types of corruption in football at a national and international level. This Anti-Corruption Strategy (ACS) shall be developed in conjunction with key decision-makers and institutions of football, representatives of national and international football leagues, national prosecutors and law enforcement officials, as well as the media and the civil society. This network would make it possible to identify the main corruption risks and to formulate clear activities and objectives. On the other hand, the network would build the platform for greater collaboration and ensure a direct exchange of information and know-how. Finally, the network would set the basis for the establishment of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), uniting the efforts and capacities of the public and the private sectors in the fight against corruption in football. The established partnerships and the Anti-Corruption Strategy would be the starting point for the implementation phase of the project. In this phase, the action plan formulated in the ACS shall be put in practice. In addition, the identified activities could be accompanied by complimentary measures.

One of the intended complimentary measures is the organization of awareness-raising campaigns, in order to amplify the support from the civil society as well as the private and public sector. The campaigns should be organized in close collaboration with the media, football clubs, players and fans, in order to attain the maximum publicity. Being the most popular sport in the world, football provides unique opportunities to challenge corruption in- and outside the stadiums. In order to further contribute to the changing of attitudes at large, the project intends to formulate target-oriented codes of conduct. These should define non-desirable and criminal behaviour of officials and athletes among each other and in relation to external partners such as the media and private interest groups. In order to ensure a more rapid and effective detection and prosecution of corruption, the project intends to identify and reinforce modern technical facilities. The development of manuals and toolkits would strengthen the law enforcement capacities and promote innovative and established practices.

Particularly in relation to the upcoming European Championship and the World Cup, the results of this project shall build the basis for future international initiatives to fight corruption, not only in football but in other sports as well. The instruments developed and used for advancing corruption control in football will be applied to other sports affected by the phenomenon. Football is the most popular sport in the world, loved by millions of people across the globe regardless of class, gender or religion. It is played and followed by three billion people from China to England, Africa to South America, throughout Asia and Europe. The importance of football throughout the world, and especially in countries in transition, is much higher than it appears. Football is not only a game, but also an instrument of education, socialisation and peace.  It is a game in which success can be achieved through hard work, regardless of income or social advantage. Football is a game in which fairness and rules are essential, where collaboration and compromises are necessary.

Corruption harms all these instruments and destroys its function. Corruption and football do not fit together, sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. There are days where your team plays better than you would have ever expected, these are the days everyone remembers, not only the players, but also their fans. These moments cannot be foreseen or controlled, they simply happen, that is the magic of football.

Rubiales denies 'irregularities' in Spanish football corruption probe

Madrid (AFP) – Disgraced former Spanish football federation chief Luis Rubiales denied any financial "irregularities" on Monday after testifying in court in a corruption probe into his time in charge.

Issued on: 29/04/2024 - 15:33 Modified: 29/04/2024 - 15:31

"What I maintain, and will always maintain, and I am convinced that justice will (demonstrate), is there has never been any money received in an irregular way," Rubiales told reporters after leaving the Madrid court.

Rubiales, 46, who resigned following global outrage after he forcibly kissed Women's World Cup star Jenni Hermoso last summer after the final, testified at length.

"I have answered all the questions I was asked, if I have to come here again I will be here, collaborating -- I am the one most interested in clearing everything up," said Rubiales.

Rubiales must appear in court every month and ask permission from the judge before making any trips outside of Spain, a court source told AFP.

Rubiales was briefly detained on his return to Spain from the Dominican Republic at the start of April as part of a probe into federation (RFEF) contracts signed since 2018, including one signed by Rubiales to take the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia.

"There has never been any irregular tender, we have been paid with the utmost excellence and in the pursuit of legality," added Rubiales.

On March 20 investigators searched Rubiales' house in the southern city of Granada among 11 locations in the alleged graft scandal.

The raids were part of "an investigation linked to presumed crimes linked with corruption in business, fraudulent administration and money laundering", according to judicial sources.

The Super Cup contracts are worth 40 million euros a year ($43.3 million) with the deal brokered by Kosmos, a company owned by former Barcelona and Spain defender Gerard Pique.

The Spanish Super Cup took place for the first time in Saudi Arabia in 2020.

It returned to Spain for a year during the Covid-19 pandemic but the subsequent three editions have returned to the oil-rich Gulf state.

New Spanish football president Pedro Rocha is also under investigation in the alleged graft case.

Rocha served as federation vice-president under Rubiales, then replaced him on an interim basis before being elected as chief this week.

Rubiales is also set to go on trial over the non-consensual kiss on Hermoso's lips, which under Spanish law can be classed as sexual assault.

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Watch outside Spanish court as Luis Rubiales to appear in corruption probe

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Watch a view outside a Spanish court as the country’s ex-football chief Luis Rubiales appeared before a judge as a suspect in a corruption probe.

The probe is being held into the business deal to host the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia.

The former president of the Spanish football federation ( RFEF ) was arrested earlier this month and released after being detained on arrival in Madrid from the Dominican Republic.

Mr Rubiales, who denies any wrongdoing, is suspected of receiving illegal commissions when negotiating the deal.

Police searched his home, as well as the football federation headquarters, when he was in the Dominican Republic in March.

Prosecutors want a two-and-a-half-year jail term.

Mr Rubiales stepped down as RFEF president last year after kissing Spanish international player Jenni Hermoso without her consent after the Women’s World Cup final.

He faces a separate trial for allegedly sexually assaulting the Tigres UANL striker.

Mr Rubiales denies any wrongdoing in that case.

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The King’s Speech 2023 – what does it mean for the sport and recreation sector?

The King’s Speech took place yesterday 7 November 2023, during the State Opening of Parliament, marking the start of the next Parliamentary session. In his speech, His Royal Highness set out the government’s legislative and policy agenda for the coming parliamentary year.

For what is likely to be the final King’s Speech before next year’s anticipated General Election, the purpose for the Prime Minster and his government was twofold: firstly to clarify what legislation they intend to progress before the end of their term, and secondly to start setting out political positioning and priorities ahead of the election.

Some key points of interest to Alliance members and the sector more broadly featured in the speech – and some were more noticeable by their absence. Our Policy Manager ,  Max Nicholls ,   outlines below:

What made it in? Terrorism Bill and Football Governance Bill

Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

As anticipated, The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, which is the legislative underpinning to bring Martyn’s Law into force, is set to be introduced. Named after Martyn Hett, one of the victims of the Manchester Arena terrorist attack, the new law will place a new requirement on those responsible for certain publicly accessible locations to consider the threat from terrorism and implement appropriate and proportionate mitigation measures.

The requirements on a qualifying premises will depend on their capacity. Premises with a capacity of between 100 and 799 people will be in the ‘standard tier’ and premises with a capacity of 800 people and over in an ‘enhanced tier’.

The Home Affairs Select Committee undertook pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill earlier this year. The Alliance responded to the Call for Evidence outlining the concerns raised by members including the lack of clarity of key provisions within the Bill, the impact on volunteers and community organisations and the potential for duplication of requirements at large venues which are already subject to existing regulatory regimes.

In light of the concerns raised regarding community organisations and venues, the government has confirmed it will hold a consultation on the standard tier to find the balance between public protection and undue burdens. Government has not yet provided detail on timings, but we will update members once this is available.

Football Governance Bill

The government has reiterated its commitment to strengthening football governance through the creation of an Independent Football Regulator. This follows the publication of the football governance white paper in February 2023. The new regulator will attempt to address issues of financial sustainability in English football and provide a greater voice to fans of clubs in England and Wales.

Criminal Justice Bill

Through the Criminal Justice Bill, the government will progress plans to introduce a mandatory duty on those who work with children to report concerns relating to child sexual abuse. This follows a Call for Evidence earlier this year, which the Alliance responded to. The government has now launched a further public consultation , seeking views on specific policy questions. The deadline for responses is 30 November and we will work with members to develop our response.

What didn’t make the cut? Mental Health law updates and much long-term

Given the current position in the electoral cycle, it comes with no surprise that there is less focus or legislation on tackling longer-term challenges.  

Though the speech did introduce government’s new landmark generational smoking ban policy, the speech was light on any other commitments around addressing health and wellbeing, and crucially the supporting role physical activity can play in this regard. Notably missing was any updated legislation on mental health, which featured in the 2019 Conservative manifesto promises.

In the advent of the next General Election, we intend to make the case to all political parties as to why the UK needs a greater vision for sport and recreation, maximising the sector’s potential to unlock significant social and economic value and address some huge, longer-term challenges around health and wellbeing. Making it easier for people to play, move and be active is vital to ensuring a happier, healthier nation and to meeting many national priorities – and government need to use all levers at their disposal to make this happen.

As Parliament returns, the Alliance – alongside sector partners - will build on our engagement in Parliament and across recent party conferences, and continue to highlight the role the sector can play in supporting key policy priorities of any future government. In the shorter term, we will also be keeping an eye on the Autumn Statement on the 22 November, and what, if any, proposals impact and support the sector.

Further details on the King’s Speech can be found here .

If you would like any more information or to speak to the Alliance about the King’s Speech or our Public Affairs activity please email Molly Hartill at [email protected]

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On Tuesday 16 th January Shadow Sport Minister Stephanie Peacock MP met with the sport, recreation and physical activity’s representative organisations to discuss how Labour can harness the impact of sport, recreation and physical activity to create a happier, healthier and more prosperous nation in the event of a change of Government.

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Nottingham Forest see conspiracies while City hit them with reality check

Maybe all things Luton are behind Forest’s difficulties but against Pep Guardiola’s men, they failed to get the basics right

T here is no better way to rally the base than to insist there is an external conspiracy. Everything would be fine if it weren’t for them. We’re being derailed by – delete as appropriate – the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Masons, giant lizards or, most fearsome of all the shadowy string-pullers, the celebrity Luton fans .

Nottingham Forest are threatened with relegation not because they cannot defend set plays, because they do not take their chances or because they bought 34 players over two transfer windows, a splurge that put them in breach of profitability and sustainability regulations and led to them being docked four points . No, they sit a point above the drop zone because of the nefarious forces ranged against them. Who was the referee when Forest beat Luton in the 1959 Cup final? Jack Clough of Bolton. Can it be coincidence that he shares his surname with Forest’s greatest manager? No wonder Luton are out for revenge.

Forest’s self-pitying social media outburst about refereeing last week poured fuel on a fire ignited by the four-point deduction. Before kick-off, the Premier League anthem was loudly booed by the home crowd, while a banner was raised proclaiming the Premier League is “for the few not the many”. Was this, at last, a fanbase waking from their slumber to attack the outrageous iniquities of the present model of revenue distribution? Of course not.

Gary Neville had spoken out against Forest’s inflammatory post on X, and so was subjected to personal abuse. This wasn’t about broader issues of the economic landscape or the complicity of the football authorities in the takeover of the game by nation states and private equity, but was rooted in narrow self-interest. Of course it was. It always is. Louis Althusser would have called it false consciousness and until fans and owners – it’s certainly not just Forest – can see beyond their own problems and contemplate the vast forces undermining the game, presenting an existential threat to the pyramid, the rich will carry on getting richer at the expense of everybody else.

But why worry about that when all your woes can be explained away by the fact that the self-confessed Luton fan Stuart Attwell was the VAR official last week? Borderline decisions that have gone for Forest this season – the goal Burnley had ruled out for Sander Berge’s imperceptible handball , for instance – are ignored in this analysis; or, in some cases, co-opted to the conspiracy theory: what was that but a smokescreen to disguise the way Nick Owen is influencing these decisions?

The thought was that Forest might be galvanised by the sense of outrage, however confected, brought about by not getting a penalty decision against Everton last week – or three penalty decisions, depending how absurd you’re being. (Given a significant contingent of Everton fans think they’re also the victim of conspiracy, this is very confusing but presumably Sean Dyche’s side were the inadvertent beneficiaries of the Premier League’s prevailing pro-Luton agenda; when it comes down to it, maybe we’re all in the pocket of Big Hat. Pre-match rumours that Peter Bankes would be assisted in the VAR room by Cerys Matthews proved sadly unfounded).

And it may be that there was a stiffening of the sinews from Forest. The City Ground tends to be noisy, but on Sunday it audibly seethed, whipped up to protest about everything. The ball squirts out of an early challenge and the throw-in goes to City? Chant about Premier League corruption. Willy Boly crashes into Ederson and the decision is not a penalty? Chant about Premier League corruption. Jack Grealish goes down after taking a knee to the thigh? Chant about Premier League corruption. The shadow of Mick Harford loomed large.

Forest did not play badly. City, once again, did not play particularly well. Forest will think back on three chances in particular that were squandered, two by Chris Wood and one by Murillo, but they repeatedly threatened to get in behind City – the vulnerability that has threatened to undo Pep Guardiola’s side all season – only to be undone by poor touches and poor decision-making.

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For half an hour, City looked distinctly uneasy. But then, with Neco Williams off the pitch receiving treatment, Josko Gvardiol ran off Morgan Gibbs-White and got above Murillo to power in Kevin De Bruyne’s corner. The defender presumably left Gibbs-White’s zone, but then had a run on the Colombian. Who was to blame? Probably the ghost of Eric Morecambe, although it was the 23rd goal Forest have conceded this season from a set play. Until Erling Haaland added the second with 19 minutes remaining, there seemed every chance Forest might find an equaliser as they had in the equivalent fixture last season – when they probably did as well as they did on Sunday.

Which means what? City, unbeaten in 31, seemingly winning as much by habit as anything else, trot on, five wins from another Double. Wolves beat them at Molineux in September and could be awkward but it’s the games in London against Fulham and Tottenham in which they are most likely to drop points.

Forest, meanwhile, despite being entangled in the insidious mesh of the Bedford conspiracy, aren’t playing like a side who are doomed, despite having won only one of their past 10 league games. Their problem is that Burnley aren’t either, and they play them on the final day of the season, when the early suggestion is that the refereeing team will be Jimmy Anderson, Alastair Campbell and John Kettley.

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• Video assistant referees (VARs)

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